As his career progressed, the explosive energy that characterized his work seemed to almost implode: reading his verse becomes like being caged inside a pressure-cooker of imagery and rhythm. As Paul Wessels (m.d.) writes in his review of The Bavino Sermons (1999), Rampolokeng’s rolling, roiling ‘dis-cum-dedication To Gil Scott-Heron’:
This very precise paradox inserts the poet firmly within the subject-matter of his work. This is no commentator, neutral observer of life. And reading this book is an exhausting experience. There is a disconcerting numbness that comes over the reader at a certain point. Affect seems to short-circuit. Image upon image assaults the senses.
The scatological language, the grotesque violence, the incisive insights into humanity, and in particular, the enemies of humanity make for something of a temporary loss of self the reader experiences.
To truly appreciate the power of Rampolokeng’s work then, we have to let go of ourselves as individual beings, thereby allowing a strangers’ world — or Hell, in this case — to possess us, to become us. Eventually, his works seem to say, all of us is an Other. Or we have the ability to be so, if pushed far enough. It’s a beautiful and terrifying idea, the dissolution of the self as its ultimate fulfillment. We lose ourselves to find ourselves.
This illustrates at least something of the relationship between friendship and reading I am trying to grasp at through loss and the chasm that exists between each of us. As Michael Brennan (2005) writes in his reflection on mourning and poetry, ‘In Absentia: Mourning and Friendship’: ‘Every word chosen and weighed with care if not a love for the unknowable, for what is beyond it, for the absence it contains and that contains it offers the possibility of relation, of friendship through the absences that exist at the heart of both being and language’. Writing then is a form of relation, at its best, an act of friendship without constraints, free of agenda, a binding beyond self and other, absence and presence, where each slips away.
I wrote to Lesego, first as a fan — ardent, awkward, searching — grappling to articulate the impact his poetry had on me. He wrote back. Flushed with elation, I wrote again. Our friendship took off quickly, energised by a sense of recognition and alliance, and finally active collaboration. Yet for all its camaraderie, the encounter was erratic, fleeting, and sometimes shadowed by trouble. Often our exchanges ignited my imagination; we tore the words from each other’s mouths, creating an excitement that seemed like an electric storm, then nothing, blackout, for months, or sometimes years.
There was a lot separating us. He was a generation older, and 50 shades darker. A Soweto boy, born and bred, who had recently shorn his dreads, traded mine dumps for cow pats in Groot Marico. I was a laaitjie — doubly, young and white, and a girl. Cape Town-based. This wasn’t a love story, no Nadine Gordimer novel3 — we didn’t hang out or even ever make out. What we did share was a library, a set of influences that ran riot from Antoine Artaud to Amos Tutoula, from Amiri Baraka to Steve Biko, Dumile Feni to Johnny Dyani — that and a passionate belief in the act of creation. This friendship was based in an impersonal form of intensity that went way beyond personal relations.
It was also a friendship that came with a warning. The challenge of Lesego’s work and personality — especially to those near it — is how much comes in: the pain, the ghosts, the rage. As fellow poet Kelwyn Sole (2009: 240) once said: ‘No contemporary South African poet — indeed, no writer — has occasioned more approval or disapproval, partly no doubt due to the confrontational nature of Rampolokeng’s poetic persona and style, and the scatological, irreverent content of much of his work.’ His fights and fall-outs with friends were legendary, often public.4 Forget 2Pac vs. Biggie. Rampolokeng, I was told firmly was trouble — violent, volatile, unreliable. A poet with a head on fire, a dark heart.
Maybe it was this glitch, the stark difference between public reputation and my own experience that provoked me to pursue an interview. Was I testing him? Seeking a way to make sense of the disjunctive relations that informed both his life and his writing? Looking for some kind of affirmation of our friendship — an E. T. moment where we finally find language and stutter f-r-i-e-n-d? Did I hope to emerge with a neat manifesto that would lay out a new sets of potentials and limits of friendship in its functioning at once as a concept and as a practice?
I should have known better. Lesego refused to comply. Over the course of several hours of intensive conversation and a fury of e-mail exchanges my long-standing friend out-and-out refused to submit to an abstract formulation of friendship, to present it as anything but life, lived experience, being human — and thus something necessarily fragmentary, messy, incoherent, violent, and ugly.
Friendship? My aunt’s place, 5100 Tsolo Street, Orlando East. I spent some years there with Vincent Sekete, my cousin who grew up to be Sasol Three. Betrayed to death on the guerrilla-front. Ok, at some point in that house, lived a family-friend as they are called. A gentler person I do not know. Guess what? He turned out to be Joe Mahlangu, Lovers Lane killer. Serial murderer. He killed the Romeos & Juliets of the Soweto corners doing the huggies-&-cuddlies. Muggers, killers, rapists, so-forth.
We are talking sunken friendship, it would have to be a heavy dirge, some kind of death fugue, if I were to compose or write that. Actually I am constantly doing it, always, in different ways. I just need to transcribe my cries.
As our discussions ran and e-mails criss-crossed — often aimed not at, but past each other — the interview became a transcription of those cries. Less a conversation than a monologue, it came as a stream of consciousness delivered in form of memories, anecdotes, and confessions, as poems and snippets of autobiography — all deep in the tradition of the everyday thing and designed to thwart academic circumscription or conscription. Lesego simply ignored and elided many of my questions, didn’t concern himself with making some kind of sense: clarifying points, connecting streams of thought, ‘putting things well’.
My childhood, all friendships I made came through conflict. Brawls, arse-whippings ... blood-splat and mucus splatter connections, you could call it. See, without brutal violence, on all sorts of levels, there is no Soweto. I exchanged flesh-tearings with fists, running stone-battles, us kids while punkarse adults stood there cheering. Blasted sick. Anyway, knives cutting through skin. No, I am not waving my scars in place of medals. Just spitting a little truth ...
A friendship then, not only characterized by conflict, but also born in and out of it, ‘fights: the fluids that fluid on and onto those streets rendered ties that bound me to others’, and one more often than not based on mutual exclusion rather than collective belonging:
I have forever been close to those who do not snugly fit, for whatever reason. In Chiawelo I ran with a boy called BOYKIE, he couldn’t speak except through grunts and other non-verbal sounds. No orality there, of course. Maybe that is why I went about rapping some kind of dead poetry, no idea. Boykie had to go through wearing an OK Bazaars plastic bag on his chest cos he drooled, heavily. We would go to Sans Soucci bioscope in Kliptown, and intermission, get meat-pies, the best this side of things. And half his food would end up on his bib cos his hands were like claws, twisted, he couldn’t hold things with any, shall we say, expertise? Anyway, always, at movie-end, stepping out we’d find the coloured kids standing on the stoep, waiting to fuck us up. But damn, after all the Bruce Lee Silver Fox Angela Mao shit on the screen there was no round-kicker better than Boykie. We would hand out bursaries of free arse-whippings and then run off, Boykie shrieking with glee. FRIEND, would never leave me behind, not once.
My old man, his first stint in prison was a 12 year bit. What happened, he was drunk asleep on a bench in a shebeen when he was woken up by croaks and gurgle-sounds of sorts. He sat up to find his friend, later to be my uncle, on his back with a guy wielding a panga over him. My old