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Just a touch of the cultural trophy-hunterAnnie GagianoDear editor - Although I am not entering the debate from either a pro-Watson or a pro-Krog position, I request that my 1992 review of Watson's Return of the Moon (a piece referred to both in the Sunday Times report of 19 February on the Watson/Krog plagiarism dispute and also in Krog's reply to Watson's article) be made available on LitNet because remarks quoted or references to it need the contextualisation of the full review to validate my now decontextualised remarks. I want to suggest three points to underline the present relevance of this earlier review: a) an underlying point in my argument that I would now make more explicitly is that appropriation can occur even when technically there is full, detailed academic acknowledgement of every source; appropriation (and its validity or otherwise) is a larger issue than plagiarism; b) some of my comments on the poetic quality of Watson's versions are in my opinion not inapplicable to Krog's versions in the stars say 'tsau': I do not regard either of these collections as highly satisfactory poetic renditions of the Bleek/Lloyd material; c) underlying the present quarrel are deeper questions concerning cultural 'ownership', cultural border crossings, cultural sharing - as well as the protocols of balancing collegial courtesy with critical acumen and honesty. Yours sincerely,
Annie Gagiano, Stephen Watson, Return of the Moon – Versions from the /Xam. The Carrefour Press, Cape Town. 1991. It is difficult to know quite where to locate the “responsibilities” for these poems (as Watson himself recognises in his informal 13-page introduction), since they come to us from an inaccessible language (/Xam being one of the Bushmen tongues, spoken mainly in the North Western Cape by the early 19th century – a time by which the culture and the people were already almost extinct). They are the accounts of three Bushmen, Englished laboriously by the devout anthropologists and linguists, Bleek and Lloyd, and now versified by Watson. Missing from the cover of this book are the names of those three men, poignant witnesses to their vanishing culture, and one has to search for the information that the cover photograph actually depicts one of them. They were: //Kabbo; /Han = Kasso; and Dia! Kwain, the orthography warning us that we cannot even pronounce their names. Grateful as one feels towards Watson for making as accessible as he could what was archival material at UCT, there does seem to be a touch of the cultural trophy-hunter in the foregrounding of his own name and difficulties and skills on the cover of, and in the introduction to, this collection. I am not convinced that Watson’s preferred form, with its immediately evident visual neatness and the regularity of most of the rhythms (a 4-beat line prevalent), is necessarily the most appropriate presentation of the material, for it seems to work against the pauses and tuneful variations of a story-telling situation, which most of them seem to call for. In other words, these accounts seem somewhat strangled in the Western garb of Watson’s stiff forms, much as //Kabbo does in the picture on the cover. The majority of the poems – roughly the first two-thirds of them, those giving us Bushmen lore about stars and winds and hunting – seem to me to have been dragged down into a sort of toneless dullness in Watson’s versions, to have been made into solemn statements with little of that spark of wonder concerning the surrounding universe that they might once have contained. They lack, that is, a real voice and a living rhythm, which may be the inevitable result of the way they came into being – but I think of such a poem as Jack Cope’s “Rock Painting” or of his versions from the San and Khoikhoi, and the vitality which these poems exude, beside which Watson’s seem to have reinterred the /Xam. An example of Watson’s rhythmic awkwardness may be taken from the opening of the poem “The Abandoned Old Woman”: “Our mother, old, unable to walk/ lay there, incapable,/ alone in her old grass and reed hut”; or from “Throwing Fire at the Stars”: “let us point it, aflame, towards Sirius, the star”, in which the diction gives the effect of absurd pomposity. If Watson saw the need to redo Bleek and Lloyd’s versions (an example of which is quoted on p 12 of the introduction), one wonders how he failed to notice the clumsy rhythmical and melodic dislocations of “If a person, good-looking, suddenly falls ill,/ and seeming to improve, suddenly grows sicker,/ sorcerers have seized him: he dies, seized”. There are too many such passages, which cry out for more sensitive revisions. How glaringly inappropriately complacent then, Watson’s “incidental” quotation of TS Eliot’s reference to Ezra Pound as “the inventor of Chinese poetry for our time” despite his disclaimer of an intended parallel! But the last section (not formally separate) of these poems, notably those from p 57 (“Our Blood Makes Smoke”) on, do have that ring of authenticity missing in the others. It is no accident that these are the poems in which /Han = Kasso, //Kabbo and Dia! Kwain tell, not of ancient ways, but of contemporary experiences, ranging from the delicately courteous (“//Kabbo’s Request for Thread”) and personal to the harrowing discovery of the ending of the /Xam’s world (“Song of the Broken String” and “Xaa-ttin’s Lament” and “Our Blood Makes Smoke”). I quote the last stanza of the latter poem: But it was by blood Xaa-ttin, my father, used to sayThis is not as good as it might be, but the power of the premonition overrides any accidental impediments. In this poem the fear clouding the mind of the /Xam “becomes” the unimaginable future as well as the actual, natural obscurity (“early-morning mists”) in which the enemies lurk – a wonderful “knotting” of experience and understanding which Watson transposes with successful clarity while not obliterating its eeriness, or its matter-of-factness. Appropriate, too, is the choice of “Return of the Moon” as the last poem and as the title, as //Kabbo expresses his yearning to return to “Bitterpits”, the poignant Afrikaans name he used for his home, where he died within a year of his return from Cape Town. He said of his people: “For I always hear them listening, talking to each other;/ I always dream of visiting, of sitting there among them.” //Kabbo’s name meant “Dream”, we learn. A chink on that dreamworld is opened in these poems.
Annie Gagiano is a professor in the English Department of the University of Stellenbosch.
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