suddenly everybody logged out all at once
i felt the blood go to my feet
years later: nothing
had changed
that moment in the hotel room in new york
when you showed me your breasts
was all i could remember
of the 1990s
am i that much older?
even a whiskey
these days
is too much bother
now it’s time to
logout again
The latest edition of The growth of Free State Black Writing (2009) journal is out. The series has been published since 2002, and this is the eighth edition. Reproduced hereunder is the Introduction to the latest edition by its long-standing editor, Peter Moroe…
INTRODUCTION TO THE BOOK BY PETER MOROE
In September this year (2009) the Mangaung Local Municipality (MLM) in conjunction with the Bloemfontein Public Library did a remarkable thing. They orchestrated an Awards ceremony wherefore black writers in the Free State were honoured. Nor were these awards limited to “established, published” authors – virtually all recognized writers who had made their mark in the society were lauded and honoured.
Writers honoured thus included the “luminaries” like Omoseye Bolaji, Flaxman Qoopane, Thabo Mafike, Lebohang Thaisi, Pule Lechesa, Saint George Vis; others like Seleke Botsime, Richard “Skietreker” Seape, Bareng Dichabe, Raselebeli Khotseng, Jah Rose were also honoured, among others. They were all presented with special certificates; and illuminating speeches were delivered by key speakers.
It was an occasion that spoke volumes of the fact that Free State Black writing continues to thrive. This year (2009) a lot of progress continues to be made. New writers continue to emerge, others who were fairly established before, published books. Poetry in particular continues to grow by leaps and bounds.
In this wise the likes of Neo Mvubu, Richard “Skietreker” Seape, Magic Khotseng, and the exciting Tiisetso M Thiba are doing very well. Tiisetso in particular has impressed so many lovers of poetry this year, and two of his poems are published in this edition of The Growth of Free State Black Writing.
Saint George Vis made waves with the publication of Indaba with Free State writers this year. This important work follows on the early Free State Writers Talking (2002). The new book has been favourably received and two of the reviews of the work are published here. Writers interviewed in Vis’ book include Pule Lechesa, Charmaine Kolwane, Teboho Masakala, Neo Mvubu, Richard Skietreker Seape, Thabo Mafike, among others.
Young writer, Teboho Masakala has also impressed many literary observers this year, with his sudden emergence. His forte at the moment seems to be short stories – and a sample of his work is published here. Much is expected in future from this young man.
Another writer of short fiction – Maxwell Perkins Kanemanyanga (based in Bloemfontein) published his debut work this year: Enemy of the State. The book comprises some ten short stories which are enthralling in their own way. Pule Lechesa’s superb review of the new book is published here.
As for the multiple award-winning Omoseye Bolaji, another full length work was added to the many studies (books) published on his literary work, this year. The new book is called: Omoseye Bolaji: Further perspectives; edited by Julia Mooi. Because of this new book, there is hardly any need to publish the recent shorter articles on the works of Bolaji here – though one impressive article is published here (“Folksiness in Tebogo and the epithalamion”)
In conclusion let me just state that this is the EIGHTH edition of this series! We are all proud of it, and the fact that burgeoning and established writers from our beloved Province continue to make this publication worthwhile. See you next time around!
- Peter Moroe (Editor)
this article first appeared here
The house of Alphonse Guava was in a disastrous state. For starters, no-one had cleaned it since the symbiote orgy, and the remains of food and drink had rotted to mulch across all the floors. Most of the bodies had been dragged out and dumped in the trees. Their stench was a constant backdrop the atmosphere of dismal chaos, which now prevailed. Symbs squatted everywhere in advanced forms of transformation. They looked like statues erected at ancient temples, with limbs as thin as beaten metal. They swarmed slowly over the walls; gigantic grasshoppers, involved in absurd, half-remembered human activities. Most simply stood like sculptures in the sun, soaking up the heat like blotting paper. Mister Sister had many of the walls spray painted with red and toxic yellow paint. Almost all the lower floor windows had been destroyed. The lovely atmosphere of the colonial plantation house had been ruined, utterly desecrated. Mister Sister was floating in the pool, on an enormous throne shaped lilo. These days he was almost always grinning in abject satisfaction. His victory over the imp had softened his demeanor and there were less beheadings than his punks had previously known. He had also gained weight, his hairless body taking on the dimensions of a massive baby. To further augment this perverse image, he had his body rubbed daily with talcum powder and perpetually wore a giant diaper, in which he would defecate. He took great pleasure in being changed by his slaves and often bawled for no reason. To further complicate things he had himself injected with hormones, which eventually caused him to lactate. Milk was ceaselessly oozing from his large pink nipples and he loved to have The Sugar Twins snuggle up to him and suckle on his breasts. They lay beside him on the lilo, doing just that, clad in matching spandex swim-suits which showed off their nubile forms to great effect. They seemed to thrive off his milk and needed no coaxing to partake of it. Their fickle shift of loyalties seemed to suit their inhumanity somehow and Taty could not bring herself to hate them, as much as she tried. They simply weren’t human enough to hate. The battle-droid had been parked in the frangipani grove and had not seen any action since that fateful night at the docks. It was blanketed in blossoms and in dire need of a lube job. A half-formed Buddhist punk writhed orgiastically on the pool deck, completing the final stages of his transformation. Taty sat sullenly at the edge of the pool, dangling her legs in the blue, staring at the sun-dappled water in a mesmerized fashion. She was in her habitual bikini, big straw hat and oversized sunglasses. The flowers she wore in her hair were Venus Flytraps. They snapped at passing mosquitoes, making tiny popping noises as they opened and closed. The walkie-talkie, which she now kept with her at all times, was clipped to the elastic of her bikini briefs. She had started smoking cigarettes, a habit picked up from some of the less homicidal Buddhist Punks. One dangled listlessly off her lip as she observed a drowning insect with detached intensity. A machine gun lay beside her, within easy reach. She had found it on one of the corpses and accessorized it with glittery stickers and pictures of kittens. Now it never left her side. One of her favourite pastimes was scavenging the estate for ammunition, and she had built up a substantial stock, which she kept well hidden. Mister Sister was watching her with a lazy smile, his almond eyes screwed up into knife wounds in the sunshine.
“Look at her my little kitties,” Mister Sister sang to the Sugar Twins.
“So many Symbs and still no hump… She must be antidote-girl!”
