(Kgositsile’s ‘false gods’ erased the poet raised between serial killers
& religion-drug-dealers blood-of-Christ-spillers & fear-feelers
& grown in healer-art embrace I like it hard at core with no fillers ...
true & up my ghetto-reality street passion of knife-in-flesh)
And later:
Bone stacks at Atlantic bottom
Rattle rise pierce through saxophones
Rhythm it wise with drummed skulls
Lungs mine-dust perforate for bass
& whip-strum melodies
piano ribcages kwashiorkor exposes
nerves percussive eugenic explosive
Moan-exorcise) that’s jazz
Salvaged strings from the hanging tree
The noose sings (cheated) forlorn off-key
& free concept rim-shots
& the sounds are tight hot
Bubbling from the clay-pot
Come to bring the day out
(testes notes and ovaries tones neither coo nor moo that Mankunku Jol’inkomo.)
The music introduced in this opening plays on throughout the book, becoming almost a din in the third part of the movement, ‘CRAP TONES MY KIN-DREAD SPIRITS CAN TUNE INTO (OR the addict looks at the dark side of the spoon’. In this poem Lesego engages the fundamental role that encounters played in his life — as much in experiencing intensities and multiplicities through music and literature as in generating thought and in moving beyond poetry through poetry. Here private language and personal gesture move from solipsism to the social, as references become characters, which feel more like ghosts, fading into and out of identity with one another and even with the author.
‘Ah, this pen scratches my work-song / complex chorded in perennial rearrangement,’ writes Lesego, presenting himself as both music producer and poet; a fluent switching from high-toned to home(l)y and back again; name dropping from music history while simultaneously sampling and remixing the rhythms of those he references.
Gouge out the darkness’ eyes
Exiled memory bellows across grief-distances:
The Bird’s screech-spoke genius
Then the flies came with the critiques
But) None darker than Parker and his demons
Supplicant at Charlie’s sermons
I’m prostrate before the apostate
The dance-floor is beyond reach
Nothing but flammable-speech
& No fire-dance escape
The poem flames out of control
& that’s the nature of The Beast
Home is where the lions are corrugated
Even my self-definition is dated
Got splinters of history lodged in my afrofuturism.
(it takes the primitive to make the progressive – fake dialectic)
race has them assume intuition stumbles black into it:
‘you would be great if you were doing it on purpose’
But the white is cold with it he ‘experiments’.
Hornman blows the highest trill
like opening a hole to heaven or hell
after the high the chill)
as if suspended on an abused tree
(they hurl insults at it) deaf to the gravity call
its fruit when it drops is deranged should be free rise not fall ...
Mongezi tips his bowl & it’s a bloodspill
...
Say Thelonious gave piano internal bleed haemorrhage concussion
Cos he thought it percussion
(condition Bukowski diagnosed after the fact of it lying on the slab (read post-mortem / autopsy
Zim’s ‘grand’ gutted for copper glory
(imagine a Picasso defaced for the frame
What a vandal\iZim
Kyle played it kneeling praying to the music-gods amid its gore
where it was pushing its own intestines in
Where the music instrument cemetery where do they go to die?
These words perhaps give a taste of Lesego’s penchant for intertextual play, but they do not, cannot show quite how vibrant and complex his employment of redeployment is — names and ideas, images and rhythms woven throughout the lengths of each poem and the book as a whole — or how it gives rise to such an intense reading experience.
This is recombinant poetry propelled by the refrains and returns of other artists, the sounds and words of fellow musicians and writers that are evoked and manifested, drawn into the movement of new concepts and rhythms, and thus reformulated, re-animated, re-connected, re-booted. You can be human by yourself but, as Fred Moten (2015) points out, black don’t go it alone: ‘It’s a social dance, unruliness counterpoised between riot and choir, and our melismatic looting is with child, sold all the time, but never bought.’
Or as Lesego calls it in his poem ‘The Bavino Manifesto (Ars Poetica Versus the Arse-Poet-Dicker)’: ‘my conscience calls? i answer in intestinal scrolls / a textual maze feeding in & out of itself like underground Johannesburg / where i was cradled, ladled & shall be body-bagged.’
Throughout these ‘intestinal scrolls’ the poet delights in the possibility of words having infinite meanings and effects. In these dense, spiralling texts he sends his readers around and around the same words and ideas, lifting us to new proximities to them, and to mesmeric new landscapes, at once political, geographical, and deeply personal. Even when he’s at his most destructive and violent, he is diligent about collecting the fragments of the forms he explodes, and always repurposes their shattered essence with humility and laughter.
Colonial Literature … got me thinking blue … several blues … the blue of eyes, of collars, of some blood … & I bled til Mista Gwala sang me ‘no more lullabies’ but LIBERATION BLUES 1974, mourning Onkgopotse Tiro parcel-bombed up in the murder-church service of the god of pigmentation (& yessah, I realized then that ‘me listening to jazz is not leisure / it is a soul-operation’ & I knew then I had to choose between Jol’inkomo (that is, in his words ‘bringing lines home to the kraal of my black experience’ or Yakh’inkomo, to OUTCRY with Mutabaruka ... to bawl the anguish like a cow being slain … & decided there was nothing bovine about me … & so … I took to Staffriding … all the way from Phefeni to HERE.
As the above passage demonstrates, it’s in his counterattack against mediocrity that Lesego is at his most exhilarating and eviscerating. While the multiple musical rhythms (jazz, dub, hip-hop, maskanda, malombo ... all the sounds encompassed in what Johnny Dyani calls ‘black family music’ (Kaganof 2010) and the constant punning and wordplay make reading A Half Century Thing the most fun I’ve had with a book in years, it’s a far cry from ‘leisure’. Entertaining then, but never entertainment. A Half Century Thing is ‘a soul-operation’; sharp, visceral,