Children

Do untainted children

Vomit gold?

Their undreamt voices

But dreams in the winds?

Do the squint-eyed ones

Possess a double-sight

Of gleaming mountains

And copper serpents?

Why

Their hale and lofty songs

Like ghostly cries hidden

In palms reborn tenfold?

Images by: Khahliso Matela

Umkhondo ka Sabelo Soko - Album Review

In The Furnace Of Dreams.

And so goes a Zulu idiom, which encapsulates the temperment of this poetry recording by one of South Africa's young and incisive voices of ungovernable conscience.
Sabelo Soko, an enigmatic wordsmith immersed in Zulu heritage, has fashioned quite an outlandish deployment of old-fashioned idiomatic expressions with his first studio album - Umkhodo Ka Sabelo Soko.

And as the South African poetry scene continues to suffer from a surfeit of homogenous Afrocentricism and banal chantery of jukebox national pride, this anthology has set him on a path of linguistic innovations that borders on invocations of the ancestral. His poetry's unconventional use of isiZulu and the radical conceptions stemming from his imagery seem brewed from a burning quest for reclamation of secret spaces, where poems become privy conversations, incantations of coded omens unto the unborn and faceless living.

It is often the cynical task of poets to forge fantastic masks from the debris of the past trauma, and bring them on the stage of the violent present with a sobering clarity of unheeded prophets. And here, we are experiencing a birth of such a critical voice, politically fractured, yes, but inking words that are daggers. Umkhondo is a lyrical testament that those daring enough to remodel archaic language devices, transcending the palatably floral yet flawed, can speak to souls of those who've had red-hot coals mark
their chests.

But what will the mainstream do with a spoken artist with such a subversive political edge? Certainly not adorn him with inflatable credentials distributed by cartels of the literary orthodox theatres.

I listen to Do Away, an eerie interlude that is both a cautionary anecdote and a continual interrogation of norms and trends deluding thousands of weary youths. Khuzani is yet another blend of the oral tradition of Zulu performance art, known for its reflexivity and deadpan truth.

With dextrous economy of lyrics on Amalunde, Sabelo and Meropa Soul distill the ugly and profane in our daily life into a lucid brew that is rare at our trend-driven times of creative bankrupcy.

Is it laudatory poetry or fleeting tributes to past griots and new-age warriors? Those ever lingering moans and suffocated vocal accompaninents are on another tip. Take for an example Ezikho Lamaphupho, at times the overlaid chorus resembles tedium, a hauntingly repetitive rhythm at moments of the poet's fragility channeling grave-digger dreams. Zithande, serenaded by some lost guitar strings strummed for love's ode and vices, is yet another tete-a-tete with a youth disillusioned by high-octane love.

"This recording is no artsy dinner atmosphere music for the cultured to ponder over utopian ideas about black expression. It is fluid orature in a time of frozen memory, providing a linguistic grid for the infallible truths evading many.

Sabelo's process of retrieving such fossilized memory is an art he must have perfected with time, and his maturity is overwhelming when it comes to his mnemonic prowess when reciting. He can speak in such a multidimensional colloquialism which strangely elicits raw emotions of familiarity to the concepts he words.

His voice is a fine-tuned device that awakens each syllable, each intonation, each texture of a tattered mind displayed with unflinching potency, giving this anthology a poignant lucidity that is rare and refreshing."

For bookings and album sales 

0794492409 or email: wordupsales@gmail.com 

The album is available on itunes 

https://itunes.apple.com/za/album/umkhondo/1231218119 and all major online stores.

Travels In The Republic Of The Damned

A friend tells me he has received a consignment of Lesego Rampolokeng’s 3^rd novel, and I am shuddering with ecstatic impatience. Soon as I get home, I am enthralled by my stupefied inebriation and words dangled like carrots or other abandoned jewels.