He burst into high-pitched, somewhat maniacal giggles. Taty glared at him. She threw the cigarette into the pool, grabbed her machine gun and stormed off. She passed through ruined rooms and halls, stopping in the courtyard where she had found Cherry Cola handcuffed all those weeks ago. It was hard thinking of Cherry Cola after what had happened. She could still her screaming when they cut her head off. She tried not to think about it anymore. Baby crocodiles frolicked in the water of the fountain, tangling themselves in the large, half-dead lotus blossoms. She could hear music in the distance, old Les Baxter records trailing out from Alphonse’s high room, a memory of better days. A Symb lurched over the terracotta roofing, dislodging some tiles, which crashed through the shattered skylights. It stopped to leer at her and she recognized it instantly. The symbiotes were all unique, containing the seed of their host’s facial and bodily characteristics. This one she knew and hated. She glared at it until it clambered off like a massive tree frog, disappearing over an antiquated storm gutter. Taty sat down on the edge of the fountain and unclipped the walkie-talkie from her bikini briefs. She switched it on and tuned up with a warble of static.
“Where are you now?” she spoke into it, swinging her legs.
Somewhere in the middle of the ocean, the half-destroyed torso of Number Nun drifted. Sunny tropical blues dappled her. Some tiny fish flickered in her chest cavity while monstrous jellyfish the size of houses wafted below, glittering with refracted light.
“My navigational array is broken,” Number Nun pointed out, vaguely irritated. “I’ve told you this before.”
Taty fiddled with her nails.
“Oh. Yeah. Forgot bout that.”
There was a hiss of open ended static and she could hear the low-fidelity churn of the sea outside Number Nun’s cracked head.
“Whatcha doin?” she asked.
“Childbride, you know very well that I am doing absolutely nothing! Now leave me alone to pray. Go bother somebody else!”
The call cut off abruptly and white noise erupted from the speaker. Taty stared at it for a moment before switching it off. She clipped it back to her briefs and gazed listlessly down at the baby crocodiles. After awhile she wandered off, humming along to the distant music.
Taty owned a stretched tape cassette of ‘Hotel California’. She had edited the song with nail scissors, so that the voiceless intro ran directly into the long guitar solo, creating an instrumental mix. She would listen to this every afternoon in her massive radar earphones, around sunset, when it was time to retreat to the bell tower. A white washed spiral staircase ran up to the belfry, and many small windows had been poked into the walls along its length. These apertures gazed out onto vistas of the steaming jungle, which stretched endlessly out beyond the house. Towering palm trees swayed drunkenly against the galactic cheese-melt of sunset and the silhouettes of monkeys gamboled in the highest branches. Taty was a creature of habit and discovered that some form of routine soothed her immensely. So every afternoon she would scavenge candy bars, green coconuts and bottles of fizz-pop, which she would then carry up to the top of the bell tower. The spiral stairs opened up into an airy space cluttered with junk. She had hidden a foldng ladder behind some crates and used it gain entrance to a trapdoor in the ceiling. This trap led directly into the belfry, a domed chamber which had over the weeks become her lair. She would shoulder her machine-gun and take the packets in her teeth while she climbed, pulling the ladder in after her. The large brass bell had long since fallen, cracking the boards. She would painstakingly roll this gigantic device over the trapdoor to further ensure her privacy. Each of the four walls of the belfry had a large hole cut out of it. These balcony windows afforded expansive views of the house and jungle. From this elevated perspective, Taty could see almost anything coming and the height gave her a sense of security. A sleeping bag lay crumpled in the corner, beside a pile of old fashion magazines and holiday brochures which she had discovered in drawers throughout the house. A bowl of green mangoes lay on the ancient wooden boards. Coconut shells covered the floor, picked clean and filled with bric-a-brac. Candy bar wrappers clustered in one corner, skirled around by the hot breezes. A large box of lollipops took pride of place near the sleeping bag. A picnic hamper of ammunition lay within easy reach.
Taty sat on the whitewashed balustrades of the belfry as she did every evening, bathed in red-gold light, swigging from a bottle of fizz-pop. She would sit watching the sun set behind the jungle and observe the large flocks of flamingoes and parrots squall screaming across the Western skies. She was busy doing this one eve when she spotted the Symb from the rooftop inching slowly up the tower like some monstrous gecko. She hated how it followed her around, like it had some claim to her. She unhitched her machine gun and fired a short burst at it, shattering the silence of dusk. The bullets dislodged the creature and it dropped to the trees below. Michelle, who was poolside, almost directly below the opposite side of the bell tower nearly jumped out of her skin. She turned in exasperation to Mister Sister, who still floated upon his lilo throne, attended to by young male slaves.
“What the fuck does she do up there all night!”
“Oh, who gives a kidney what that little cockroach does,” Mister Sister muttered. “Even the Symb’s won’t touch her anymore – little miss pariah.”
He leaned up off the lilo in a sudden fit of childish anger.
“Pariah!” he bellowed up to the tower. “I should feed you to the crocs! You hear me you little brat?”
Taty heard, but paid no mind, making faces at them when they weren’t looking.
