Meditation On Joy

And as all joys of childhood are unforgettably nonchalant and innocent, this video poem is a reconstruction of such a moment in the lives of township children swimming on a hot summer’s day. 

At the pit of my fears is the contaminated sewage water they are paddling in, a violent pond filled with infections and simmering pestilence that will soon wreck havoc on their young immunities. 

But all is in game, the euphoria of play and the unadulterated spectacle of being in an adventurous gang of unattended urchins, blinded to the fact that one might drown anytime their plastic bottles slide from muddy fingers.

Out here, dog pee is marking skins of new boys with offal baptisms and sacraments from sewer ponds, gurgled and gulped by hungry mouths of sunbaked bodies soon to be scribbled as post-mortem reports of drowned brown little bodies - headlining tragic recitals in morning bus-rides.

It is a joy still, when a bully dares a tread to the deeper side of this mire, another bony twelve year old daredevil out of depths slithering on fungi and tripped by lost engines and wheelbarrows.

Yet when a mother calls to a crowd of ring-wormed faces flocking from the scene of a drowning, all joy turns to bile and blind gods are beckoned to receive silently those soon forgotten frolics and giggles. 

And at such puddles many a memory are formed and lost, rules bent to whims of childhood brevity without restraint, but often these swamps bury many a glowing smiles perishing with awe-filled eyes, and dread.

Meditation On Violence

 

Meditation On Violence

”And remember, the passion for destruction is also a creative passion.”

These are words uttered by an elderly character in one seminal cult-classic film titled Slacker, after expressing his rage against the systematic oppression of human potential by powers that be and their complacent populace.

But does the urge to rebel and protest an unsavory situation always have to result in destruction of property and life? And taking into cognizance the shared risk of public protests, can one deduce the destruction of property and life as force necessary for the creation of an alternative situation for the victim?

And while being fully aware that protestation is a humane reaction against the exploitation experienced by victims and that their persistent participation in emancipatory efforts that often turns violent is unavoidable, this video poem undertakes to further meditate on anonymity as a weapon in the hands of those engaged in violent protests.

Though anonymity may vary in many instances of such outbursts of violent protestation, I often wonder, what sociopolitical contexts affect protest participation and the psychology of protesters at any given time of the event?

There is an undeniable sense of anonymity that a crowd affords each protester, and various psychological impetuses that drive the urge to protest might be directly linked to the degree of oppression and discomfort experienced by each participant victim.

Others might opt for peaceful tactics of expressing their social discontent, collective vulnerability and palpable results of socio-economic inequality, and their methods can prove productive at times.

But it is often the spectacle of violence that inadvertently looms, in fact to entrench the memory of protests in the minds of many, while further providing a shared intensity of the profound impact of a collective responsibility.

Yet, extreme protest tactics, often conducted by a few, have continually painted even the most peaceful bystanders and observers with the same brush of brash activism, but I am left to wonder what fuels the rage of those few who eventually arouse an involuntary response from others in a contagion effect of sorts.

A climatic confrontation of opposing forces then ensues, and tensions culminate in a plethora of unprecedented vulgarities, which later stain the grand objectives of the protest. 

But, at the heart of it all, lingers turbulent strife unresolved by simmering tyres and smoke blackening urban skies, and demands for a better lot vanish with ashes trampled underfoot by times ceaseless trot.