Artaud: ‘That trick you have of always turning your back on questions will not prevent the heavens from opening up on the appointed day and establishing a new language in the midst of your imbecile tracts. We mean the tracts of your ideas.’
Fanon: ‘My final
prayer : oh my body, make of me, always, a man who questions.’
Pasolini: ‘The
real Marxist must not be a good Marxist. his function is to put orthodoxy and
codified certainties into crisis. His duty is to break the rules.’
(what WARS BANTU
EDUCATION crimes against human minds---
The wedding
Music-lyrics of inferiority’s internalisation : ‘tswang tswang tswang
le mmoneng….ngwana o tshwana le lekhalate’…(‘come
out & see her…see how beautiful she is…
the bride is so beautiful she
looks ‘coloured’’
___grandma’s
compliment : ‘jy’s so ‘n mooi kaffir
Jy lyk net soos King George’
The writings of
hydroquinone went deeper than skin-tone to graffiti inside the cranial-wall
Ek hardloop met ‘Die bang-worsie….’
En ‘daar kom Jan Ballie an…hy lag so hie hy lag so
ha hy Lag so hiehahahaha’
di-sketch,di-rasteishen,di-comic
Tessa & Die Grensvergter…fighting die
uitlanders…
Savage, Slaughter, Cool…SA Clint Eastwooden enuff for
the brazier-smoke that made Soweto-dusk such an exotic sight
HE-MAN, she & Chunky Charlie
Who could have pulled a less absurd idea of my liberation
out of his coat were his name Nikolai Gogol
&
CHINWEIZU’s ‘the west & the rest of us’, a social stratification
bubble-burst…
the native who
caused all the rubble cometh
As mista Jack
Goody too-loose broke down ‘the domestication of the savage mind’
Charles DICKENS
& outs & ins-&-outs left generations of children’s heads turned to
marsh/mush, K-Y jellied….yes, he preached my annihilation, a final solution to
the kaffir-problem
As he wagged his
‘tail of two faeces’ he called up the savage to come grunting onto & out of
his bloody paper-shits/sheets. scat-tracts.
Thus it was I wished Senghor’s head in the blocked
toilet of waste-thoughts when he said ‘emotion is completely negro as reason is
greek’ & lifted Soyinka on my scrawny shoulders when he butt-plugged him
‘Senghor’s negritude not only accepted the dialectical structure of European
ideological confrontation but borrowed
from the very components of its racist syllogism’.
THEATRIC STICKS
& POWDERED BONES
Gibson Kente…wailing
out a Sikhalo that grew up to be a question: How Long
(& Mphela
Makgoba echoed in verse…/urging me ‘run, boy, run’---making of the SOWETO
anagram: ‘sons of women enslaved, terrorized, offended’
I’d been
scratching my locks off in wonder at the ‘I love Soweto’ stickers my
people covered their arses with. asking myself how one could express positive
emotion for a slave-labour camp? I sat, saying with Michael Smith ‘mi cyaan
believe it’…until…along came Mista Sepamla’s ‘the Soweto I love’…oh yes, love
for self..& Sam Mhangwane’s Unfaithful
Woman….(I can’t be disillusioned if I never harboured illusions to
start/fire-fart with)…I sat, staring at James Mthoba’s Visions of the Night,
yes, I sat, deep in Dukuza ka Macu’s Night of the Long Wake…awaiting the Soweto
Dawn that Mike Makgalemele later blew out of his horn.(yes, I said with Ngoaps
‘I was born there, I will die there’ as I sat, in that hell of apartheid
design…frozen, cramped between Jimmy Cliff’s ‘House of Exile’ & Dambudzo Marechera’s House of
Hunger.& I was alienated, ravenous.
I sat. &
Kippie Moeketsi blasted on thru from the Scullery Department…(much like fleeing
the buggery compartment) & wafted high up on alcohol fumes & into my cold-as-the-Mageza-funeral-undertaker
refrigerated-dreams.