The night was always full of bats, swarming past the tower in high-frequency clouds. Giant, clumsy moths would also always tumble in, like origami constructions, sucking back out into the darkness before she had time to study their ornate wings. The raftered ceiling of the belfry was awash with golden orb spiders. The creatures had decorated the old bell supports with a fairy lace of webs, giving her something magical to gaze at before she fell asleep. She would light candles in glass jars and watch the flames flicker drowsily in the moist breezes rising off the jungle. Sometimes it would rain for days and she would snuggle up in a battered fur jacket, scrounged from the walk-in closets. The white fur had been in a pristine state when she had found it, but after weeks of continuous use, the garment had grown grungy and pelted, like the skin of a stray Persian cat. Now it was the hot season and she would always be in her bikini, day or night. It seemed pointless to wear anything else it was so hot. She sat cross-legged on her sleeping bag gnawing green mangoes, hideously bored, watching the flytraps in her hair eat mosquitoes. Her mind was a blank and she would accentuate this blankness by smoking cigarettes, one after the other. She found she liked tobacco, the way it cured her brain like a hock of smoked ham. She missed marijuana, but was too paranoid to get stoned. Every now and then her mind would drift back to the nightmare of what had happened and she would wake in a shaking sweat, clutching for her machine gun. There had been weird rituals she could barely remember. They had dosed her with drugs and she had woken up in the basement, covered in alien slime. She told herself that she had been too drugged to remember what had happened, but she could still feel the carapace scraping against her back when she slept. The interlocking shells of the Symb had felt like rough, glazed ceramics on her skin, it’s jointed form making creaky bamboo noises when it moved. The sibilant chittering it had made now filled her dreams like an ocean of toads, and she could never completely erase the burned electric wire stench of its body. At least now she could say she lost her virginity to an alien, but who was there to impress? The world was one long heat spell of bad memories and scavenged ammunition. The punks had left her alone after the first rape, waiting for her to change, laughing and teaching her how to smoke cigarettes to ease the pain. She had cried a lot then, but stopped dead when Cherry Cola was executed for spitting Mister Sister’s milk back into his face. She remembered getting very sick the day after having sex with the symbiote. A fever descended and she became delirious, seeing kaleidoscopic visions and glimpsing people’s sno-globes against a backdrop of thrashing energy. They put her in a hammock by the pool and made fun of her while she passed in and out of consciousness. At one point she suffered from severe diarrhea and voided herself every few hours in one of the outside bathrooms. After one of these episodes she found herself feeling inexplicably better. She looked back into the toilet bowl and saw the dead, baby Symb, staring sightlessly up from the soiled water, wearing a mockery of her own face. The second time they tied her to a bed and stood watching, grumbling over their cigarettes, making sure the Symb impregnated her properly. Another fever descended, though this time not so bad. She was rid of the baby symbiote within a day. The Buddhist punks didn’t touch her after that. They thought she was cursed, or somehow special. They stayed out of her way and she was not manhandled like the other girls who had the misfortune of finding themselves trapped in the fallen house of the imp. She kept a low profile and was eventually ignored, the silent household pet with a secret. The symbiotes with whom she had spawned began to follow her around like retarded animals. Their behavior was out of keeping with the general mindlessness of the other Symb’s, and the sight of them disgusted her. When she found the machine gun, some of the punks even gave her ammunition, trying to tempt her into coming out looting with them. But she kept her massive radar headphones on and listened to tapes at full volume, ignoring their calls, keeping out of everyone’s way and stealing candy bars whenever she could.
The nights were rarely quiet. From her tower she would hear the screams and pistol shots. The ruckus of debauched celebration rose up like the stench of the many bodies, choking the night and making it impossible to sleep. Most nights she would stay up smoking, eating coconuts and paging mindlessly through fashion magazines while the world went mad around her. Sometimes she would lean on the balustrade facing the house and look out across the courtyards to the lighted bedchamber of Alphonse Guava. She watched him through binoculars, moving like a green ghost in his ruined room. The chamber was by now an unholy mess. Shattered aquarium glass and the rotting corpses of many reptile pets had destroyed the white shag. A lava lamp threw psychedelic patterns on the walls, illuminating the destruction and decay in twisting enchantments of light. Alphonse himself stood at his desk, gaunt and withered, bent and broken. His skin was a minty shade of green and he had been fighting off transformation for an ungodly amount of time. Yet, even with his impish constitution, the battle for preservation had taken its toll. Antennae drooped over his blackening eyes and his pale hair was a lank and tangled mess. He wore a soiled suit and operated a juicer with slow movements. He was dicing carrots and placing them into the mixer flask. When it was full to capacity he juiced the roots to a frothy orange gunk and withdrew a massive syringe. Taty watched as he filled the syringe up with freshly squeezed carrot juice and tied a silk tie around his arm. He injected the contents of the syringe into his veins and shuddered horribly, grabbing at the desk. His skin flickered like a cuttlefish, shifting from green to orange to ivory. It settled on this pale tint for a few moments before gradually washing back to green again. He would always sit on the edge of the bed after one of these episodes, exuding an air of terrible defeat. It was a painful thing to watch, and Taty would often set down her binoculars at this point, anaesthetizing herself with a barrage of cigarettes.
It was very late and the peculiar stillness of the night hung about the jungle. Some candles still guttered in the belfry, creating swarms of weird shadows, which leapt about playfully. Taty was curled in her sleeping bag staring out at the stars. At some point she lifted her walkie-talkie to her lips.
“Hello?” she whispered.
She waited awhile, just listening to the sea of crackling static and the monumental quietness of the jungle.
“Come in Number Nun…”
She eventually gave up and fell asleep. She woke in the night, as she often did, holding the communications device to her breast and speaking in her sleep.
“Mommy…mommy…”
One day she was sitting in the cinema, watching old cartoons and eating leftover scraps of jungle chicken. She was still wearing the puffy fur jacket and bikini, machine gun across her lap, the walkie-talkie jutting from a pocket. Despite the deafening volume of the maniacal cartoons, she had on her enormous headphones and was frying her brain with witchcraft guitar solos. The cinema had also suffered much abuse. Seats were uprooted and broken champagne bottles lay smashed everywhere. A huge boa constrictor had slithered in from the jungle and was exploring the projectionist’s booth. Michelle suddenly appeared in the doorway. She stared down at Taty for a moment before calling down to her.
“Hay little girl,” she called.
She called another time, louder this time and Taty turned her head. She stared blankly at Michelle.
“Little girl!”
Taty pulled her headphones down around her neck and glared at the crucified girl.
“Yeah you,” Michelle scowled. “Listen, Alphonse told me he wants to see you.”
Taty continued to stare unresponsively.
“Now, you little brat! This is still his house you know.”
Taty slouched up, shouldering her machine gun. She plodded up to the door, kicking debris out of the way.
“Do you have to carry that fucking popgun around everywhere with you?” Michelle muttered. “Mister Sister and his punks might find it cute, but I think its ridiculous the way you shoot at bugs and shit all the time.”
“It’s mine I found it.”
“Oh, whatever.”
Taty brushed past her and headed down the hall. Michelle suddenly hesitated as an idea occurred to her. She turned and called after Taty.
“Listen, little girl…”
Taty glanced over her shoulder to witness Michelle suddenly put on what she considered to be a friendly, how-to-talk-to-a-child-face.
“Listen little girl,” she smiled in a sort of horrific fashion. “I have a whole box of candy, really special candy in my room… And I’ll give it ALL to you if you just tell me what Alphonse says.”
Taty stared blankly at her.
“Well, what do you say huh?” Michelle pushed, struggling to maintain her smile.
