Herds At Dusk

Images by: Khahliso Matela

On The Irrational Library – Now That We Still Can

I must admit that when I first heard The Irrational Library, I thought Zappa was avenged by some vigilante poet as the world tears itself apart in a new era of racial tension and capitalist slavery continues unabated. 

I was awestruck.

The sound, fuzzed with a juvenile rage pent up for years in a discordant chest of a mid-life crises victim, was a breath of fresh acceptance that being divergent is a weapon.

Joshua’s poetry is weird in its colloquial eloquence that exudes both academic gravity and street fervor, and when met by the crescendo of musical acrobatics performed by Jazz innovators and imagineers, I believe that my year is made.

The psychedelic and inventive rhythmic vocal patterns he piles with words unveiling spaces between even the chords, there is urgency here.

The album is like a final assault on something unspeakable in the face of an impending global catastrophe of spiritual proportions.

Veering from crooning couplets to scat rapping about societal ills throughout, this music provokes a response from the depths of complacency, and for a writer like myself, I feel there has been a lot I have taken for granted in regards to harnessing my gift.

I might have perhaps lost my revolutionary fervor, but The Irrational Library has certainly forced me to face up to my irrevocable talent.

I can’t think of any current music that is comparable, when we have become so blasé about titillation and psychological violence.

And it is surprising that The Irrational Library has despite the mechanisations of both the music industry produced what is truly an independent vocalization of collective rage.

I am uncertain how long Joshua has played with this line up but the synergy is incredible.

And this album, which proves the experience gained by decades of performance, is testament to the groups emerging influence on a younger generation of poets.

The lyrics are as passionate as they are cerebral.

“Of all the freedoms that elude us everyday…” A line that speaks to the politics of humanist pride, and with it 

Joshua is striking in his resemblance to Gil Scott Heron, which gives an exasperated character to the tracks and raucous lyrics that hail on behalf of castrated voices under surveillance and bomb coalitions.

The album is an anthology of testaments of human resilience in the face of faked new spectacles and diatribes while giving name to beauty’s sustaining power.

While artistically they teach me to be completely free and at the same time vigilant, these audacious artists who were so far ahead of their time are crafting an insurrectionary sound.

When contemporary moral constructs continue to problematise dissent, would it not be fair to burden ‘the word’ a little, with hefty tasks geared at social re-engineering?

From the first track, the album is a defiance campaign – sloppy title disguising a full on assault on crafty laureates fossilized on shelves of dead book stores and other brain libraries.

This is music made by madmen piloting a plane on fire – mean and nasty, daring entire nations to stare at a runaway nipple rampaging through warzone villages.

On the next track, Baumgarten suddenly sounds like an esoteric Hendrix possessed by the spirit of Uma Bin Hassan (Last Poets) or both held Siamese by the vocal folds, dishing a buffet of barbwire truths.

“I Belong To The Republic Of Humankind” is yet another viscera assault which stands far away from the normative laments of socially conscious poets, it is dare from a man – not a juvenile.

There is “Haarlemtown”, which sound like a eulogy to America’s complacent indifference to the wretched of the earth, it’s a steel-toe lecture handing sonic verdicts on global self-mutilation.

Shifting from major to minor keys without logic or traditional histrionics, it should be that these songs are not for radiophiles.

Then follows that saxophonic infusion of jazzy randomness disguising a reprieve before a crescendo of bursting seeds; FAKE NEWS.

The rummaging is endless of course, track after track soaking me with dangerously lucid dreams and baffling the tedium of my life.

While Random Things continues with eerie sentiments of hopelessness strummed on a nauseated guitar, Joshua races his uncrusheable words strung with a grim disdain for bloated individualism.

Clearly this band is not a fledgling boy-band but made of raw hides looking for a church to blow off steam and psychic infrastructures of oppression.

But what will the world think when The Irrational Library topples shelves piled with pasteurized music accompanying sanitized poetry?

I will end with a quote which seems to be the only sensible conclusion in regards to how the music should be received:

“We all hear different music, and the stars bear the names of death.” William Blake.

Moeder And Elsa

Sometimes she couldn’t sleep, a mother of a fully grown comic nightmare of a promiscuous daughter, a woman with a battered heart. She’d married young though she couldn’t recall the exact age, as does her daughter who opted to believe a baptism certificate instead of their grandmother. After years of toiling the highlands of her matrimonial country of Lesotho as the third of four wives, she had returned home broken; but that after many epic misfortunes beset her, a foreigner among a proud and isolated people.

But that was too many a flood, debris under bridges she crossed to still be waking up her arthritic body to toil, now at Oubaas’ house. She had set roots in Kokosi, worked as a maid for racist households of Fochville, a town whose modernity seemed like a dusty façade painted over rusted monuments and relics of white affluence. Here, contract was the only option for child-mothers drained by screeching screams of malnourished infants they could feed on social grants.

At 42, she felt ancient. A twenty-two year old daughter whose recent pregnancy had brought shame upon her was her greatest failure, or rather she wished. Ausie was her name, a taciturn character, with snapping rage and lazy hands. Yet she carried her belly vibrantly unconcerned about gossip and slander by religious fanatics. And to further throw fuel to her ferocious daring, she knew who else was about to bloat like toads; which made her disliked by many women her age.

But she was the least bilious of Moeder’s sacramental cocktail of depressive encounters while she waded a stream of a desolate life, for today, as daylight tainted her bedroom with stale golden rays, was yet another day of reckoning at Oubaas’ house – that sickly twisted man, wheel-chair bound and repulsed by the country’s new political climate. Nevertheless, Moeder held Oubaas’ family closest to her infernal heart; they were an epitome of unabashed family love and resilience under many adverse situations, considering that Oubaas a badly aged man of 65 was now senile like any veteran secret police apparatus.

