We were filming his seminal journey down the train tracks of poetic thought, past and present, memories given credentials by heroes and villains of verse, and this journey became an initiation into the blotched history of subversive expression personified by him among a few.
Being of no literary vein, and not cut from the fabric of verse, all I could lay claim to were remnants of recollections about my first encounter with his sullen craft.
And encountering his writing for the first time can be jarring to any reader.
Black Heart was my first induction into dilapidated theatres of a formidable mind that Bavino is, and with time an avalanche of text was crushing my skull with metaphors of familiar turbulences and souls’ wreckages.
Published by Pineslopes Publishing, once a subversive outlet for what was often termed “reclusive authors”, that book came out during when many a youth were faced with crumbling dreams, as they were ushered blindly and ill prepared into adulthood.
His is a literary rebellion that exhumes our multiple forgotten deaths, discordant symbols of sainthood and other laments at depravity under guise of power and affluence. Scars and blotches visible only once one peels off their skin, are laid bare on his pages, in his rhythmic recitations of clumsy constructs of texts.
A voice that spoke of the venality of elitists affluence, interrogating the self-betrayal of promises of freedom, and waging a war against the debasement of intellect by scriveners and highly regarded writers.
Critics and intellect privateers, like many other writers of self-persiflage mass goods have often taken him to trial like a heretic, and this relegated him somewhat to the margins of the literary showbiz arena.
An improvisatory agility is often woven into his method of detailing spectacles of mundanity, which radically alters how he paints the reality in which his characters find themselves.
I once watched Bantu’s Ghost, in a darkly theatre a somnambulist waltzing the stage in straight-jacket regalia, pallid as a sick mood, with a beard and beret, mocking the sounds with ‘explosions in the sky’ or some odd serenade which held god-speeding litany of slurs that awoke many into his death-bed.
A stream of (black)unconsciousness
Directed by Bobby Rodwell, the performance art piece went to beyond the convention of traditional theater, in that it was an orgy of dance, poetry and music, all staged under subliminal light and aural compositions.
The poet merely sat at a desk, encouraging exquisite unpredictable associations between his disparate poetry rousing palpitations of a psychiatric kind in the tethered dancer gyrating among washbasins and other tools of domestication, some recourse to chance operations of thought, I assumed.
And there under stroke of a spot a patient dancer sat huddled over a washbasin, the music and her movements performed in a wayward yet consciously lucid and impersonal style, choreographed in responses to verse, ascribing a serenity which was also unsettling; that was sublime a language to a deeper thought.
The production proved not to be the first and only collaborative projects, with Oratorio Of A Forgotten Youth now premiering at the National Arts Festival.
Though largely sporadic and determined by the artists himself, these projects have often felt like an absurdist blithely impersonal yet rooted in an ungovernability that stretches the art of theatre to other terrains that swell beyond the winds.
For many, he is a fountain of the unknown, pampered with cures for his sanity, prodigious labor of a beggar under suspicion of a terminated system remembering our traumas. So, is he merely an orator of damned scholars parading manuscripts from witchdoctors and excommunicated priests praying for drunkards on train carriages to places beyond wildest hopes?
***
I recall how White Heart plunged a dagger into my chest during early fatherhood, while I was trampling other dreams underfoot, with a myriad bridges burning with incendiaries from my self-destruction.
I was not alone, I felt, in thoroughly laying waste all double-edged empathies of literary charlatans, who claimed allegiance to the downtrodden only during bouts of nostalgic visits.
And like many of his characters, those narcissistic anarchists who are self- flagellating, broken fellows, with brains for gods and penchants for death-walks through nebulous spaces, townships, morphing into every township, Papa Ramps embodied the subaltern.
Indecent personages with vulgarities dripping from their mere essence, be it from the specter of constant poverty and redundant labor out of the proverbial gutter, these characters mirror the horrid faces he glances at inside and often siting in a taxis beside us on many trips endured.
Years later, I came across a copy of Horns For Hondo at the AlexanKopano Library in Alexandra township, a book that solidly placed him among unspeakable minds of a generation of the devoiced.
Among his many collaborations, his signature recordings with Kalahari Surfers remain a kind of sonic collusions that has over decades brought unaccountable and devious sounds involved with not only the poetics, but the soundtrack that seems inherent in Rampolokeng’s rhythm in life.
Often interlaced with randomly intermediate rap scatting as though in an unconscious rendition of well determined metaphors, the force with which each record has punched holes into the South African musical bubble will resonate for centuries to come, even though at present the work seem rather under-rated.
This little video is but in respect of their art and experiments with soundscapes that foretell of a time of dreary mechanizations of being, that is often tempted to succumb to the numbing whine of a self-annihilating humanity.
