Voices of the land

Kobus Moolman

Weather Eye
Isobel Dixon

Weather Eye is Isobel Dixon’s debut collection of poetry. It is also the tenth collection in a series of slim anthologies put out by Carapace Poets under the heroic mentorship of Gus Ferguson. The collection furthermore won Dixon the 2000 Sanlam Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript by a writer not previous published in volume form.

As befits a collection of such finely-crafted and precise work the volume has justly received its fair proportion of attention. From Die Burger to the Mail & Guardian, from online magazines such as Donga to this one, Weather Eye has been acclaimed for its “deep love of family and homeland which poignantly bridges the past and the presen” (Stewart Conn).

In this review I will seek on the one hand to add my own perspective of admiration and enjoyment of her work, while on the other also attempting to tease out and unravel some of the layered nuances of her rich poetic language.

I am aware of the need to tread carefully, though; to speak with respect. Dixon’s imagery is charged with resonances of her childhood and family. And even though she herself claims in an interview with Joan Hambidge that her poems are “not complex enough, intellectual enough”, I nevertheless will argue and (hopefully) prove their complexity and depth through my analysis.

I first encountered Dixon’s work seriously about two years ago when she submitted four poems to the small poetry journal, Fidelities, which I bring out annually. Of course, I had read her work in New Contrast and New Coin, but there was something in the work she sent me then (and it is evident in some of the poems in Weather Eye too) that arrested me immediately. In the poem “Comfort Zone”, for example, the poet is accosted by a beggar in the Underground. Quite honestly, there are few South African poets (except for the late Wopko Jensma) who can evoke as fiercely the human heart of pity as Dixon does in the lines that conclude the poem:

Oh have great mercy, Lord, for him
in some cold doorway, sleeping rough
and me in my own bed, too little troubled
by it all. Make my soft pillow stone
and wrestle me from dreams. Scorch
my smooth mattress, scald my sleep.

In Weather Eye, too the poem “Amanzi” (the Zulu word is deliberately chosen to help ground the orbit of its argument firmly in this country) reflects on the poet’s reaction to the ubiquitous street children who beg from motorists at traffic lights, while in “Vantage” she acknowledges that her childhood of “sweet simplicity” was “not the whole of it”, and that there was a world of “passbooks, curfews, tsotsis” against which her safe childhood had been blinkered.

The emotion in the last stanza of the poem, though, is difficult to read. The poet describes a congregation of black women (maids) in a church:

They are the dark, abandoned sheep,
they sing and clap and ululate,
and know that in the end, He’ll come
to keep them, ever after, safe.

After her having listed earlier in the poem the suffering experienced by black women in this society I search these lines for a hint of irony. I do not feel it. Instead, the phrase “ever after”, followed by “safe” (which we as readers had before seen as a positive rather than ironic term) is put forward in an uncomplicated manner as the redemption from their suffering.

Let me be clear here. I have no issue with what Dixon in the interview with Joan Hambidge calls a “sense of a continuing personal faith”. On the contrary, it is precisely this that attracted me to her poem “Comfort Zone”. However, in the latter poem we as readers feel the tension and the wrestling and the lived-in-the-flesh complexity of a real woman working out her faith in a real and bitter world. In “Vantage” it is precisely this intricacy that Dixon surrenders.

Dixon is, however, strongest in this volume when she is writing about people and places that she has actually known. In this sense, her writing is profoundly personal. But personal is never to be equated with the private. Even when she writes about the tangle and the torment of human love, as in “Consummation” and (my favourite) “Valentine”, she is nevertheless able to transcend the narrowly confessional and, through language that is startling and sharp, provoke a deep sense of identification within the reader. Her use here of imagery drawn from the lower animal world (the praying mantis and the toad) is an almost surreal reflection on those “lower”, darker forces within us which resist explanation.

Many critical readers have commented on the theme of longing in Weather Eye. Dixon, in the interview with Joan Hambidge conducted in this magazine some months ago, admitted that “longing is always a strong impetus for writing”. The displacement experienced by someone who grew up in the Great Karoo (Graaff-Reinet) and then moved to the lush surrounds of Cambridge is only part of this story; for longing is always looking over its shoulder to something in the past, whereas many of Dixon’s poems situate the longed-for in the future. No doubt this has something to do with the Home that the poet still can return to; when the home is seen in national (South Africa, in general) terms rather than the direct family.

In “Fruit of the Land”, therefore, she speaks of the “precious milk and honey of nostalgia”. This is a particularly interesting phrase. Dixon first conjures up the Biblical image of Canaan, the Promised Land, the land overflowing with milk and honey. The Promised Land, however, must lie in the future, must lie in front of the poet, otherwise it could not be Promised. But the poet says that this is actually the land of nostalgia, of the past. What we have here, then, is Dixon creating an ideal (Promise) out of that which no longer exists, the past. In other words, she is moving forward to something which is already over. And in so doing she is creating a Utopia, a place that does not exist.

The movement in many of the poems. then (characterised by the words “then” and “now”) is always a returning to a position which is itself moving toward something else. I am reminded of JM Coetzee’s notion of “doubling the point”.

In Foe Sue Barton explains it thus:

The trick I have learned is to plant a sign or marker in the ground where I stand, so that in my future wanderings I shall have something to return to, and not get worse lost than I am. Having planted it, I press on; the more often I come back to the mark (which is a sign to myself of my blindness and incapacity) the more certainly I know I am lost, yet the more I am heartened too, to have found my way back.

In Dixon’s case, then, a range of childhood memories from stealing extra water for her bath to eating grapes or watching “ants marching underneath the guava tree”, as well as the personal figures of her parents and sisters, are all used as metaphoric markers to situate both return and departure. But such an orbit is never without its dangers. Returning to her new home (Cambridge) after a visit to the past in the poem “The Festive Season”, we are told:

I come back to a chilly house
(the heating off for weeks)
and have no spirit even to unpack.

The finely-observed details in these poems builds up the force that past and present have upon her life. In lines that are often as sensuously rich as anything by Dylan Thomas, Dixon evokes the touch, the smell and the taste of her childhood:

... we, legs lime-tree scratched
and fingertips dark mulberried,
moved light among the earth and leafmould scent,
the taste of sourgrass tanged against the tongue.

The sensuousness of the past is often placed against “the banks of steel and concrete” that press her “on all sides” (“Rapture”).

But it is perhaps in the very power and accuracy of the language Dixon uses that she is able to attain that Promised Land, that Home, which otherwise will always elude her. The Rapture she so desires (to be “reborn a goldfish”) is not possible within either of the movements encompassed by the past of her childhood and the present of her adult life. She needs to be lifted out, “gasping into clearer air”.

Weather Eye is indeed a worthy winner of the coveted Sanlam Award. Being able to write about living on this African soil and also being able to look upon it from across the ocean, Dixon reveals to us, in that famous phrase of Jeremy Cronin’s, “how to speak with the voices of the land”.

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