What could one expect for one who made a name for himself by guillotining hundreds of unnamed necks? Furthermore, plagued by many dysfunctional bodily organs, he now needed to be bathed by the maid because his wife was herself confined in an asylum. Their daughter Elsa, a chubby urchin with varicose veins crawling up her legs was breast-feeding a nine month old boy, living off their pension and other family heirlooms.

So today, Moeder had to be early to prepare the old man for his routine check-up consultations with discouraging doctors who probably would perform anesthesia at their intrepid patient’s lisped request. Ran him a shower, undressed his soiled frail body and brushed all caked gastric deposits clumped between cheeks and scrotum with the devotion of a catholic nun during wartime. These were followed by other mundane and repetitive house chores which turned to be more a misadventure for Moeder as she often finds plates hidden under bed with litters of kitten stinking up bedrooms stale with tobacco smoke.

***

Yet today Elsa had another pot boiling when Moeder found her. For as she began doing dishes which was eternally heaped like garbage in a reluctant sink - perhaps an aftermath of a buffet with trailer trash, Elsa snuck into the kitchen to reveal a sordid truth about her calculated intentions to terminate an untimely pregnancy. Elsa’s unknown impulse to reveal such a matter to Moeder was unnerving yet unclear, let alone incriminating as she knew well that nobody else was aware of the bun in the oven. 

Besides Elsa, an impassioned cook and gorger, had a body with a perspicacious ability to conceal any bizarre transformations of the waist areas. Such unwarranted courting into the arena of bloodlines being aborted was too heavy for Moeder’s adoration of the sanctity of life. And in her silent intensity she listened but with a double-edged prayer that sparked of fear and a realization of the unavoidable.

It was on Moeder’s day off that Elsa pleaded they meet near the church grounds the following morning, for a journey to a doctor who lives off maiming newborns. Her arguments, immersed in regret of a night spent with Jan soon after giving birth to her infant daughter, were those of an apologetic juvenile infatuated with the short-lived brutish allure of farm-boys. She made excuses for him, but also blamed herself excruciatingly.

Coupled with the shame of open acceptance of sinful indulgence, were still more confessions which burned Moeder’s mind for the entire day. By the time she left the mansion, returning to her four roomed municipal matchbox house rationed after years of impotent patience, she was spent. One would have surmised that both being of nearly the same age, this germinated a form of camaraderie which has always remained respectful. They could always share their internal strife of age without recourse to metaphors but straight talk. And Moeder being a mother already, she had become a source of inspiration to the otherwise, unmotivated, under-educated paranoid brat shielded from the world by orthodox deceits and values spelt by whips and leashes employed on black back throughout her racists upbringing.

But that afternoon, Moeder felt a breach in the unspoken accord, yet it was too late to refuse the rendezvous. The afternoon had begun to wear a somber shade even though spring was in full throttle. Elsa’s jabbering and her own sympathies were a weight for which she was ungrateful. It was too much, how could she contemplate murdering a seed of a bloodline of her oppressors? Yes she allowed her own daughter Ausie the privilege of birthing illegitimately, but this Elsa situation was perplexing. Would this allow Elsa a chance at a right refused many, which Ausie had neglected?

Was her conundrum weaved by a secret lust for the extermination of Jan’s seed? Jan, the self-same brute who baptized an elderly woman with boiling water in a maid’s quarters  shower when she demanded her pay? And as her shoulders began to tighten unbearably during her ride back home, she remained distraught, dragged even further into melancholy’s inferno by wanton taxi gossip about pastors who impregnated adolescents, and mother who aborted their own grandchildren. Wondering how best to shield Ausie from the matter, she opted to keep a tight lid on Elsa’s tear-marked pot of sorrow.

***

Day later, after driving in silence until they were slightly away from prying ears of god’s angels prancing in gardens of the church yard, Moeder attempted to beckon a change of heart. But Elsa was pink with resolve, determined and captivated by prospects of a life without her parent’s shame and fury. Moeder recalled her venomous tirades aimed at her daughter, but she could not stand a better ground today as guilt churned her growling stomach. The pink CITI GOLF was already hell bound, and it was thus that Jan’s seed was to leave life prior to being among the living.

Moeder felt as though she had brought the unborn to its cemetery, distant yet near like all sorrows of the flings of youth. She had been called upon to hold her hand through this dark valley filling with fetal deformities disguised as a laboratory for the humane treatment of the discarded. She could not bear the bile gnawing her tripe, death was as clear as the brightest midday. There she was to comfort a bereaved jester, listen to more private confessions; a keeper of blackest secrets told through pallid lips of a dehydrated middle-aged white girl still blushing with small town innocence.

And when the agonizing episode ended with a ride back to the Celestine church among giggles and exclamations of relief and hunger – Moeder found herself pushing a trolley load of unlisted groceries and fast food combos as a reward for her part in the murder. Elsa had the decency to drive Moeder back home that afternoon, to Ausie’s vivid surprise as it had been years she since she saw the Klein Mevrou, compounded also by the common reaction of inferiority when many are faced with white folk. 

Glancing at her mother’s bounty, she had difficulty containing herself. Bursting into an intrigued smile, confusion could be read on her face. A momentary cloud crept over Elsa’s face while Ausie was greeting her, her face perturbed by her heavy pregnancy of which she had not known. The fun and jovial mood of the ride changed to a cold simmer of rage that reminded her of her whiteness.

