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The first poetry reading where I actually read something was in Oldenburg in the north of Germany somewhere in 1997 or '98. Dr Roth, the lecturer whose course on the didactics of poetry I attended, had invited a few students to her home to read poetry with some cheese and wine. Everybody was supposed to bring along a few of their personal favourites, along with something to eat or drink.
Shortly after I had rung the bell at the entrance to her swanky old turn-of-the-century residence, I started wondering what on earth I was doing there. From the very first stiff hellos it was clear that my coming had been a mistake. I was that guy who mistook the Baptist service on the beach for a beach party. It was the kind of company that immediately made me want to fart, tell a dirty joke or light a cigarette. No one there seemed to share Kafka's conviction "[that] literature must serve as an axe for the frozen sea inside".
After the first few painfully predictable contributions and practised reactions it was clear that my intuition had been accurate. Dr Roth and her guests wanted to have an informal eisteddfod in dozy candlelight. I was surrounded by the kind of affected lovers of innocuous word bouquets who made my own pyromaniacal obsession with words seem more like a venereal disease than a cultured hobby. They reminded me that some people like to read what they already know and admire poems as one would admire calligraphy, tradition or uniforms.
When it was my turn to read, or rather, when people started asking whether "Der Südafrikaner" wasn't going to read anything, and would not take "nein" for an answer, I felt like a rabbit in the headlights. I obliged as I would agree to open my mouth for the dentist. My palms were sweaty around the Afrikaans-German edition of Breyten Breytenbach's selected poems I had been surprised to find in the library a week before. A few people asked me to read a poem in Afrikaans first. They were curious to hear what the language sounded like.
I started with "Vlerkbrand":
wanneer jy dink aan jou land
sien jy
vlegsels en 'n bril; 'n ou hond vol bloed;
en 'n perd versuip in die rivier; 'n berg met vuur;
'n ruimte met twee mense sonder tande in die bed;
donker vyge teen die sand; 'n pad, populiere,
huis, blou, wolkskepe;
riete; 'n telefoon;
sien jy.
The first stanza slipped out like a confession before I could stop myself. It happened fast, because it was an accident. Breyten's trapped Afrikaans words fluttered about in confusion, colliding with the walls, the stylish curtains and the beautiful old bay windows. It felt as though I was hearing voices and seeing ghosts. The distance between me, the place I was from and the Germans around me had never been so great. My courage almost failed me. I wanted to run away like someone who had wet his pants in front of the whole class.
But then I suddenly found my rhythm. It was as though a ventriloquist was speaking through me. I was out of control and it was like nostalgia - intensely unpleasant and intoxicating all at once. Bart Simpson must have felt like that when he realised at the school concert that he enjoys dancing ballet, whilst dreading that his mask might slip, revealing to Nelson and the other bullies that he was the one doing pirouettes.
I understood that evening that the place I was from, the place where I belonged but had fled and now longed for was not a place on a map. It was not a place you could photograph or visit, but a remembered, imagined place entangled with language and raw emotion. I could conjure it up like a spirit, or share it with friends like memories or loss, but I could not inhabit or reclaim it. It was a place that looked a lot like nowhere, especially seen from Germany; a place full of narrow-mindedness, crime, rednecks, Bible-thumping, violence and Apartheid. It was a lot of things: unconditional parental love and understanding, my first kiss, historical debt and school dances, resentment, misunderstanding and holidays at the sea. But in 1998 it was, to me, above all a close shave. I thought of South Africa the way Ben Folds thought of his girlfriend in his song "Brick":
She's a brick and I'm drowning
slowly
off the coast and I'm headed
nowhere.
But letting go of the brick would mean losing myself. James Lee Burke provides the following description of the relation between the self and its past in his novel The Neon Rain:
… I reflected upon the ambiguous importance of the past in our lives. In order to free ourselves from it, […] we treat it as decaying memory. At the same time, it's the only measure of identity we have. There is no mystery to the self; we are what we do and where we have been. So we have to resurrect the past constantly, erect monuments to it, and keep it alive in order to remember who we are. The "I" or the "self", seen from Burke's perspective, is not a place to comfortably make oneself at home in. Rather, it is like a burning house or a sinking ship. Contrary to one's better judgement one returns again and again to try and rescue something from the flames, to save photo albums, old people, children and keepsakes from a watery grave. For white South Africans the burning house of the fathers is also contaminated with a past no progressive individual is supposed to feel nostalgic about. Confronted with the reports of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission outside of the white communities one grew up in, it seems unlikely, almost perverse, that one's own personal experiences of beauty and innocence could have happened in such a time and place. It feels wrong to yearn back to anything, especially when one recalls the shameless idealisation of the "good old days" by some of one's white compatriots. From a politically aware angle all the picnics, romances and beautiful memories of those days seem like the by-products of reckless white apathy. If the past was a station wagon on the way to the coast, guilt and Apartheid were right behind it like a Venter trailer. Thus there are those who prefer, or at least try, to let the past sink with its people, words and places - especially when they are confronted with the estrangement of emigration to boot.