First two words falling off a page thrust me into a reedy marsh – reeds of concrete lining black rivers of extraordinary rags, human spoils in a gangland. Jozi remained filth. Then when Bavino Sekete lands brain splattered on Marico dust, he begins laying bare some traumas of a people encountered, reports which soon become warped psychiatric reports of an entire nation.

Reading the book felt like I was fidgeting in a jazz session of stray and deranged souls, as though Charlie Parker was fanning a furnace in my brain. And in fact – the book itself is furnace, page after page of incendiary exposes of the blatant, an indictment on the chilled eyes of our folded pasts.

Phantoms numbed by drink and whores, forgotten or used for extra-racial allegiances of canal natures; a cyclone nation is our locale and Bavino a tragic hero ambushed in a microcosmic chorus of prisoners and wardens. At times I feel as though he is gagged, a mummy finding air and setting it alight.

Is this book in parts or octaves? Is it prosody or an apocryphal hymn for the coming dearth of true genius in South African literature? And why does Lesogo avoid spelling out the word AND? What’s the significance of & in his works?

Gutless monuments are erected in Seding when all else burns in braziers fueled by gonads and chopped fingers – fingers that once pointed at gods. I marvel at a tale of Bra Vusi, an unrelenting din of Miles’ In A Silent Way nuzzled at the back of my mind.

Apparently the intention for the trip was to write a Jazz Essay, but Sekete finds himself facedown in his own blank verse, painting a blackened existence to white light; stories of characters with paranoid destinies, prostitutes with hearts aflame.

Lesego simply writes cruelly;from a place suffocated by soapies and hysterical press; when our country is wrapped in a blanket of guilt and forged reconciliations, students wrecking libraries and bludgeoning monuments sedated by poetic propaganda when poets have become impersonators of booklets.

***

What vivid portraits of bioscope adventures scored by rude dubs, “…the abject poetry of it all.”

How immensely discordant when words sing only tunes of disharmony about life as not a protest, but an acquiescence of depravity and social decay? Bird-Monk Seding is a book whose sole intent is taking readers behind tattered curtains masking hideous sirens rummaging through deplorable dreams.

Sekete is obviously a poet negating the dystopic locale of his life experiences, but willing to mirror those same horrors in moments of excruciating introspection – which is a true measure of the poet’s courage.

Veering far away from any prescriptive approaches to narrative, Lesego Rampolokeng’s use of words has always been unsettling. His use of language is certainly not confined to concepts of theme or structure, grammatical prudence is out.

This is not to say the book is uncritical in its exploration of social issues, not at all. Instead it is a lucidly rhythmic absorption of specific moments which are then distilled into a prose of tragic dissatisfaction with the norm.

This book is more an exploratoray journal, no checklist of literary devices. 

At Virtue's Zone - Khahliso Matela

Oh seers of all concerned,

Man who sunk in the mire,

Man who plucked an infant from the earth’s dusty nippled breast…

Yes, thee;

Sprouts who launched a rape upon her delicate features,

Splashing them about in your muddy baths -

Those plagued with pledges of remorse,

Those who swallow their solace with rusted fists.

Here at the antechambers to the minds of my foe,

he who lay for me to see the self eye mind,

Peering fastened to the walls of my father’s mind;

For his inward brutalities in a priestly form,

I say:

‘I so brave these furies frenzied by his dark and razor speech…

My father like a rock, leaping through the cold stares

Of spark-wreathed oceans coagulated abound me.

I paste and ink these dirges suspended and swelling with each breath…

Each exploded chest in a 1000 nights of a night,

With each retreat to the blinds of my past,

With each ear hung chopped at the neck

And with each echo from my lactating holes…’

Theorem 1

And thus seethedfrom a castled face of a suicidal negro - the urban caveman,

Rippled sounds wailed wide

Chest ripped

As mouth naughts war for them and golem, the barren monsterin various names of god,and to the carcass of a factitious race known for morbid things…

Eye says … eye shun these hardware…warehouses and whore-houses with ties to sadistic sex-fairs sponsored by government officials.