Moeder had to rush now, seeing that Elsa was already buckling her bulky self into a worn seat , a bloated hand clutching the steering wheel and a betrayed look on her face. An idle superiority rising in her hot cheeks, she gave a mocking glance at Ausie. Stupefied by an indictment for an unknown crime, even when she had waited for the mere decorum of entering the meagre house, a township girl was swelling beneath Ausie’s breast. Moeder remained at a loss for words, but at the back of her mind she could discern an apocryphal judgment for her sacred deed as an accomplice in what she could never wish upon her own.

***

Moeder often curiously thought about the dynamic of this motley family; about the paralysed father whose affliction seemed to have traceable origins. The Mevrou, who was an otherwise calm 58 year old shopaholic with a penchant for neighborhood social clubs and avid fundraiser for jubilee sales fairs, loved street children and battered spouses. Their daughter, however, was a naïve soul; shielded through Sunday school pageantry and farm house etiquette. She grew up clearly wishing to vent out her caged disobedience and sexual hurricanes since adolescence. But an odd combination they had become over the 15 years of Moeder’s working for them, estranged from one another in a way far more mysterious than incest.

Photographs of pristine times past standing on well-dusted tables, in glass cabinets holding star-studded medals and other trophies; Moeder knew these like familiar eyes. A resolutely upright brigadier framed in all his composed arrogance brimming with insolent shrewdness and aloofness. A lady dressed in a light gown walking over dunes of some conquered shoreline, the ocean at her rear; it was saddening to recall how she was institutionalized after finding out the truth about her husband’s brutalities. A triad drowning in exuberant wealth farmed on serrated shoulders of gullible black folk, which was their legacy.

Moeder could even smell a whiff of aging dust tracing pages of floral albums depicting Elsa’s upbringing, from birthday pictures, to shooting range poses with her father’s collection of assault rifles. But all that reminiscence, that admiration was a double edged sword that threatened to taint this splendor with her rage; for how could she tend and nurse a tragic man who was her husband’s torturer?

Once the sun had fallen silent and night coursed the sky, Moeder and Ausie sat quietly listening to light thunder of late spring while trying to make out mundane dialogues of soap stars, a ritual they both adored. Ausie wanted desparately to know what had happened, but Moeder was in a contemplative morbidity with her heart twisted in shame of her complacency which has bred only catastrophe.

It was during such nights of commonplace doses of earth tremors, when reverberations rocked her cracking walls, the earth reeling with other perishing children of other widows that she remembers fondly her daughter’s boyfriend. A sweet young soul who died two months after being hired at the mines. Witchcraft was the culprit, many had speculated. But like many ghosts that know all the misery of the living, he lay somewhere unwept, in a sinkhole further dragging his corpse into bilious throats of hell. No lamentation for their breath taken by unholy death, their vanished names would only be worn by their newborns, otherwise remain unsung, swallowed by rubble.

***

After yet another sleepless wade through dreamland, Moeder knew that among a million fortunate ones who wake towards undesirable jobs, she was to face a battery of slurs she alone could imagine. But at least she had work, no matter how brutal and dehumanizing and with it a myriad of dark secrets kept by maids reeling in exhaustion and lethargy. She had heard of white women running over black maids for their husband’s infidelities and bastard children, and of barbaric rape orgies on farms owned by khaki-clad millionaires. She was well versed in the Afrikaners culture steeped in violent tantrums, incest and other habits of extracting pain and ridicule, which rested on heavy souls of reluctant mid-wives and nannies absconding from their own grandchildren.  

Coming up the stairs towards the colossal mansion sprawled over a double garage, she opened the doors to find Elsa and Oubaas seated formally across one another at the hardwood table lined with blompotjies inherited from Tannie. Somehow, there was a twisted comfort in having expected the tension, but Elsa’s crimson eyes and Oubaas’ stuttering hands fidgeting curses he could not utter were paralyzing. A knitted blanket over his scrawny knees, legs shriveled by constant motionlessness, fingers cramping over the armrests of his wheelchair, Oubaas asked: “Hoekom het jy my kleinkind vermoor, mouth snapping shut with every syllable.

Morning light dancing through giant sparkling windows, a silence unbeknown waited for all cares and anger of the day. Moeder pulled a chair hesitantly and gazed with resolve at Elsa and tears begun streaming again on her pale, dull face. Her father’s sick-sounding grunting of a broken man who knew he was to die never having laid eyes on a grandson pained her not as much. Moeder tried to reach out a shy hand towards Elsa but only a cold retraction squeaked on the wood. So, Moeder just sat there with a perplexed expression, looking both, hoping for them to let her depart and start with her chores.

But a cruel air lingered, straining their resolve until the room felt like a coffin, all purity scraped from the spick and span walls. Those photographs of their past lives stared morosely at their somber gathering, Elsa’s elegant mother in her wedding gown standing before a mirror; her father at his desk with a pipe in his mouth while she played nearby, intricate ribbons wound around her ponytail. Moeder felt them all in her, senses remembering how each glass smoothly kissed her palms when she dusted then, and the cushions she slapped faintly before placing on beds decorated with woolen dolls and quilts.

And the realization of loss impending found her mind wondering in a fog of remorse, of memorabilia which spoke not of her life, which left only unreal sorrow escaping her eyes when she needed to hold herself together. Elsa fingered her hair finally, staring at her father before coldly informing Moeder she was no longer needed as a helper. Moeder only nodded, placed her palms flat on the table one final time after fifteen years and with a detailed voice said: “Ek is baie jammer, Elsa.” Tears glistened in her burning eyes as she turned the corner of the street she came to loved, life had gotten rather too intricate.