Kundera formulates "the pain of estrangement" poignantly in Testaments Betrayed:
Emigration is hard from the purely personal standpoint […]: people generally think of the pain of nostalgia; but what is worse is the pain of estrangement: the process whereby what was intimate becomes foreign. […] The shocking, stupefying form of strangeness occurs not with an unknown woman we are trying to pick up but with a woman who used to belong to us. Only returning to the native land after a long absence can reveal the substantial strangeness of the world and of existence.
I did not succeed in letting go of the place I came from, but reluctantly stuck to my past like a tongue to dry ice. My past and I and Afrikaans and I were at loggerheads just like my German ex-wife and I were. It was a routine crisis and eventually became old news like the Israelis and the Palestinians. I could not continue like that, but I was too afraid to go back - a victim of the negative propaganda I had fed myself to stick it out in Germany. South Africa had become a hostile planet to me on which people could not breathe or survive. I tried to detach myself by writing, but achieved the exact opposite. The more letters and poems I wrote, the more Afrikaans became to me the native country that I had been looking for. The Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz articulated a similar experience whilst exiled in The United States ("My Faithful Mother Tongue"):
Faithful mother tongue,
[…] You were my native land; I lacked any other.
While I tried to impose aesthetic dignity upon my feelings of powerlessness and loss, my words kept wandering back to the thoroughly Afrikaans places of my childhood.
In the end my plain, happy childhood made it impossible for me to surrender the places of my past to their fate. After almost six years in Germany the words of Milosz in "A Portrait With A Cat" made immediate sense to me:
… Our true encounter
Is in the zones of childhood. Amazement called love,
A thought of touching, a cat in velvet.
The people, places and words touched and sanctified by my childhood would not accommodate the irony and cynicism with which I tried to stay in control as an adult. It was not possible to leave behind the beautiful words of Kimberley, Cape Town and Pretoria - not if I wanted to keep on writing, and I did not know how to quit. My present was a mess, and I had begun to live in the narrated spaces of my own making.
Kundera diagnoses the dilemma of the emigrant artist in Testaments Betrayed:
… the numerically equal blocks of a lifetime are unequal in weight, depending on whether they comprise youth or adult years. The adult years may be richer and more important for life and for creative activity both, but the subconscious, memory, language, all the understructure of creativity, are formed very early; for a doctor, that won't make problems, but for a novelist or a composer, leaving the place to which his imagination, his obsessions and thus his themes are bound could make for a ripping apart.
However, the places and people of the past are not only a source of inspiration or artistic obsession. They are a necessary component of any life story or work of art. Every drama must be enacted somewhere and every believable action or character belongs to a specific time and place. To make literary sense of a life it is necessary to identify with a time and place:
… we apprehend the human condition with pity and terror not in the abstract but always in relation to a given place and time, in one particular province, one particular country. (Czeslaw Milosz - The Witness of Poetry)
But some places and times are easier to celebrate or despise accurately than others. It would seem that a writer, painter or composer would have a greater chance of success when trying to apprehend the human condition point-blank in London, New York or Paris. To go and bleed to death or suffer self-destructive love in Pretoria or Beaufort West in a scorned and endangered language looks like a very wrong-headed and underground activity indeed. According to Milosz the perceived "literary map of the world" has always had several "blank spots", open white spaces, which could easily bear the inscription "Ubi Leones" ("Where the lions are"). In "Bypassing Rue Descartes" Milosz describes how he, coming from one of these "blank spots", believed he had to travel to Paris in order to become familiar with the "universal ideas" of the time:
I descended toward the Seine, shy, a traveler,
A young barbarian just come to the capital of the world.
We were many, from Jassy and Koloshvar, Wilno and
Bucharest
Saigon and Marakesh.
Ashamed to remember the customs of our homes,
About which nobody here should ever be told:
The clapping for servants, barefoot girls hurry in,
Dividing food with incantations,
Choral prayers recited by masters and household together.
I had left the cloudy provinces behind,
I entered the universal, dazzled and desiring.