“Ok,” Taty answered flatly.
“Good girl,” Michelle beamed, showing all her un-brushed teeth. “You just come up to my room after and I’ll be waiting with all that candy, ok?”
Taty continued to stare at her in suspicious non-comprehension. In the end she simply walked off without a word.
“Ok! Great!” Michelle called after her with all the vim and vigour of a cheerleader.
Alphonse Guava sat at his desk in a ruined white suit and deco pattern breeches. His skin was a sort of pea green, split by intricate patterns. His eyes had swelled to bulbous, globular proportions and were filmed over with silvery cataracts. Feathery antennae sprouted from his forehead like peacock feathers, and these fluttered about of their own accord, touching things. His pointed ears had finally fallen off. The desk at which he sat was a mess of papers and carrot stubs. His well-worn juicer was close at hand. Orange stained syringes overflowed out of a massive black garbage bin, spilling over into the smashed ruin of his precious ‘PERM BANK’. Mister Sister had long since raided it, using the pearly contents of the many glass capsules to butter the croissants he had delivered every day from a baker in Namanga Mori. Upon Alphonse’s bed was placed a veritable mountain of carrots. He never slept anymore anyway. He had thrown the reptile corpses out of the window in order to make the room semi-presentable for visitors, but the stains remained, irreparable and dark, lacing the freshly juice smells of the chamber with an underlying stench of prehistoric morbidity. Alphonse held before him a small card of paper. He pivoted a geometry compass between thumb and forefinger, using the needle to print something across the card in Braille. He had to write in reverse and it took him several minutes, even though it was only one word. When he was finished he placed the card inside a small satchel, within which could be glimpsed neatly folded papers, a brick of cash and a pink tape cassette in a box. It wasn’t long before his private doorbell tinkled, announcing Taty’s arrival. He pressed a small glass button and watched the heavy doors swing open. She stood at the threshold and for a moment they regarded each other in silence. The last time they had exchanged words, the symbiotes had not even existed in their reality. Now they themselves were trapped in another reality, a dimension corrupted by the insinuations of another world. She entered barefoot, glancing at the carrots, avoiding shards of glass.
“That’s one big salad,” she said, leaning her machine gun against a battered filtration system.
Alphonse smiled broadly, despite his wretched state.
“If I take my time it’ll last me to the week-end,” he quipped.
She sidestepped the rotting leg of an iguana, which Alphonse had somehow managed to overlook and slouched on the edge of the bed, spilling a small avalanche of carrots down to the shag.
“So, what’s up Doc?”
She met his gaze evenly and he eventually stood up, hobbling over to the window. He leaned on the sill and lit a slim white cigarette.
“You can’t stay here anymore cupcake,” he finally said.
She stared blankly at him.
“I’m ok,” she mumbled after a few moments of pregnant silence.
He blew a thin cloud and gazed down at the wreckage of his house, still smiling like a jester when he spoke.
“It’s going all the way down baby. And you need to scram before something comes along and eats you up.”
“I tried to run away a few weeks ago, but they stopped me.”
“Don’t worry about that, I’ll help you to get out. Anyway, I want you to do something for me.”
He was perhaps expecting rebellion, but she answered without hesitation, clear-eyed and sincere.
“Ok.”
“I’m going to give you a card,” he explained carefully. “I want you take this card to the Outer Necropolis and deliver it to a secret postbox within the floating pyramids.”
“You want me to be a postman?”
“Yes, exactly that.”
There was a pause and he examined her expressionless face, unsure, yet somehow sure of her answer.
“Ok,” she answered quietly. “Is that it?”
He regarded her with a sardonic smile, unable to help himself from picking at her passivity as one would pick at a scab.
“You seem angry with me,” he teased.
She looked away, slouched like a bedraggled bird in her mangy fur.
“You let the monsters do things to me,” she eventually said, speaking in an extremely low voice.
“Was it fun?” he grinned.
She blinked at him, unable to grasp his reaction for a moment.
“No, it was horrible,” she replied darkly. “You let Number Nun get shot, everybody is dead because of you.”
He sniggered without the slightest hint of reproach. And it was at times like this that one could clearly understand that he wasn’t at all human, not even in the slightest.
“I suppose,” he admitted. “But at least I had a ball doing it!”
“Look at you!” Taty snapped. “You’re turning green! You have bug-lashes!”
“Yes. I’m en-route to a slimy alien hell. I’m trapped in this decaying body, imprisoned in my own house by my own worst enemy, forced to degrade myself daily with root vegetables. But…My God, you have no idea how pleasurable it all is! Even my worst nightmare is absolute, unquantifiable ecstasy. You just can’t understand. You’re only a little stray.”
“I suppose.”
He hobbled back to the desk and tossed her the satchel. She caught it clumsily, spilling more carrots.
“There’s a secret tunnel that will get you off the grounds,” he told her. “Everything you need to know is on the pink tape – Leave maybe an hour or so before dawn.”
“Ok.”
“And put some clothes on, you won’t be coming back.”
He turned dismissively, busying himself with papers on his desk and she rose. She picked up her machine gun and lingered for a moment beside the door.
“You don’t really care about me, do you?” she asked quietly. “You’re just saving me so I can deliver your letter.”
He burst into raucous chuckles, swinging round madly in his chair.
“Why on earth should I care about you?” he laughed gaily.
She stared uselessly at him, before finally giving up and drifting back down the hall. His eerie laughter followed her through the passages, poking in at her through open windows.
Michelle was waiting for her in one of the courtyards. She loped after her, struggling to balance under the weight of her cross.
“Little girl!” she called.
Taty took one look at her and scampered down the nearest corridor. Michelle raced after her, her cross bobbing hilariously.
“Come back here! Come back you little bitch!”
Taty turned and sprayed machine gun fire along the walls and ceiling, scaring a pair of toucans who flew screaming down the passages. Michelle dove for cover, landing badly because she was unable to use her arms. She wriggled on the tiles like a clubbed seal, thrashing about in a cluster of pot plants.
“Traitor!” she screeched, her round face red and distorted with rage. “Traitorous little skag! I’ll have your head you little cunt! You just wait till my boyfriend hears about this! I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you! I’ll fucking kill you!”
The screams receded as Taty fled to her tower. She ran and ran, and didn’t stop running, until the big brass bell had been rolled safely over the trap and she could collapse panting.