Heat was breeding some insane mirages before her, perhaps Elsa’s car was coming to pick up with wails of apologies and endearments. But the streets were empty now, just whispering their reflections of other tales of masters and slaves.

Blue Souls In August

When her departure finally befell on that fateful morning, the weather was exaggeratingly calm. He stood searching with agitated eyes across a vacant lounge, in the bedroom closets emptied save for his over-prized suit and overcoat, some under garments scattered as though by a thief.

Bed meticulously made with sheets folded to resemble a letter written with deep thought and mystery. He follows the daze into the next bedroom where her son became his; a pensive little urchin with hazel eyes that reared mischief rather than curiosity. 

That’s how he recalled them at least, and suddenly a chill clung about the silent duplex, lounging in a lifeless delirium.

A sober isolation gripped him like a crazy blanket – a fresh dullness hanging over his head still swimming in last night’s absurd tantrum. 

Décor staring quietly in place, he had chosen to leave her crying; her son safely visiting other boom-gated friends for a sleep-over. His mind needed only indulgence in cheap nightclubs hosting stripper contests.

She, however, was very distraught. 

That he knew or perhaps wished in the deepest of his convoluted soul. He blamed for his failed marriage, a first of other ethereal mundanities he was to experience. 

Touching his only left-over framed image on the coffee table, he realised that he hadn’t seen his daunting resemblance in weeks. 

He also hadn’t seen his daughter for months, but there he sat on a faun leather couch missing another man’s children.

Her birthday was approaching faster than the police who were tailing him as a suspected illegal miner, yet he was vague in thought, pondering the rash and immature choices of a bloated ego of a newly divorced charlatan intent on avenging a castration suffered in secret.

Marrying soon after was dismal adventure as proven by absentia, but it helped him then that she was there, for a while. 

A beaming trophy wife to gloss and flaunt among other infamous Zama Zama’s turned instant township millionaires. 

Had he been convinced otherwise, each glitzy expense he carried for her crown could have been a jewel on his daughter’s head.

This he thought bitterly, hand railing dish-towels as he stooped over to vomit last night’s debauchery into the kitchen basin. 

On the floor, cold he slumps and curls into tensile fetal position and morosely weeps knowing at the back of mind that guilt was his only verdict on disconcerting golden morning of reminiscence.

His sickness infiltrated every room in the duplex, smell of puke and unflushed piss assailing him, alone needing another face to look at for sympathy. 

He cursed his friends for second, because most of them were unsavoury animals or quitters when it came to marriage. 

He didn’t need their company; he didn’t them to weep as he did on the tiled floor.

The smell of the boys’ hair as he kissed their heads was what could calm his nausea, maybe.  

Not hers. 

Her memory in his crimson-eyed head was still clad in a putrid darkness, exhaustingly painful. 

And in that dreaded bedroom where sheets of a letter he alone could read lay folded, he tossed his shivering body onto the bed hardened by vacancy, enveloping his sobs into silent pillows that smelled of her.

And like all dreamers at day, he fell into a bottomless pit children fear, and was overwhelmed by a velvety blackness – curled cold as though the bed had turned into a box. 

Tears stung like psalms from his beseeching daughter under his feverish eyelids, but a body raped of any succulent nectar was hers alone, not his stony skin which hides his most brutal nakedness. Pillows offered no caustic kisses she forgot behind, only channelling guilty memories, no tickling love through his volcanic veins.

***

When he awoke, drenched and longing not to be alone, he realised she had also takenthe car, after a frantic search for the keys and a cautious look into the garage. 

He needed it to get around, but he supposed this was another act of spite; the car, their hard-earned debt he blamed on her. 

She was of course nowhere to defend herself. It was among his purposeless friends that he wanted to be, lost with other blunders that occur in their midst.

All images of their false love had to be eroded.  

And as the clock struck midday he was walking a scotching 30 minute stretch across a sleepy town he chose to live in, lightly walled in a suburban setting of left-over white exclusivity. 

And that eternal illusion of exclusivity which prompts too many a greed had landed him where he was on this day.

A car he needed to possess, but it was evidently gone now. 

He walked into his friend’s hair salon smelling of heated fur and sweat, fumes of chemicals always fluttering from the force of the fan attempting in vain to rid whatever stench of beautification.

And what a perfect distraction a hair salon was to become, with splendid women augmenting their eyelashes, polishing gossip with feline flair while he sunk into their jests and frivolous laughter. It seemed he had broken a long spell listening to giggles and secrets, even though his marriage had lasted barely a year. 

And here he was, privy to disclosures about infected girls and other serial nymphs.

His stomach was calming down but hunger was rolling with each wave of saliva swallowed, as he waited for his friend to finish with a sickeningly quite client. 

And once on their way to scavenge on toxic kiddie meals, they pontificated about travesties of affection, such as when two broken men meet to complain about the marvels of flawed acquaintances and other privileges of allegiances.

“But why did you choose a yellow-bone?

“She looked like a GQ model my man. She still does.”

“Does that mean you crave macheri amangamla?”

“Isn’t it why black men work hard? To live like white men, with maybe a white woman?”

“That is a dangerous way to look at life mfethu.” His friend replied.

“it’s not like I imagine a white woman every time I fuck her...”

“And I am supposed to believe that?

“You are just warped man.”