& Harare
called up the communal in me :’if you give…a little bit of what u have’…
I sat, waiting to GIVE words that would celebrate
life & denigrate strife.cos ’I am the watcher’,
along with Serote, so I sat as Teenage Lovers bobbed on a Hammond organ…&
The Movers made Spirits Rejoice amid squalor born of scorn
& the big Kimberley hole swallowed, yawned…&
spoke in red, wet syllables as I sat. &
sit still…
where …‘the
revolution has been postponed’, as Sony
Labou-Tansi said & I awaited death since he stated ‘to die is to dream a
different dream’
As Matsemela
Manaka’s ‘let art be life’ turns into
‘the wet fart of strife’
Still, with
Maishe Maponya ‘We March’…even as the theatre of the dispossessed
Becomes the
amputator of the retrogressed…
& Lefifi Tladi’s Black Lightning strike ‘We are the Elephant’-
Black Consciousness -chant becomes a
wheezy Red Ant rant for rent
-- it is time
again for Dumile Feni’s African Guernica
For Thami
Mnyele’s black art of tragedy…that rises out of the deep & dark river of
blood
& gardens
sprouting heads with flowers growing out them like Fikile Magadlela drew.
The English
literarily canonized Racism
& I found
myself getting ridden Haggard
From here to
where my people broke their spines going down into King Solomon’s mines
& from their
cashed flesh & bartered bones rose Johannesburg.
Dread
encountered Uncle Tom’s cartoon children step-n-fetchin all over Disney’s
cloverland
That’s when I
took a Aime Cesairean Return to my Native Land…running
& I ran as
Jean Binta Breeze became a dub-storm hurtling thru sounding out ‘watch out…AID
travels with a bomb!’...
yes, there is a
time for the burning & looting need…for both the poem & the bomb. This
much we learned from Agostinho Neto.
Thus I ran…Amilcar
Cabralised to howling with Ginsberg,(howling) not at the moon but at
Armstrong…the Apollo creed was a bad seed. for as the Purple Prince said :
‘sister killed her baby cos she couldn’t afford to feed it yet we’re sending
people to the moon…& if the night falls & a bomb falls will everybody
see the dawn?’
I ran…from
throwing stones & the (dynamite) sticks of june ‘76 to tossing alternative
Afrikaans rock with James the beboptist Phillips….cherry & cheery-faced Lurcher/
(some got shot down in the street & some got the third-force blues…hou my nie so vas nie korporal…
Getting Funked
up & Punked out with the Warrick Soniced surfer…. the Khalagadi bleeding
sound like that other desert gushing oil
around death)
Ingoapele
Madingoane – scratching beginnings & endings out in the south western
township gold-&-broken-human-bone-dust
& it threw
an axe into his skull while he sat on a toilet….that is how sewer-bound poetry
is written…Even as, from the guerilla camps…dressed as if for high-fashion
ramps:
‘jou vokken maskanda’
was military might’s denunciatory thundering down on The Artist…
of ANY form or
formation)
& I ran,
from sketches & recitations to….drawing, scrawling, scribbling beyond Grada
Kilomba’s Plantation Memories & Prophecies in the blood-flesh-bone-brain-dust
mix of liberatory ART….as power yells ‘cut’ & I realize,’ damn, I missed my
cue’, but that’s nothing. been missing those since my juvenilia.
FiLmic Race-hate
From SILIVA the Zulu…DINGAKA…SHAKA
ZULU…from dusk to the Dawn of the Dread runs the black bodied exotic
object…along came barefoot-dread Muta, rasta tutor against Vatican
pasta-brains, ’dis poem shall be continued in your mind’ …but all the devil
wanted to do was go up the native’s behind : slime-choice : ‘kaffir-vrou, die
tronk of die bosies…’kaffir woman, jail or the bush’ & of course power
spred the black coosh…
eLollipop…chocolate-baby
pop & drop…from there to Mshefane
My people
couldn’t help cooning, cheerful in babbling buffoonery, grinning, blackamooring
their way all over the BLACK HOLLYWOODEN
world
‘burn Hollywood burn’—public enemy number one
& the screen tears up, celluloid shimmers, goes
to toast
like
it did in Jesus giving up the ghost
yes, ’there’s a zulu on my crap’, said mista baas,
scratching his serrated arse.
--- compare with
“the cinema of heresy “– HIS nemesis
Thus, at one
with the Blade Runner’s prey, I can say : ‘I have seen things you people
wouldn’t believe’
So where was I to place Nicanor Parra writing ‘the poet’s only duty is this :
to improve on
the blank page../..i doubt that is possible’ & still ‘write as you want /
too much blood
has gone under the bridge / to go on believing / that only one way is
possible.’