Nicola’s first orgasm
Aryan Kaganof | 2003 | 5 min. | video | geen dialoog
“We cannot abstain from watching the revelation of a being that would be an object neither for herself nor for any other gaze and yet which would effect, in the mystery of her own invisibility, the condensation of all objectivity.”
watch it on www.filmbanktv.nl
Well now….even if I have to say so myself….remember you saw it
here FIRST. Nowhere else. Not in any fashion magazine, not in any film show, not in any stage show, not anywhere else in the WORLD but right here! NOW.
the date: 06:10:09
You would think that even with something as simple as fashion, they would get it?
Right? Wrong!
Outside of that they just cannot think, or SEE, now can they?
I have never apologised for being ahead, and am not about to do that now!!
Discourse
About knowing a subject well
Let’s look at the example of ourselves
What subject could we possibly know better
Than the self
Since we are that self
And yet who knows themselves well enough
To say “I know myself”
Anybody who says that is a liar
Or a fool
A satisfying alternative to trusting one’s own opinion
Is to have no opinion
I prefer to trust my intuition
It is best to have no motivation
To allow the Youniversal mind to guide one always
You write “There is not much clarity in communicating
with the confused.”
On the contrary, this is the only clarity
I cannot imagine you as a person in a wheelchair
Unless it were your wolves
Who hauled you through the snow
I would like to appeal to others,
But how one has to stoop in order to do so!
I could not stomach the debasement
For this reason I have no money
And no prospects for the future
But, I do sleep well,
And, I am able to confront myself in the mirror
Every morning without having to gnash my teeth
Merciless love is not a concept
It really is nothing other than itself
It is an onotological experience of being
Incomparable with other states
Certainly not to be dissected linguistically
One should never have to strive for anything
Merely being the thing is always best
Striving is for losers
Which coloured poem are you playing?
I kiss you good night
It is a very slow, very long kiss
We are both dreaming of…
“I saw that you were something,
but what it was I wasn’t sure…”
Warrick Sony was born in South Africa in 1958.He first came to public attention in the early 1980’s in South Africa as the sole member of the Kalahari Surfers.
They released five albums of politically radical music with numerous South African session musicians. Many of the albums where released by Chris Cutler’s Recommended Records in London as they were too political and anti-apartheid for South Africa at the time. The musicians where credited only by first names in fear of the Apartheid police. The music was only available to South Africans as imports during the 1980’s.
Most of the music also included sound recordings of political speeches from apartheid years in South Africa. This material had been collected while he was working as a sound recording engineer for American and European media networks while covering political activity in South Africa during the Apartheid years.
He then toured Eastern Europe with session musicians mainly from Henry Cow. Sony not only had to get permission from Anti-Apartheid organizations to perform, but had to have his passport stamped on a special pull-out page so that he could remove it when he returned to South Africa, as it was illegal for South Africans to enter the former Eastern European countries.
He then went on to produce music for many artists for Sony, BMG, Recommended, M.E.L.T. 2000, African Dope, Microdot and Shifty records. He is also involved in numerous sound recordings for film and commercials. He has also held sound recording workshops with Brian Eno for post graduate students.
PSF: What was your early musical background before you were ever in a band? Who were some of your favorite artists when you were young?
W.S.: I am autodidact, totally self-taught. Started playing guitar at age of 12, learning chords from a guitar course in a weekly magazine. First song I could play was “Bad Moon Rising” by Creedence. I loved a South African band called “the Suck”- they destroyed a grand piano on stage and played a killer version of the Black Sabbath song “War Pigs”- (it was) my intro into social comment and music. My friend’s brother had a wah-wah pedal and played a Hendrix riff through it and totally blew my mind. Hendrix was my introduction to electronics– this changed my life. The Suck also played “21st Century Schizoid Man,” a King Crimson song which led me into the murky depths of Prog and ART music. The psychedelic side of the Beatles led me to the work of Ravi Shankar and Alla Rakha and I started collecting Indian music from Roopanand Brothers; my favourite Indian record dealer was off Grey Street in Durban (at that time, Durban had the biggest Indian community outside of India in the world). I listened to South Indian Veena music and learned tabla from the Surat School.
PSF: Could you talk about your upbringing and how that influenced your work? Did you have any first hand experiences with apartheid that left an impression on you?
W.S.: I grew up in Cowies Hill, a suburb of Durban. Attended Westville High School but was frustrated with the conservative confines of Christian Nationalist education. I played bass guitar in various school groups, doing Who and Hendrix covers. Left school a year early to go and live in an Krishna Ashram in Desai Nagar near Tongaat. In 1976, he was drafted into the Apartheid army - tried to fail (the) medical by fasting for 30 days drinking only distilled water. Military authorities declared me 100% fit for duty however and I had a 2 year stretch to sit out. I protested that as a Hindu pacifist I couldn’t use a gun so they put me into Medical Services and then in the Band where I played the trombone and enjoyed some formal musical education. I was politicized by Punk in ‘77 and formed a punk band in the army called “Grim Reaper”. I heard of Steve Biko’s death on my birthday whilst standing guard in the vehicle park without a rifle.
PSF: Could talk about any bands you were in before the Surfers started?
W.S.: Very influenced by the Crass/Lee Perry/Pere Ubu /Max Romeo/Talking Heads/Pop Group/This Heat/Art Bears/DAF, etc.. Very influenced by Punk and new wave and Reggae whilst in the army 1976-78 after leaving went to Cape Town and played in various punk/art/new wave bands: Rude Dementals, Happy Ships, Under Two Flags, The Cortisones
PSF: The Kalahari Surfers is essentially you with who ever you can get or choose to play on your recordings?
W.S.: Kalahari Surfers began as a musical exploration between 3 friends of likewise musical and political interests. Working in Cape Town, during the early ’80’s, a number of compositions were realized using a variety of tape machines. We discovered that the best way to compose was to record all of our improvisations, then to revisit, edit, rework and rehearse.
Later, with access to a studio, the process became more refined but essentially the studio or the ability to record was the instrument of composition. I had a fascination and love of gadgets and technology so with the access to multi-track recorders, I was able to realize more of my art alone.
PSF: Describe your creative process- how do you come up with songs?