As they chuckle in escape and intrigued anger, sitting among loafers with their own adventure stories, he bears an inner silence – a death of heart. 

Without another word they vacate the ill stench of the eatery, impossible to tell apart from the rot outside. August winds were rising and started to chewing dust; this was his birth month, eerie and unrelenting upon their blue souls.

He realised how he missed the noise of storms, upsetting conversations and thoughts of numbers. He felt chained to his redundant company and needed to be alone again, to gunner strength for a long haul of life’s solitude.

He never violated the law unnecessarily, but nobody stays pure in this world, it is said. Whatever nobility is desired in loving he knew the cost and frailty of love like a child – only in death. 

Mind wondering through faces, sometimes seen as nemeses, they at times were those that held him in high esteem, peers he bought expensive whisky on weekdays.  

These were the distractions and lives deceiving his senses with clown smiles tricking favours and gunfire away. 

He always felt the law at his tail, sniffing tracks of his straying steps through debris of forsaken dreams, scars and the hopes they reminded him of. 

But, this town of the abandoned welders and boilermakers rusted like car-wrecks in unkempt suburban yards – pudgy dogs barking at black skins at all hours of a maids stay; this was Fochville where his hopes were to decompose.

***

After only a week, that turbulent spark of love became impossible to resurrect, memories now fade into mirages of new acquaintances and infatuations. 

The eternal certainty that change is the fundament of all existence therefore made sense whence the brother vowed to lose himself to bouts of sexual debauchery and lust.

He made a concerted effort at always bedding any easy catch as he’d come to see women, but his money was dwindling after loans sapped the last of auctioned furniture. 

New clothes were fading, even though he tried hard to conceal the sight from a lot of his family members. 

He hid more from himself in fear of facing defeat through eyes of others, but secrets have a penchant for darting their lizard tongues at unexpected times.

So the brother’s vase had to shatter, first crack coming in the form of an eviction that couldn’t be averted with sly promises to pale landlords sweating bullets. 

Second was his mother, as shrewd as a loan-shark let loose in a pond of coins.

She could read a gesture like a spy novel, all habitual deceptions blown out of the swamp she dug greedily, while breeding ambition which made him a money monster. 

It was at this time that his sister became acquainted with a new love in his life, yet another moody entrant he chased for only a weekend amid cautious happiness and coded behaviour.

He, though assailed by a sad reverence for his mother, the brother could not turn back upon footsteps that led him here. 

His mother remained one adversary he constantly avoided, even in the streets of this small community whose secrets were borne like skid-marks for ogling curious urchins. 

A brutal woman in her unabridged honesty; a god-like courage that helped her raise four children of her own and seven others by her siblings.

How her words could cut like a double edged sword, hearts molten by her strokes and quotations from the bible and other sermons. 

And all her profane reproaches had sadly alienated her children by now, so his sisters had reason to hide his secret lover from their mother’s clawing.

Whatever inopportune scandal was discredited by his sisters, their mother was becoming more suspicious while he was content with dodging other shadows that could reveal his previous criminal activities. 

He was always on the lookout, a childhood that died young. 

His mother was always sour, her constant absence and unbearable presences made his feel unaccountable from an early age, he thought.

But he was the one bearing a curse, a vast cruelty though he never could lay a hand on a woman. 

He possessed a glossary of crude invocations that could strip and denude far harshly than rape. 

These he knew and always regretted, but it all seemed his dark and eternal art, and in his mother a mirror of his monstrous soul.

***

It was one evening as a drizzle began to fall that in his digression from morbid thoughts about his mother that he felt a nameless finger jotting his story; a witchcraft that distracts his fate. 

He floundered in a fear of a dismal future unborn, as  he felt himself repeating too many mistakes, agonising about the inevitable and just never being able to his past behind. 

And once the booze were weighing heavy in his belly, making himself home to other worries and unnoticed wishes, a sudden anger blazed in him.

He wanted to run away from something, perhaps his new girlfriend’s embrace and other souls that give him breathe perhaps; towards some other softer exposure to vulnerability among strange thighs. He craved unique women with favoured by frustrations; he grossly envied their companionship that night, all his notepad fantasies and outrageous monologues failing under the crush of slumber.

But tonight he was laying fully clothed and freshly caked with sweat and expectations bigger than his mother’s – he wanted to avenge his betrayal by all means sinister and taboo.

This crisp house made by this woman’s debts only held the physical cold at bay, but he was as ice disguised in the sober decor of his divine madness. 

He would laugh sickly for what seemed a moment, gravity at the back of his throat, a calendar of silences breaking into mirth that was playing a joke on him.

And yes, mucus and tears filmed his throat as the night’s mystery coated the air about him, waiting for her, who left with friends, uneasy and hurt by his deadpan obscenities directed at her.

As dawn whispered with morning gales she returned having developed strength for his impoliteness and ghastly reprimands. 

His beer-hall rudeness was boiling over and beyond redemption, but she sat there on her couch bereft with rage at his cotton-candy love.

His days were numbered she knew, he had to leave, her soggy hands clutching her phone sobbing throughout his apocalyptic tirade. 

His blue soul was flirting with disaster and she snapped, her bile invariably exploding, a weary woman returning the froth of his vomit into his mouth. 

She burst out and admitted her HIV status as the purgatorial scene went outside into the early morning stage with housewives as an audience sweeping dusty street.

He was now on a boat of the damned, she said, his mouth hanging, fists clenched, a quizzing looking on his conquered face. 

She started throwing her clothes out her window, neighbours proven right and an ulcer of jealousy being squeezed in his brain.