Eye shun your acid competitions for toy dynasties resulting in remedial neighborhoods without tramps or guns where man is gun and childhoods tamed by pedophiles and long files for social grants.

Logic has failed to surmount my urban politics, eye be that anarchist norm gradually eroded by nigger-breakers at this advent of arrested dissent against our father’s labor purgatories.

With particles of burned sweat lacing his forehead that what pours through these pores of a speech-machine be tongues of guillotines, eye be proving that my earth birth be a divine set-up lacking cerebralcatalysts for an insurrection against gods who cough-up mind storms.

And perhaps based on the metaphors of our voyage, the entire fuckin’ race has de-evolved into a state of sacrilege.

Man-machine’s in his silent coliseum, rodent kids fastening necks with charms from potent men of this bone-museum.

Under this whiplash protocol, restless breeders they label our mothers; gross and casual sexual-imprudence is the metaphor in theses of elitist scrutiny, describing the docile nature of us, a tortured youth.

Our slave-paralytic fathers bread-thatching are slouching pensioners gagged, hung and roped to a chair; bewitched by derailed juvenile quests headed for funeral convoys said to reach a constitutional climax at some twenty years of freedom’s hollow body.

And my mother was mauled by dogswhile looking for job, before my brother opened a fruit-stall next to the shopping-mall.

Your mother was standing in queue, before she gave birth to you and your brother the globe-trotter who ought to know the order of city debris and war. And our father is that man who’s battling to feed families who won’t eat fruit smeared with blood of children, shot on the spot while running hugging a loaf of iron-bread.

And, there’re turbulent prayers in jesus’ trust, dispelling syndromes of perfectionist mind-clones distracted from the source of our mother’s disease – that dead-burned bible slithering through her black back, peering from a struck rock, her locks reappearing weaved with fleas of these cells of her tomb, her womb severed by land-mines and paper-cut presidents of these unconsummated military states. Now, we be lamenting the final apocalypse of a doomed capitalism or some new-age romanticism of poverty, or your social loyalty dished-out in bucket lavatories from white-collar criminal laboratories.

Like schools, regiments and other scout complexes or moral reformatories with testaments canonized by bishops of these fundamentalist brain-libraries.

Yet eye says: eye shun your broadcast mirage of a non-existent first-world where morgues are filling with breathless youths exploding in parking lot kingdoms. And with their contrived orchestra from cracked chests behind the broken splints of a squatter sun flickering at the back of the black screen of nigger talk occupied by white master pity…

Rage is merely blended in bootlicker politeness… but there’s your brother full of lead, breathing ghosts and sweet-talking god for bacon.

And this black boatman says that job said in the land of dark spiral stairs, to the shadows of dusty-nippled death creeping to the bones burned with heat and the skin that is black upon us.

He hollered: man that is born of a woman,

did not she that made me in the womb make thee,

and did not one fashion us in the womb?

Theorem 2

A body harvests through rain-sticks – soberly.

Beards hooked with tadpoles spasmodic with every strut and others thrown under,

Into stagnant pools…

Like electric tentacles into the cracks of arid concrete slabs.

It’shim and the wall for graffiti and other assaults…

Him and the wall.

Rockshin was the name,

He came cuffed to the hounds of his junk-appetite;

His return from prison-rites was harsh,

Like that congestive fix of pure marijuana charring the dread-filled lungs,

Weaning the wet scars swelling from beneath his Adam-coat…

Onto his razor-shredded arm,

Onto his blood,

Unto his eyes humbled by rage…

He was returned

To recyclethe fangled leftovers of the desolate sons of this mannequin city.

He was that straightjacket individual,

Flamboyant and expectant of elements beyond relief of cracked thrills.

He stood at the daze of tagged bricks; in the midst of overpowering prints and evening lives.

Plastic jazz booths gaped at the mess of art un-compromised…

Awaiting the poison of the night’s breed…

their barks of discussion behind panels of white-collar restaurants stifled by lavatory air.