W.S.: I often come up with a song title or song title idea like “Let’s Build a Shack” which was an obscure allusion to a Swell Maps song called “Lets Build a Car.” I then South Africanize the idea and set it in the near future ala JG Ballard – so the scenario is: we’re running from the cities which have been burnt and rubbled during civil war , families heading for the country with the refrain ” Let’s Build a Shack.” This was also a turn around for whites who don’t have these skills and for whom this would be an alien way of living but is totally normal for many South Africans.
PSF: You started as a sound recording engineer for various international media networks in the 1980s covering political events in South Africa and anti Apartheid activities?
W.S.: I worked as a free-lance sound recordist after moving to Johannesburg in 1983. I could work hard for a few months on a drama or feature film and then plough the money into the studio and spend a few months doing my albums.
PSF: Did you consider the Surfers’ work to be explicitly anti-apartheid?
W.S.: Surfers were an expression of an average white middle class teen’s rage against the injustices of that system. Punk helped me realize that. That we had a right to express ourselves and that we had a duty. This was our reality. We were suffering in the army against our will.
PSF: What censorship did you come across during time under the Apartheid government?
W.S.: I teamed up with Lloyd Ross (of Shifty Records) towards the end of last year (2003). Lloyd made a documentary (for the new South African Broard Corporation under democracy) on James Phillips (musician who had passed away). While he was in the South African Broadcasting Corporation archive, he found records with gouge marks on them. Someone had the job of carefully dragging a nail across the offending track to make sure no-one would play it ( low tech censorship).
PSF: Did you ever have to leave South Africa to record because of censorship?
W.S.: Lloyd Ross had a mobile studio in an old Rand Mines house which we all lived. I went to Lesotho to help him record a group called Uhuru who (because of the reggae band) changed their name to Sankomoto and became, over the years, very successful. They were banned for political reasons from entering South Africa at that time, so the only way to record them was to take the studio there. At that time, we were sharing a house with Jaqui Quinn who was murdered in Lesotho during an operation to kill her husband who was in African National Congress ( the liberation party that fought the Apartheid Government) which was done a Vlakplaas (the Apartheid security police) hit squad directed by Eugene de Kock. Check out the Truth Commission report.
PSF: Your music has a lot of speech recordings of 1980’s political events. Did you collect these and then decide to put music to them?
W.S.: This was the environment we lived in. Later, as international interest peaked and Apartheid was in its last throes, more and more work came from the foreign media networks. I did hard news for CBS News, ABC News, WTN, BBC and ITN in an environment which was hostile to media workers. I was often suffering the same tear gas and police bullying as the protesters. I ran a cassette machine and collected audio whilst working. I still have piles of cassette tapes with all sorts of audio: Hitler Youth type school sports days, Afrikaaner right wingers singing hymns, rallies, marches, police announcements radio broadcasts as I was the collector of Apartheid’s audio garbage.
PSF: Could you talk about the use of humor and satire in your work?
W.S.: South Africans use humour to get out of and express all sorts of troublesome situations – Puns and word plays are part of black newspaper culture and a way of seeing. Living through the John Vorster and (prime minister) P.W. Botha era one couldn’t help laughing a loud at the antics of the State (nothing has changed I might add – check out the work of Zapiro in the Mail and Gaurdian newspaper now), I also found in the early work of the Mothers of Invention very inspiring – the cynical critique of American culture and its covert operations world wide, the jaundiced cynical eye of Frank Zappa always helped me to see South Africa in a certain way.
PSF: Since you use so many field recordings in your work, who were some of the artists who also used this medium that influence your work?
W.S.: Holgar Czukay’s album Movies, Eno & Byrne’s Bush of Ghosts, This Heat– both albums, Karlhenz Stockhausen.
PSF: Looking back now, what are your favorite Surfer albums?
W.S.: The albums fall into two distinct time period– those of the ’80’s which are word and concept albums and those of the post ‘94 freedom period, which are more film and music driven.
Pre ’90’s, I like the Bigger than Jesus album– the last of that lot of work which I think was lyrically the most accomplished. Of the post ‘94 stuff, the last album Panga Management, which was mostly done using Ableton Live, the first major new software I’ve adopted since Protools in the ’80’s.
PSF: Where can one listen or purchase any of your found sound recordings?
W.S.: Everything is a negotiation as have contributed my recordings to, South African artist, William Kentridges theatre production Ubu and the Truth Commission as well as the theatre production Truth in Transition. More recently, Sweetnoise, a metal band from Poland, made use of my work for their new album Tripty.
PSF: When apartheid ended, did you have to change focus musically?
W.S.: I didn’t ‘HAVE to’ as it was more a freedom as like now we can write about love and rivers and trees and shit without being insensitive. My musical freedom was to enjoy working with music without words.
My post-Apartheid work evokes atmospheres of ambiguous discomfort… sort of strange worlds of ethnic misfits. Music suited better to film.
PSF: What musicians toured with you?
W.S.: For the UK and European concerts, Recommended Records put together a band for me which consisted of:
Mick Hobbs (from Officer) on bass
Alig (from Family Fodder) on keyboards
Tim Hodgkinson (from Henry Cow) played keyboards and sax and slide guitar for the East Germany gigs
Chris Cutler on drums (Henry Cow, Art Bears, etc.)
Myself on guitar and vocals and tapes
Maggie Thomas did our sound
In South Africa, I worked with existing bands and we toured together as a two part act:
The Kerels played with me in Durban
The Cherry Faced Lurchers did many gigs for me
Louis Mahlanga and his Musiki Afrika played with Lesego & the Surfers
In France, at the festival of Angoulemem, Ubuyambo and Amampondo have also done gigs and tours with me. Ghetto Muffin was a Ragga outfit I played with in Norway.
PSF: In the 1980’s, you toured Eastern Europe. How did this come about?
W.S.: During the middle of February 1987, the Kalahari Surfers were asked to play at the 17th Festival of Political Song in East Berlin. “Rote Liede” was the title of that years effort and the line up included artists from all over the world. These were the times when politics were fashionable in Western popular music. It had been 10 years since punk, Reagan, Thatcher, Gorbachev and P. W. Botha were in power and many songwriters worked social comment and political satire into their lyrics. In England left wing pop stars had formed a movement called the Red Wedge which include people like Billy Bragg and the Communards. Communist Chic was in.