THE MUSE IS SICK
OF FAKENESS
(Billy Paul’s )
War of the Gods
(became a silly jol) Gore of the Hordes
Whoring in Words…I stand & stare…’the
horror…the horror’
indeed (apocalypse there & then)
THE BIBLE as a
racist document)
– grandmother’s hands Bill
Withered around The Bible
Is two sets of
Crooked lines running all the way from Genesis to Revelations
Of…WHAT?----catholic
versus black consciously poetic missions ---
I had two baptisms at Regina Mundi---soaked
in more than just fire, water
& spirits both
holy & other-liar-wise-driven
to self-identification
----- & then
the morphology of Liberation Theology
(from Soul on Ice- Eldridge Cleaver
to SOUL ON LICE, head on fire, Ramps
the
right-left-about-turn-salute-zombie-talking Reverend Chikane’s seven un/holy
days that choked the ‘I ham an African’-cry in London-bound champagne-sounds of
meekness, expedient politics & e-toll tricks. Treason & chicanery. Soul-sales to the naaierst bidder. & pick-pork the Cheshire cat creamed itself
when the church-bell rang. No mouse climbed up the clock…but it was a louse
that disappeared up the frock.
Out of this
south’s multiple, putrefied moralities….(& not from its petrified papyrus
either…but more from the Khoisan’s caves that defy erosion) my lost childhood,
travelling with Artaud’s
electro-therapeed-on nerves, screams out of my catholicized-to-senility
mouth: “we don’t give a damn for your canons, index, sin, confessional, clergy,
we are thinking of another war – war on you, Pope, dog....”
here spirit
confesses to spit as Anthony B chants in chorus with us :
‘fire ‘pon Rome,
fe Pope Paul & him scissors & comb’
Indeed, we are
Bound to Violence with Yambo Ouologuem.
& Richard
Pryor proved to be just that. He pried that tomb-talk open, stood it up &
made comic of it, thus: ‘the reason
people use a crucifix against vampires is because vampires are allergic to
bullshit’.
I agree. so,
mom, I think I might just be a vampire. From now on kindly call me Count
Blackula.
& hence, my Robin black Hood ambition:
steal from men
of the cloth & give to women of none
Colonial Literature…got me thinking blue…several
blues…the blue of eyes, of collars, of some blood…& I bled til Mista
Gwala sang me ‘no more lullabies’ but
LIBERATION BLUES 1974, mourning Onkgopotse Tiro parcel-bombed up in the
murder-church service of the god of
pigmentation (& yessah, I realized then that ‘me listening to jazz is not
leisure / it is a soul-operation’ & I knew then I had to choose between
Jol’inkomo (that is, in his words ‘bringing lines home to the kraal of my black
experience’ or Yakhal’inkomo, to OUTCRY with Mutabaruka...to bawl the anguish
like a cow being slain…& decided there was nothing bovine about me…&
so… I took to Staffriding…all the way from Phefeni to HERE.
Rhodes, yes, the devil literature of craniometers
& penciled skulls…the anthropology of hate & the psychology of race.
Pederasty. a prostituted people. they made me do it. the Art of Darkness.
Master’s call
& slave’s response. ‘let there be spite’, sayeth the powered, sick horde.
& it was right. Kentucky Fried Chicken-winged. & the whips come down
& thick lips are glued tight. the scream bounces backward but the blood
splashes all across my antiquity & posterity’s book-pages. Whitelight.
5 nights
multiplied history-long with Linton Kwesi Johnson I bled
Came out of it
Screaming in Voices of the Living & the Dead.
Yes, they do.
Dead Voices Shout. bra James Matthews is
witness to it,
‘the hate that hate produced’, as spoken of by
Malcolm the X-is-black-man.
Baraka went
there, to the edge of fear. black dada nihilismus.(against what light-skin?)
No, ‘black is
not what white is not. black is black’…Lemn Sissay had THAT myth to slay.
& yes. ‘they
want your black arse, not your Black Art’, Rux rear-views it.
(& as in
that "Fourth Poem of a Canto of Accusation" that Costa Andrade wailed out of Angola,
we also know the dead whom no one buried, like Lumumba.