He be laying slain rays of smudgy ink-stains

On paved routes…

On arrested slave cubicle walls,

On perpetual labor purgatories with slim psychologies for wealth assimilation.

He be gathering fetal remains of dead postures congregated at train stations

And other migrant cemeteries…

He be proclaiming in a rigid vernacular, with a paralyzed fist and defiance and sprayed mental stamina -

THAT HE’S THE SLUM.

He’ll be wringing wires to sewer lives  

Rudely like a denim youth bred of slum cultures

And appetites of milk-faced car guards.

He be fuelling population exchange between prisons and ghettoes.

While cocktails drown the wails of blue-faces, sacked literature lies fossilized among self-elected Prophets.

And more mimed verses of blood rage are whistled by a lone saxophonist, met by the chorus of black gloss-feeders…

Who might be cultured if it weren’t a joke.

And it’s him and the wall

For graffiti and other assaults in these polygamous terrains.

It’s him and the wall…

He was dog once,

Now a superhero to informal boards of cooks who clan along drains

And blood fountains struggling on paving stones.

He was a dog once,now a superhero to butchers of heads trotting against the traffic.

He was dog once,now a superhero…

To delightful recruits scaling the ruins for some coal inventions.

And as his night prolongs the jam on that bridge to both ways;

Neon-pleasure breaths a fetid cloud against the smiles of his adventures.

Rockshin is the name, and he came cuffed to the hounds of his junk-appetite.

It was him and the walls…him and the walls with graffiti and other assaults.

While cans danced across broken glass with cremated cigarette buds marking a social territory,sleepy executives were being fed their last meals by beggar palms of man-property.

There,the silvery kitchen slaves remunerated with token gratitude in this cosmopolitan engine.

Yet it was him and the wall at these polygamous terrains.

At this bazaar,

At this sale of winning philosophers starved for post-culture etherealities,

It was him and the wall against their women –

A parcel of slaves cast upon the refuse of a garish hype.

They art central to the catastrophe, with their skulls weaved with vacancies.

Them thronging about the infamous ones,

Feeding oiled throats with stale delicacies

Of narcotic incomprehension and parasites.

  

He was returned, he was returned to recycle the fangled leftovers of the desolate sons of this mannequin city.

He was returned… and kept saying shoot me right here,

Where the heart begins.

Where the pain begins.

Where the tomb is vaulted…’cause a man who kills me is not free not to kill 

Theorem 3

The last feed before…

I am filled

Breast-full with the cacophony of street design.

With the woeful swirling of dark rusted crumbs,

Upon her visage of stagnation.

The City…

Her vast veins will soon cave-in;

Listless

Like testaments of opulence.

If we be burned

By the warrants of greed,

Monkey-wrenched and damp,

Usthe slaves

Who poison and attack

The stoic erect masonry of walls stretched hovering over car-cemeteries,

If we be buried with these needles

In blue skins of the expanse

Disinherited, bound by our unborn feet,

Howling across dead silent swamps,

Frozen with motorized can-machines.

Would we not

Tear-wrench our hearts from their cage of plastic ribs

To render our protest at this sacrilege;

Our womb severed for blood donations?

Would we not,

Resolve to that final slurpof thinning air,

Resounding from eternities lucidly like the cries of our mothers?

Ramshackle women with folded faces, their bodies displayed in a state of torture.

WOULD WE NOT shed our vandalized liberties, not cowardly die; 

THE BLACK MARTYRS AND THEIR RAW-BONED WOMEN 

at the funeral of a noble cause?

***

When our father passed away at birth,

Faceless and upturned,

Lips contused into a purple shade…

The coffin of his twilight, its wires rattled in the last spectacle of death

Like mud-fingers pointed with impunity.

In the midst of many a gallery of shacks;

The toxic army of single children together with crucified futile black wrists – their eyes bleeding…

Upwards they struggled, chained and earthbound,

In convoys towards places of lessons.