I came from a country where a man had gone to prison for having an A.N.C. (liberation movement that fought the apartheid government) flag on his beer mug, where the state employed its Iron Fist against any form of criticism regularly banning and detaining activists and artists. My passport had to have a special removable page when I traveled to the East Bloc so that the South African authorities would not be tempted to enquire about my goings on behind the Iron Curtain.
Chris Cutler was well connected with the East Bloc and set it all up. He was brilliant at getting gigs. We played in East Germany and Soviet Union. I met political exiles in Moscow and in East Germany, people like Max Mfazwe who had fought for (Zimbabwe prime minister) Robert Mugabe and Umkonto (armed wing that fought apartheid) and was married to an East German girl. I later bumped into them in Johannesburg South Africa many years later having resettled in SA after liberation. Good people with interesting stories.
PSF: You toured Brazil also.Who did you play with there?
W.S.: Lesego Rampolokeng and I were invited to perform at a poetry festival in Belo Horizonte and we performed together with backing tracks. The new South Africa had just happened and I was of the opinion that The ANC (newly democratically-elected government in South Africa) ad agency Hunt Lascaris had done a great job on selling the flag, peace and a happy transition to the Nation, along with our great leaders. Indeed, it was heady optimistic times and I told Brazilian journalists the same. Lesego disagreed and said that they were all untrustworthy corrupt sellouts as I guess there was some truth in that.
PSF: You went to Chris Cutler’s Recommended records in the 1980s to record Own Affairs. Why didn’t you record and press it in South Africa?
W.S.: I recorded all my albums in South Africa. They were manufactured in the UK by Chris Cutler’s company because no-one in SA would do them. EMI made me pay for cutting the vinyl acetate of side one of my first album but told me to basically go away and don’t do that sort of thing as it was ‘political, anti-religious and pornographic,’ as they called it (your basic hit rap album now!)
PSF: You named your one album after Tim Hodgkinson’s song on a Henry Cow album?
W.S.: The album is called Living in the Heart of the Beast which Tim took from a book called In the Belly of the Beast (by Lyndall Hare) because that’s what living in S.A. felt like… the Beast.
PSF: You have done recording workshops with Brian Eno?
W.S.: He came to South Africa to do a series of interactive art workshops and basically connect with SA musicians and artists. I engineered the session at the Baxter in Cape Town (February 1998) where he composed with about 30 non musician artists a piece using various found sounds and instruments of great miscellany.
PSF: What soundtracks have you contributed to?
W.S.: Most notably the Truth Commission film of John Boormans called In My Country based on the book Country of My Skull by Antjie Krog.
PSF: What musical acts/groups have you toured with?
W.S.: We played with Fred Frith (from Henry Cow) band Keep the Dog in Russia and during the ’90’s, I had a band called TransSky (a pun on the homeland in Apartheid) and we toured with Massive Attack during their South African visit.
PSF: You used political speech recordings and incorporated them into songs. The song “Teargas” is interesting and great. How did that come about?
W.S.: I had recently played a concert for the End Conscription Campaign (ECC), during which the police rolled a canister of teargas into the hall creating pandemonium. That same evening, I laid down the vocal line for a track which featured a distorted voice shouting ‘Teargas! Tear gas’ over and over and coughing and choking. It was a performance piece in the studio. Tragic comic… that was South Africa in the ’80’s.
I was working then as a film sound recordist to pay off the 16 track tape recorder I had bought for the studio that I shared with Lloyd Ross. The state media machine was like a theatre of the absurd. I used bits of propaganda films in my music: P.W. Botha’s State of Emergency speech, news broadcasts and quiz programs. I’d intercut material that I’d recorded in the field as a documentary sound recordist for the BBC or Channel 4. William Burroughs was the guiding light in splice and paste word/content experiments and I’d devour anything thing that spoke to me in the ironic voice.
PSF: Touring Russia in the 1980’s must have been quite an eye opener for a South African?
W.S.: We played at Festâ- it was put together by the Committee of Youth Organizations,(KOMSOMOL) and was held at the Palace of Youth. Gorbachev was making massive reforms then. I never met a communist in Russia, even though I was staying in the Communist Youth League’s fanciest hotel. It made me feel strange, the distance between foreigners and locals. The haves and have-nots in the socialist dream. The place was awash with Americans. Perestroika and Glasnost were the buzz words. I could get three times the official rate on the black market, but money is worthless when there is nothing to buy.
Luckily I found Melodia (the only Soviet record company) made good vinyl so I stocked up on hundreds of fantastic classical records.
I was amazed at the extraordinary experiments (that) humanity has attempted. The break up of the Soviet Union was beginning… which was the exact opposite to what was happening in South Africa. We were trying to bring all the former homelands under one united South Africa- separate development of all the different races was a bad idea for us. I had many arguments with Russians over this. Here were a people moving toward democracy, away from Socialism, whereas we still had the overtures of Socialism, in fact, one could have died for being a communist in South Africa at that time. To be a rebellious youth in Russia, you’d become a Christian and wear a pendant with a picture of the last Czar aroundyour neck.
To be a rebellious youth in South Africa, you’d be anti-Christian and wear a lapel badge sporting a hammer and sickle. The Russians never got their democracy and we (South Africa) never got our socialism. Another one of God’s curved balls.
PSF: Your original title of one of your albums Bigger than Jesus was banned, and later released as Beach Bomb. Was this as a result of Christians telling everyone that rock music had hidden Satanic messages, or because of multi tracking and sampling?
W.S.: A piece I did called “Play it Backwards” as on my second album used voices from Radio Today (a morning news broadcast of the ’80’s), discussing the hidden messages in rock music, which are found by playing records backwards. I was intrigued, so I ordered the tape from a guy who made a living out of doing this stuff. He’d even written a book, assembling hundreds of examples of these ridiculous messages that he’d discovered by playing his record collection backwards! He later charged that these secret messages could be found on some of Shifty’s releases. We challenged him on this, and by using his same technique, I proved that even Christian songs had demonic undertones, when I demonstrated that the line “God is in all of our aims,” turned into “Satan is in all of our aims” when it was played backwards. He settled out of court.
PSF: Are there other South African bands now that you admire? Are there any that you feel are kindred spirits to you?
W.S.: I have always been intrigued by African computer programming in music – the beginnings of this with Chico’s work on the MC500 on Brenda Fasi’s albums to early Kwaito (songs like “Magents” by Senyaka ) and Arthurs’ Kaffir, right up to the Gabby Leroux’s work with Mandoza. I’m also still an avid listener of ’70’s mbaquanga music, especially now that it has been re released on CD, especially Moises Mchunu, Soul Brothers Abafana Basequdeni and the African Cheese stuff like Harari.