& how
corpse-stacks became rungs the Aryan raced up to superiority on
Alongside Tin
Tin in the Congo cutting out rubbered tongues
Laughing all the
while & in the lounges of expansionist whiteness
Was the breaking
of more than just a smile
& Cesaire
spent a night in communion with the Lumumba spirit
Even as Jesus
gave up King Leopold’s Ghost
Another
holocaust…why bother counting the Hollow Cost
Of black skins
when white masks crack?
_
my RHODESian
RANT: (dedicated to Cecil John Rhodes)
not rhyming, son...envenomation this
the scheme's a toxin...cerebration poison
intellect-crack like chest-plate buck
in full-metal-jacket talk...
santa puss
&
father piss-mass
bring disease as present
countdown to 'ah-mama-get-on' this
hoarse men of the epoch-eclipse
keep my name off your pork-lips
peace in your uterus
piss on
the mattress
each a piece of the universe
gift of the rabid...(i got that
next up...my mongrel tones
my generation break-beaten into line
obscenity-heritage--
pornography
pageantry
sah, faecal & cum-stains post-bum-invasion
never
con-sanguineous with my ancestry
thus my
telescopes your rectal-probes
superstars,
asteroids/arse-steroids & haemorrhoids
all things i try
to avoid
now) time's
stuck a fist so far up my rectum
it's waving
Amandla out of my mouth
(what a boneless
slogan to chew)
THUS) cecilia
joan rhodes? pissed to meat you
dread
professor...at your cervix.
---& last, my governing ideal:
no need to search for
me
i’m right there...in the words i write
get off that tour-bus to soweto...
sitting up in there like it is zoo-time...
let ME 'take you on a walk thru hell'
sitting up in there like it is zoo-time...
let ME 'take you on a walk thru hell'
give me a pen & u
can be sure it won't be 'one-armed-struggle'
my ambition is to be...'reactionary',as defined by
the current atmosFEAR
or should
that be counter-revolutionHARRY,dirty or otherwise?
don't like my asbestos-crack-busted lung-wage?
safari-suit-&-straitjacket yourself
u don't get it...well, maybe it was
never there to be got.
'rhyme HARD'...was ntate mofokeng's
advice...
(been trying a lifetime, sah...pulverised crap, it bounce rite the hell back...
(been trying a lifetime, sah...pulverised crap, it bounce rite the hell back...
but i'll never write
to anyone’s brain-dead dictates...
as ARTAUD says :
‚we are surrounded by
roughneck popes, scribblers,critics, dogs;
Our spirit is among
the dogs, whose thoughts are immediately earthbound,
who think incorrigibly
in the present.’
unquote,as the
scalpel said to the throat while i beam myself to the future.
for, as Mista Mthoba said :
“we often wonder whether there is any
school in this country
that
can satisfactorily teach us how to crit black theatre.
the
best school we can think of is inside the theatre.
critics
should not wag their tongues from
outside the theatre...“...furthermore ‚if your
contemporaries do not understand you, it is okay.
the next generation will.“
so gwaan,bring the
critical hate
what do they want,? cow-dung poetry, goat-droppings mapping the literary path? fuckcuff!
i flex it much the mentalhighway, punkarse...u want what 'oh massa gore-dam' barf/coonery?
what do they want,? cow-dung poetry, goat-droppings mapping the literary path? fuckcuff!
i flex it much the mentalhighway, punkarse...u want what 'oh massa gore-dam' barf/coonery?
'we live in a society where manhood is about conquering and
violence, man'.. – Powell
'call me NOT a MAN, For neither am I a man in the eyes of the law,
'call me NOT a MAN, For neither am I a man in the eyes of the law,
Nor
am I
a man in the eyes of my fellowman
'... – Mthuthuzeli Matshoba
'i am no big black man...i am a blackmanchild'.. –Serote
(Phefeni boy signing out: be all the man u want, sir...u are just not me.
'i am no big black man...i am a blackmanchild'.. –Serote
(Phefeni boy signing out: be all the man u want, sir...u are just not me.
peace to your uebermanliness...u are
just too stressed to impress, count me out,
unlike yr grandfather's gout
*Trying
to luv you, S.A. you are just making yourself so totally unlovable. always
have. & I’m just your son, prodigal or not, trying to come home. with a bag
of books, music & art the Sasol 3 were traded for…& the guerilla-poet
Solomon Mahlangu wrote his will in his own blood when Goch street was not far
from Russia. Mayakovsky was there.
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