He wished to forget, but feminine vengeance has echoes; and as the sun crept over the township he avoided, the taverns he hid in were silent as an amnesiac, the bristles of brooms hissing along as he crumpled his gear into a plastic bag to finally head home.

Remembering Aardklop Nasionale Kunstefees

Being one always keen on any impromptu road-trips with my pseudo-bohemian mates, I must however admit that panic clutched me when I discovered we were visiting the Aardklop Nasionale Kunstefees – held in Potchefstroom nogal, a place of frightening conformity and racists tensions. But a sudden rush of enthusiasm and freedom surged inside, induced by the prospect of a short trip outside of the mundane complacency of Fochvile.

I must also concede that it takes a special breed of revelers to endure what at first glance could seem like common place small town monotony, away from the humdrum city life. Potch has undeniably become a haven for reclusive artists, and many who dare extricate their priorities from glitzy nightlife spectacles and gridlocked traffic nightmares. This change often happens during the early weeks of October; when this canonical town is transformed into an art fair congregating farmers and their crafters from the vast landscape of the North West province. Country Lifestyle experts showcase a variety of products, painters providing snap-shots of an agrarian history and a privileged pride through this festival established some years ago.

Aside from monuments of colonial bravado that forged this town’s identity, a myriad of preserved museums are found perched on ancient streets; Reverend Tobius’ house where he translated the Holy Bible into Afrikaans being one of my favorites. These houses are a marvel of historical preservation, carefully curated and transmitting stories which otherwise remain a cornerstone of future cultural developments of the Afrikaans and English communities established here. And Aardklop is their annual platform to celebrate a diverse, and often conflict ridden histories and cultures, while honoring artisans who have molded the creative spirit of this mining region of South Africa and not ignoring pivotal contributions of the many indigenous peoples in the region.

Despite its questionable multi-cultural make-up and supposed tradition of conservatism, this year’s eruption of creative energy was contagious, with a number of group exhibitions being as compelling as the subject matters and themes addressed in various venues. Take for instance, the DEAD BUNNY SOUP group exhibition curated by Neil Nieuwoudt (Dead Bunny Society), which showcased a number of emerging artists exploring a vast landscape of imaginative representations of social realities which ranged from crises of identity, gender politics as well as environmental concerns.

Among the selected works exhibited was an incredible series of photographic prints titled INEXORABLE by Minien Hattingh, which explored ideas of anonymity and obscured identities; while Collen Mashanganyi’s sculptures questioned metaphors around sexual entitlement based on perceived physical differences in a refreshingly prosaic yet humorous style. His wooden quirky carving radiated colors so innocent in their grace. And having always found superimposed images intriguing and offering multiple lives to a single frame in time’s unfixed adventure, roving through Stephanie Langehoven’s watery images of bodies in fish tanks was a starling experience. They possessed a sophisticated, elegant beauty entwined with a feverishly visible riot by female bodies depicted, intentionally deluding one to think that these were mere body parts similar to those carcasses.

Though the atmosphere at the festival often reeked of white esthetics, it was refreshing to stumble across a discussion hosted by Keleketla Library in one nook in the maze of university grounds. This collaborative initiative between historians, musicians and linguists aimed at retracing and locating semantic origins of Tsotsitaal and eventually Kwaito within the evolution of Afrikaans. Though Afrikaans has often been viewed with suspicion by many aware of its colonial legacy, the Voortrekker history is surprisingly well known by the inhabitants of both Ikageng and the town of Potchefstroom, and this knowledge came out during this seminal discussion I attended at the festival.

The NOU DIE LAS – A Kwaitopedia Of Afrikaans Terms And Phrases Ko Kasi, initiated by Keleketla Library under the guidance of artists and historians Rangoato Tseleng Hlasane, Masello Motana, Vuyiswa Xekatwane and Kgomotso Neto Tleane aimed at tracing the origins of Tsotsitaal from the Afrikaans language, which in itself was linguistic creation creditable to the slave of the Voortrekkers. Among those in attendance were elders who hailed from Ikageng Township, personable jazz aficionados and township historians and storytellers with uncanny knowledge of Tsotsitaal. Well-versed in the history of the town and its inhabitants who descended from Voortrekkers through lineages that span decades, they were speaking to plaas jappies crowded in the Alumni Saal on school trips that exposed white children’s affinity to black rhythms.

These sessions unearthed some hilarious koeksuster meisietjie twerkers and khaki shorts and velskoene pantsulas, while highlighting the multi-dimensionality of kwaito as a language. The facilitators meticulously engaged their audiences with critical and masterful presentations, collating oral testaments and devising meanings for a Kwaitopedia that will legitimize a somewhat obscure sub-culture among ever transient modes of cultural expression. And though these sessions formed an inaugural phase of the initiative, many such sessions will be hosted annually by the festival, with the hope that this initiative gunners adequate financial support to expedite the realization of its primary objective of publishing a compendium of words for posterity. I felt that NOU DIE LAS has ignited a divergent flame razing through the otherwise traditional establishment with Aardklop has become, and  in many ways pioneered a trend that will confront challenges of diversification of the festival.

And as we hitchhiked back home, assailed by inclement drizzle and piercing winds - my friend warm and buzzing from stolen wine, I soaked in the last of the images by Portia Port Wig’s darkly hues of blue cast in oily strokes depicting mirages of ocean surfaces. With those landscape memories looking eerie with clouds sparkling with rage, a truck finally veers off-road to give us a lift, an impulse to continue investigating modes of memory germinated in my mind. From that day, I could look at Potch for portraits of cattle-heads and woolen dolls made by housewives and daughters who are sharpshooters and hunters of game. From that day, Potch became a destination for artistic revolutionaries looking to engage audiences out of the box, a place where recluses are not antagonized but revered.