(I like) an experimental rock group called EMP (that) I used for a movie a few months ago- they are really brilliant in an instrumental style similar to what 65 Days Of Static are doing in the UK. Also Felix Leband, Waddy (Max Normal) , Tumi and The Volume, Real Estate Agents, Teba, Crosby, Zukile, MArekta, Mzi & Ginga, Lesego, Marcus Wormstorm- all are out there ploughing a new groove.
I liked Miriam (Makeba) when she was with the Skylarks during the Sophiatown period and Hugh (Masekela) when he was with his band “The Union of South Africa” and of course, he did write one of the best South African songs ever- “Stimela.” For Dollar (Brand), the album he did with Johnny Dyani was for me his greatest- Good News From Africa on the Enya label, a real gem. Sakhile first album was OK. Ladysmith (Black Mambazo) is the most imitated group in our history.
PSF: What do you think the prospects are for the political future of your country?
W.S.: This is an inspiring and amazing country, predictions of which will always surprise one. The present government has taken us down the road of many other African dictatorships, with its corruption and divide and rule personality cult… and that persons’ (South African President Thabo Mbeki) obsession with race, and his veiled Stalinism. He has removed his opposition, not terminally, but clinically and being an exile brought his, understandable, bitterness against whites to the countries leadership. The political spectrum in the ANC divides along the 3 lines: the exiles, the Islanders (those incarcerated on Robben Island like Nelson) and the UDF - those who fought apartheid from within the countries mass democratic movement. It is these latter that Mbeki purged and forced from office a la Joe Stalin.
There are many wonderful people waiting in the wings to lead us back to optimism and good will. With the demise of the Mbeki regime, I feel we will be a great country with abilities to solve our great problems peaceably.
this interview first published on furious.com
Africa Remix was an international success. The Johannesburg Art Fair is becoming a fixture in the international art circuit. Major academic interventions such as Sarah Nuttall’s Beautiful/Ugly are redefining the boundaries of African aesthetics. William Kentridge, Penny Siopis and countless individual African artists are making a name of their own in the world market. A silent revolution in contemporary art is in the making. Its ramifications extend to other domains such as literature, fashion, music, architecture and design. As jazz and cubism in the 20th century, it is to a large extent engineered by African forms.
Yet the terms of recognition of African contemporary art and cultural creativity are still contested. The latest controversy is about the role of Western cultural funding agencies in Africa and whether the support for arts and culture should be justified by the latter’s contribution to “development”. What, then, is the agenda of donors when supporting the arts in Africa? Is there a role for the arts in “poverty reduction” or in “conflict resolution”? Is “cultural cooperation” a two-way process or a surreptitious way by which donors impose their agendas on Africa? What do terms such as “cultural diplomacy” mean?
In this interview, Achille Mbembe research professor in history and politics at the university of the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg, South Africa)responds to Vivian Paulissen, an expert and consultant in cultural funding policy based in Amsterdam.
Is there a space for respectful/mutual negotiation in the traditional donor-recipient relationship in which cultural funding agencies today operate?
I am not saying that it is a zero-sum game. Indeed there are very rare exceptions. The Prince Claus Fund is one of these. But overall such a space hardly exists. And considering the little amount of money involved, the damage is disproportionate.
In fact, relationships between Western cultural funding agencies and local “recipients” (individual artists and organizations) have never been so bad.
Over the last decade Western European financial contribution to the development of arts and culture in Africa has been steadily declining. The paradox is that as they put less and less money on the table, European agencies increased the severity of the conditions of accessing their meager subsidies. Instead of creating art, many artists in the Continent must spend a disproportionate amount of time, energy and resources filling useless application forms or desperately trying to respond to ever-changing fads and policies when they are not constantly checking the mood of ever-touchy and capricious Western consulates’ “cultural attachés” they hope to get support from.
Instead of spaces of mutuality, recognition and respect, donor agencies have established throughout the Continent countless networks of patrons-clients relationships. These relationships are not one-dimensional. They are characterized by deep levels of collusion and complicity, unequal transactions, at times mistrust, and in any case reciprocal instrumentalization. We can keep dressing up the unlimited power of the donors and the myriad forms of humiliation and indignity visited upon their “recipients” in the fancy language of “partnership”, “empowerment” or even “international friendship”. These words won’t mask the brutality of the encounter between those who have money and resources but hardly any good or useful idea and those who have some good ideas but hardly any money.
The situation is made worse by five major local and global trends.
First, the neo-liberal drive to further marketize and privatize all forms of art and life has resulted in the endless commodification of culture as spectacle and entertainment. This is a very significant development. It comes at a time when global capitalism itself is moving into a phase in which the cultural forms of its outputs are critical elements of productive strategies. The capacity of art and culture to engage critically with the velocities of capital can no longer be taken for granted.
Second is the relentless pressure from African governments to consider art and culture as a kind of “social service” whose function is to cure the ailments of poverty and underdevelopment. Third is the hyper-technological enframing of the life-world and the growing implication of art and culture in global systems of militarization of consciousness – which raises deep concerns over the limits of freedom in the militarized landscape of our times. Fourth is the “humanitarian” impulse of most Western donor agencies – the vicious ideology that promotes a view of Africa as a tabula rasa, a doomed and hopeless Continent waiting to be rescued and “saved” by the new army of Western good Samaritans.
And finally is the conflation of African art, culture and aesthetics with ethnicity or community or communalism. The dominant but false idea – shared by many Africans and many donors – is that the act of creativity is necessarily a collective act; that African artistic forms are not aesthetic objects per se but ciphers of a deeper level of the “real” that is fundamentally ethnographic and expressive of Africa’s ontological cultural difference or “authenticity”. It is this African “difference” and this African “authenticity” donors are keen to find, support and, if necessary, manufacture.
Taken altogether, the combined effects of these processes on the relations between “donors” and “recipients” and on African cultural creativity and autonomy have been devastating. Without a new ethics of recognition, solidarity and mutuality, the way most Western cultural funding (or for that matter development funding) agencies operate will become ever more destructive of the Continent’s capacity to culturally and artistically account for itself in the world.
keep reading this interview on chimurenga online