After the thorough post-colonial, post-modern and post-structuralist critiques of Platonism and essentialism not many learned people would like to maintain that universality is a hallmark of important literary texts. However, the major languages and cultures of the West have found a substitute in "authenticity". When it has to be decided whether a cultural product from a "blank spot" is of any worth, it is asked whether it is "authentic". But to determine whether something is "authentic", one has to be familiar with the place of its origin. As this is seldom the case, Western judgements of "the real South Africa" or things "truly African" often mean that artists and writers from Africa are subjected to the limiting despotism of so-called "African music" or "African art", in other words masks, drums and naive texts dealing with oppression, poverty and nature. It is ironic how much emphasis is placed on "boundary-breaking" work within the South African art scene when Western audiences are often interested in exactly the opposite.
In 2002 I helped organise a Bitterkomix exhibition in Berlin and I was occasionally stunned by some spontaneous condescending reactions. The fact that some visitors were able to recognise stylistic influences from Europe and the American underground in some of the work on display apparently made them jump to the conclusion that Bitterkomix was "cool", but not authentic, "not really African". I have never heard Paul Simon criticised because Graceland was not authentically American. In other words, creatively adapting musical styles borrowed from the so-called Third World for an over-stimulated, bored Western audience deserves a Grammy, but "the scatterlings of Africa" are allowed to feed only off their own traditions in order to remain "authentic".
Derek Walcott's creole Caribbean sailor, Shabine, makes the point eloquently in "The Schooner Flight":
I met History once
But he ain't recognize me.
[…]
I confront him and shout, "Sir, is Shabine!
They say I'se your grandson. You remember Grandma
your black cook, at all?" The bitch hawk and spat.
A spit like that worth any numbers of words.
But that's all them bastards have left us: words
Shabine finds himself in the position of all vagabond orphans of History across the world, ie in a similar position to that of the Indian in Jim Jarmusch's film Dead Man who calls himself "Nobody" (Gary Farmer). After Nobody had been abducted by the circus and had learned to read and write in England, he fell in love with the poetry of William Blake. On his return home his own people called him "He-who-talks-much-says-nothing" and thus he decided to be known as "Nobody". When the main character, the accountant, "coincidentally" also called William Blake (Johhny Depp), stalks a group of bandits hunched around a fire and admits his fear to his companion, Nobody comforts him by saying: "Nobody will observe."
As Shabine says in Walcott's "The Schooner Flight":
I'm just a red nigger who love the sea,
I had a sound colonial education,
I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me.
And either I'm nobody, or I'm a nation.
How, then, does a Western audience want to determine whether Nobody is being "authentic"? Nobody can never be authentically only European, African or Asian, because he or she is part of his or her own authentic hybrid nation. For a work of art hailing from a Western Nowhere to be authentic in the eyes of the Nobody-artist involved, playing primarily for a foreign audience is not an option. Such an audience would probably not be able to fully appreciate Nobody and Nowhere; would not know whether Nobody and Nowhere are being portrayed true to themselves. The realities of Nobody and Nowhere may not be observed from the outside. I feel about the Nobodies and Nowheres of my native country the way Walcott feels about his Caribbean origins (The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory):
Its proportions are not to be measured by the traveller or the exile, but by its own citizenry and architecture. To be told you are not yet a city or a culture requires this response. I am not your city or your culture.
In the final analysis Nobody from Nowhere seems to have a simple choice between stubborn pride and self-respect and the politically correct Western circus of Anthologies of Native American Poetry, "outsider art" and the empowerment of minority groups.
After eight years and eight months in Germany I returned home hopeful and relieved like the character in Kris Kristofferson's "Just the other side of nowhere":
I come from just the other side of nowhere
To this big time lonesome town
[…]
I've seen about enough
To know where I'll be bound
[…]
Give my best to anyone who's ever done me
Any loving way but wrong
And tell them that the pride
Of just the other side of nowhere's going home.
Nowhere was a warmer, more exciting place than the one I remembered. South Africa is cultural no man's land only when seen through tired Western eyes. For Nobody Nowhere is the one place where he stands a chance to belong and to mean something.
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Danie Marais: I was born in Kimberley on the 30th of
May 1971, but grew up in Pretoria, where I matriculated in
1989. After studying BComm Law at the University of Stellenbosch,
I left for Oldenburg, Germany, in 1993 to pursue a relationship
with a German exchange student. I studied Lehramt ("the teaching
profession") at the Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg,
majoring in German and Mathematics. From 1997 my poems regularly
appeared in the Stellenbosch publication Vlugskrif,
as well as the Dutch poetry magazine Meander. Since
my return to South Africa in August 2002 I have been teaching
at the German School of Pretoria. I regularly write book reviews
for Rapport and have been nominated for the 2005
DaimlerChrysler Poetry Award.
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