Image by: Kgomotso Neto Tleane

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Through a lacy veil of sewer dreams

We glimpse at lust’s bounty soggy-eyed

Us, the dispossessed vagabonds

And bastardized beneficiaries of borrowed sands

Polluting leafy suburban avenues

In our tick infested uniforms

We police these adventurous colonies

With our cosmopolitan pretences

Travelling undetected among moles

And cleansed ethnicities

Here straddles our drunken messiahs

Salivating like strays with lazy shame

Scaling ruins and garbage piles

Down shanty roads named after campaigners

And bankers

Our restricted ground zero

Bursting with flowers and phantasms of names

Redacted from artifacts, lies

Barren and exposing scatterlings of bones

Scavenged by other tramps for sugar factories

Afrika Prays

Afrika prays for draught aversion, and storms batter fields of monopoly food security with mudslides.

Afrika prays for rogue presidents to retire, yet warlords are born among vengeful nations pillaged by greed.

Afrika prays for food aid and Rihanna concerts, Afrika prays for big cars and over-priced duplexes in Dubai.

Afrika prays for sold water and abundant fish in the sea, and sewage remains buried under seaweed and corals bleeding oil.

Afrika prays for desexualised children in schools when television is principal in favoured tutorials on glamour.

Afrika prays for famine’s end while her resources cause infanticides, Afrika never prays that Trump doesn’t start WWIII via twitter at 2 am GMT.

Afrika prays for consensual servitude and machines are bred to scrape all crumbs of earth’s failing bread.

Afrika prays for soccer matches and plates of beans sprinkled with stale spice, Afrika prays for lottery and world peace.

Afrika prays for their dead left in cesspool mortuaries infested with rats and organ traffickers, Afrika prays against witchcraft by its progenies.

Afrika prays for a voice of unison, but her 1000 dailies and nuzzled airwaves preach depravity and organised truisms.

Afrika prays for drug-dealers holding adolescents at ransom, when apothecaries are stocked with toxins and counterfeit remedies.

Afrika prays with turncoat evangelists bidding space agencies to courier laments for slain miners and lepers, yet Afrika never prays for NO Man.

***

Afrika prays for No man to proselytise brand cartels of social engineering; not for war criminals to surrender their vigilante messiahs.

Afrika prays for No man to unhook whales wailing towards unregistered stars or caverns in the earth, bad-naming a civilization of the damned threatening congregations with nuclear explosions.

Afrika prays for No man to unlie about norms and bibles breast-fed to benign sinners numbed by hunger.

Afrika prays for No man, no janitors of their prisons and wards pilled with haunting instruments of death; not for other galaxies where their gods don’t reign.

Afrika prays for NOT BAAS to die a paranormal death while holidaying in Knysna’s forests doused with flammable pesticides; and prays for No child deformed by helicopters they chased like curious gnomes.

Afrika prays for No man sterilized by Frankenstein diets and NOT for women comatose from blows and wounds masked with animal fat cosmetics.

Afrika prays for NO WOMAN period, the many veiled and prostituted by matrons of a pornographic propaganda patronised by emasculated state officials.

Afrika prays for No man drowning in leaky boats crossing seas towards sinking paradises, abandoning disillusioned pubescent dreamers dancing silky moves on silvery poles.

Afrika prays for No man sodomizing child soldiers behind altars and sacred texts, nor father circumcising reluctant novices inebriated by demands of machismo.

Afrika prays for No Pope, head-butting paedophiles crowding libraries of trafficked art, and Afrika prays to never pray again in the face of unanswerable pleas hurled towards deaf ozones.

Afrika In 16 Lines

Afrika, fate’s gilded casket with stained-glass eyes

Stitched with dry veins of irascible children turned colour of tarmac they trot with rifles.

Afrika, of suicidal commissions ransacking votes and collateral concessions

From bones of violated girls turned promiscuous incubators.

Afrika, a colossal abattoir of dreamers greased by lightning

Wailing death’s symphonies in maimed forests burnt silent and indifferent.

Afrika, purring in dissonant slumber among raided jackals and minor men

Bred of sharp steel and gun-powder stolen from abandoned barracks.

Afrika’s infants yawning iridescent warnings of blood, rosaries and chains

On electric souls accosted for bills and malnourished toddlers.

Afrika is draped in fishnets and landmines hurled in fields and acid streams

By profiteers from forgotten slaughter-houses and gaols.

Afrika, when will you desist from your hymnal maladies,

Your melodious prayers to your neighbour’s gods with nameless crimes?

How will your human-factories flourish under probation from ancestral sentences,

Your orphans journeying the cold belly of a shimmering bejeweled underworld?

The Man and The Brother

The Man

When the man arrived, Sophiatown was still fossilized in ghostly aura unshaken after decades on unforgetting walls. His brother's precarious breath was very sickly, arid skin yellowing in rejuvenation of illness, undiagnosed as yet of a gut ulcer.

This brother has recently severed ties with loved one, and all hate was crowding his person, more for himself than any other; his failing for a woman engulfing him like flames upon a helpless dreamer.

Yet, Sophiatowm watched, undead among dead memories of many who aspired to live eternally in the spirit of this place.

The house his brother was renting on a final straw of brokeness and nearing destitution, was in disarray when the man arrived.