***

And, in a litany of tears choking waste-paper buckets with mind-sores of truth,

They ask: ‘Who is our father?’

Who is our father, at this last feed before our souls sail into slavery?

Soon, rodent ants crack the earth’s crust.

Bicycle tyres slosh in shallow murk of crescent avenues,

Township philosophers mushroom in suburbia

THE NO CLASS, DROP-OUT TYPES…SPEED FREAKS.

Mermaids are driven on highways of psychedelics mesmerized by the design of this industry,

They are turning their needles of smack on some well-off student activists.

  

THE TOWNSHIP CROWNS THE CITY…

With faces slashed with lip-stuck brutal vibes.

Baskets with holes carried by children cueing for rations of american aid…

And, the city caves in.

Midnight hour strikes the capital.

Motorized carts shut off their engines, and methanated street prowlers clog the silent throat of city sewers with the rubble of city sluts…

And the township crowns the city, with alley slaves –

A 1000 trouble-tossed forms responsible for garbage migration.

Their scattered wrecks maul the horizon,

As the city rises out of the slime

Piercing chisels of her inferiority through to the skies.

An amphibian beast,

Reeking of sweat from them…

The blood-smeared metal skins fangled for this festival of death-dances.

And tonight rests the last feed before their souls sail into slavery,

The lone runners soar past the twelve moon and listen to laments of these wooden people,

Strained by birth to death twice the sum of all evil.

Responsive to hails of overthrow,

From voices in furrows and catacombs,

Castrated,

Like muffles in syringes of longevity waters from acid reservoirs.

And the lone runner soars past the full moons

Saying

I

am

specializing

in

revolt…NOOTHERFORMOFSOCIALTHERAPY,

I

AM

SPECIALIZING

IN

REVOLT

NO

OTHER

FORM

OF

SOCIAL

REBIRTH. 

Theorem 4

DONE-IT-AGAIN was at it again…missed his pregnant mama with a bullet.

Then police swarmed the streets, and they were all confused and stranded on those bullet avenues with other overseers of his plastic biology…like officer friendly, with his robot uniform.

And DONE-IT-AGAIN was cheering his desperate perfume, he done narrowly survived. He was hailed a bootlicker – at that clearing on the edge of a tangled city rock, at the edge of a world in a glass. He became that new nigger, elfish and bowlegged, hopping on a busted leg. His mother was a slave-breeding muse and his father rusted his bones on troubles.

DONE-IT-AGAIN staggered and said: ‘ask me about teenage suicides and other unspoken genocides…

Like how nations are killed with pesticides and how a hero’s birthday is celebrated with massacres of infants’.

He traveled widely among them pocket bureaucrats, among charity museums, among imprisoned leaders and peasants on truck-loads of fire, noosing his neck like a stick on a coward’s arm…

He huddled a hit and run pistol, his shadow hollowing in sounds of his wheel-burrow bosom filled with revenge.

He remembered; He touched down, all crushed and craving death. DEATH waited at an intersection where ordered soldiers decapitated him, his head displayed on postcards sent back home to sweethearts allowed a love who supported shackles.

He touched down, crushed and beat…and death was black in the veins of this feature fool; an option-less fellow…yielding to nothing in the heat-blizzards of straight-jacket individualism.

He lay on a wall paging through a Martian bible…we later discovered that he was massacred through the stomach and through other scourges of the black holocaust, like destitution, suicidal family systems, the immobility of the ghetto and the present-day death-count inflicted by aids.

Picks and spades redefined this new nigger…like DONE-IT-AGAIN cursing clans of proselytes lamenting jesus’ anthems in the frail hope of flameless sleep. He sensed their fear of dreams, of death or the dying aims of life.

He was a new nigger.…

He

put

on

a

steel-make

smile

and

kept

on

the

ground,

with

his skin stretched over his palms.

(First published by PINESLOPE PUBLISHING)

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.