I’m mourning the loss of my dreads.
now I’m the original ‘lockless monster’.
Baloi, ‘be afraid, be very afraid.’
Relation magnate to diamond-dust ferret?
Avuncular laugh to tubercular cough.
So la-la-land (eclipse
How Daylyt black them out
Like ‘pee a sea and toss dromedaries back in it
Return-trip to Anus-land...
But ‘dem towers leaning outta position pisa me off’…
Organic intellectual versus the synthetic ineffectual
& the censor-ship is anchored &anc-whored
in heads of the pansy-horde :
‘you write poetry? Shem.
You the soft, sensitive, flower-fondling type, then?’
Fuck it, gimme my machine-ahm-pen!
Ultimately it’s the force of a smile that protrudes through in A Half Century Thing, a smile mixed with a startled, helpless laughter. The book encapsulates the necessity of laughter, the deep relief and release that laughter offers. Pain, loneliness, loss — these casual horrors are called up, but also held off by the rebellious power of Lesego’s ruthless chuckle and grin. And in making us laugh with him, at him, and with and at ourselves, the poet extends a hand of friendship to the reader, inviting us into the text and making us complicit in its creation, in its joys and horrors. Laughter then as an act of friendship, an act of defiance, of revolutionary praxis; a regenerative act:
Indeed, we are Bound to Violence with Yambo Ouologuem.
& Richard Pryor proved to be just that. He pried that tomb-talk open, stood
it up & made comic of it, thus: ‘the reason people use a crucifix against
vampires is because vampires are allergic to bullshit’.
I agree. so, mom, I think I might just be a vampire. From now on kindly call
me Count Blackula.
& hence, my Robin black Hood ambition:
steal from men of the cloth & give to women of none
A Half Century Thing is thus a crossroads, a multiple connectedness. It’s a meditation of friendship and an enactment of friendship created as an act of friendship that shows us not what friendship is, what it could be, or even who the friend is, but rather what can friendship do (Salut, Deleuze!),10 that is, how friendship functions as an active and dynamic relationship, allowing affirmation as well as dissent, rage, and pain as well as laughter and joy, harmony as well as disharmony.
References
Blake, William. 1793. ‘Marriage of Heaven and Hell.’ Blake Archive. Accessed May 2015. http://www.blakearchive.org/exist/blake/archive/work.xq?workid=mhh
Brennan, Michael. 2005. ‘In Absentia: Mourning and Friendship.’ Jacket Magazine, April 27. http://jacketmagazine.com/27/bren-inabsent.html
Dieck, Martin and Jens Balzer. 2006. ‘Salut, Deleuze!’ In Chimurenga 9: Conversations in Luanda and Other Graphic Stories. Cape Town: Chimurenga.
Dlamini, Jacob. 2014. Askari: A Story of Collaboration and Betrayal in the Anti-Apartheid Struggle. Johannesburg: Jacana Media.
Duiker, K. Sello. 2001. The Quiet Violence of Dreams. Cape Town: Kwela Books.
Kaganof, Aryan. 2010. ‘Johnny Dyani Interview’. In Chimurenga 15: The Curriculum is Everything. Cape Town: Chimurenga.
Kona, Bongani. 2015. ‘The Other Brother.’ In The Chronic, New Cartographies. March. Cape Town: Chimurenga.
Moten, Fred. 2015. ‘Amuse-Bouche.’ Jacket Magazine, February 12. http://jacket2.org/article/amuse-bouche
Ouologuem, Yambo. 1971. Bound to Violence. Trans. Ralph Manheim. London: Heinemann Educational Books.
Ouologuem, Yambo. 2008. The Yambo Ouologuem Reader. Trans. Christopher Wise. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.
Pisano, Claudia Moreno, ed. 2014. Amiri Baraka and Edward Dorn: The Collected Letters. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press.
Rampolokeng, Lesego. 1990. Horns for Hondo. Fordsburg, South Africa: Congress of South African Writers.
Rampolokeng, Lesego. 1999. The Bavino Sermons. Durban: Gecko Poetry.
Rampolokeng, Lesego. 2015. A Half Century Thing. Cape Town: Black Ghost Books.
Rodwell, Bobby. 2014. Word Down the Line. Directed by Bobby Rodwell. (DVD), 75 min. Screened June 23, 2014. Durban, South Africa: Durban Film Fest.
Sole, Kelwyn. 2009. ‘“I Have Learned To Hear More Acutely”: Aesthetics, Agency and the Reader in Contemporary South African Poetry.’ Cross-Cultural Poetics 21(22): 240–266.
Stivale, Charles J. 2008. Gilles Deleuze’s ABC: The Folds of Friendship. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Tutuola, Amos. 1954. My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. London: Faber and Faber.
Wessels, Paul. n.d. ‘Review of The Bavino Sermons in the Cape Times.’ Accessed online: http://www.ukznpress.co.za/?class=bb_ukzn_reviews&method=view_reviews&global[fields][_id]=10
NOTES
1 The chapter title is borrowed from Yambo Ouologuem’s 1968 novel Le Devoir de Violence, translated as Bound to Violence by Ralph Manheim in 1971, and later as The Duty of Violence by Christopher Wise (2008), which presents a violent vision of African history, and as Wise has argued, ‘a view that there is no such thing as a public sphere that is completely free of irrational violence, and that in certain circumstances it is even a moral duty to enact violence against the other’. It is also a reference in Lesego Rampolokeng’s poetry, and the subject of often heated discussions between Rampolokeng and me on the incapability of violence-doing and eroticism as one possible means of breaking such enslavement.
2 For a beautiful reflection on friendship in Masande Ntshanga’s debut novel, The Reactive, see ‘The Other Brother’ by Bongani Kona in The Chronic, New Cartographies (2015).
3 Gordimer’s third novel, Occasion for Loving (published in 1963), deals with the failure of tolerance and humanism; the increasing absurdity of the race laws brought friendship and love across the colour bar to a halt.
4 Years later, to explain his shifting allegiances and alliances, Lesego would quote Greg Tate on Amiri Baraka to me: ‘We are so quick to, as Greg Tate said of Amiri Baraka, grow up in public. You don’t only grow up, but we want society to see we grow up. So we turn around and crap on what we stood for in the beginning. ... And you see it happening, here. It happened with Amiri Baraka. He was part of the Beat Generation ... got married to this Jewish