The man been an obsessive compulsive freak managed to bring semblance of honour to home he kept warm with love for years.

It was on 2nd Avenue, with an eviction notice hanging over the brother's frail shoulders, an anathema of history's rerun in an age of monetary castration of black men by a system of debt and desire.

It seemed the city was sipping his marrow dry, his forceful ardor now beginning to fade into denialist tirades that scorned rebuke and advice.

A hard soul; preferring solitude the following days after the man's unannounced visit - a solitary withering among walls peeling recollections of a sand castle he had built for love.

Impenetrable his shields had become, but through him the man saw the bare nakedness of urban soldiers enduring old chronicles, and counting on a new dawn.

Scribbling their nameless dreams, poets cramped pubs under sodden drifts of early winter rains, and the brother was always among them, hands stuffed in worn and leaking pockets.

Pulling on an unkempt goaty, solemn and sinking into music and gin - you would watch the wonder of immersion; he was a frozen frame of shebeen intellectuals of yesteryears.

 And here he was ushering the man into the muck and jozi debris, after a short exile - shedding  despondencies of my own and wrecked by chronic joblessness.

It was sometime in May, a dull and soggy clime, inner city streets fashioned in usual sweeps of sodden pedestrians and muddy pools stagnated on broken tarmac.

Whirling storms of taxi engines and husky hooters from a brazen metal tomb of a city; somnambulist prowlers and dazed hawkers in disarray always were sure to brave it all for either work, or hustle.

The brother always had his hustle, though at this point in his life, no much choice was left in the cult of hustles; and the city hailed its ancient misspelled billboards advertising rags and glass windows staring at one another with daring and permanence.

Jozi, at anytime was whining with a sinister hum of life, reflected on puddles and clogged drains.

Cheap supermarkets will always stand bargaining for lusty eyes of the living while bins stand scavenged by children facing cold spells in derelict passageways of high-jacked building.

But, Sophiatown, by some serendipitous coincidences and events familiar in a place of transit lives, was still a leafy village of lost roots; rotten trunks and branches clawing their stare at time's slow trudge.

Pleasures past remained as tales lamented in books we held dear; each street still writing its dirge, its psalms of the newly dying hordes of revelling scholars.

***

A job prospect had dredged from the bowls of oblivion; an oblivion I very well cherished under circumstances of my own making, but nevertheless an oblivion, yes.

Why dis I return at such an inopportune time, when the brother is so irrevocably tormented and downtrodden? Or was it a perfectly synchronized incidence ordained to guide and saddle him through my turmoil?

The initial shock that later subsided was when he smiled; his neck ligaments painfully taut from beneath the chin.

Veins, green and exposed looking like freeways of infestation - I realized that a change had to be made; one has to take care of one's body, or else dying young would be a truly fast death.

What a disheartening sight, but a joy in the hope that new strength can spring from dried rocks piling our his frame.

Our first night under the same roof was troubled with nothingness; resolved to a numb shroud of darkness slightly illuminated by distant neon constellations and lightning.

How night bears witness to the heaviest of toils; those churned in silence by minds fearing hunger for their unborn.

On days that followed we brooded with nostalgia, nursing bruised egos with swabs of bitter truths, and visits to museums, liquor stores and nearby jazz booths.

There we'd meet friends unrecalled, acquaintances and former lovers; spend the last peels of our used fruit and bartered tales for other gifts.

Much of the substance of conversations waning, recoiling to recesses of lost allegiances - peers pass handshakes from armloads of failures.

Shimmering days were soon never forgotten as more friends begun to visit; the emptiness the brother so miserly kept dissipating and being brushed away by noisy feet of dancers.

A spark began rising in his eyes, trousers started to hold at the waist and as his prison diet grew, so did his spirit.

But, nights after all jubilation were often coldly grave, the man's thoughts wrung off oily residues and tears; I knew I a novice to older pain even though my own scarred deeper with age.

The man had come to Sophiatown dreading to face his past on the other side of the wretched city, and he new that facing it all all was as inevitable as smoke from smouldering embers.

Wind from a stale lake, keeping the man shivering most of the time; a torment and a nag of blatant emasculation by a white landlord wanting the brother own on the street like the rest of the menials.

Only two months worth of rent was owed, but be lividly made sure every security force around the neighbourhood knew that the freeloader had to vacate the premises by nightfall.

That never happened of course, the first night of these confrontations being mildly amusing for the man who mused that one African should be evicted on Africa Month.

Not in a continent of the dispossessed, from a suburb infamous for the forced removals of black people.

But the landlord had other plans like the thriving student residence conversions that saw many owners raking millions from over-crowded houses.

We would watch is slovenly age turn his ruby face crimson, awash with spite and bile, and sweating bullets over suburbanite debts.

The man could empathize sometimes, but while mesmerized by he white man's indifference towards black destitution; the man knew his mercy was misplaced.

These events became simulcra of a vile episode once felt by the brother's mother and grandmother who had lived in Sophiatown during those turbulent times.

His mother, only a toddler being bundled off like wayfarer's luggage to unknown destinations - the nerve of white privilege.

 The treachery of it all, boiling maniacally about shielded wealth usurped from coal black souls who flowered gardens and painted guilds and fences for their mansions.

What had become astoundingly purgatorial was his disregard of the knowledge of the brother's recent stint in hospital; yet in an ungodly calm we ate the white man's cake filled with razor blades.

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But having raffled his feathers, we decided after his one of his customary departures that we won't move; anthemic of antique struggles of fallen figures we now resembled.