Telling Times

by Nadine Gordimer

  Rested near swinging

  sliding playground

  with eager-eyed-black faces

  ‘can we play on the swing’

  a cowing no

  in town the voice pleads

  ‘I want to pee’

  a hackneyed no

  leads to the edge of town.

  And James Matthews in ‘Two Little Black Boys’:

  Two little black boys

  standing in front of a public lavatory

  one not bigger than a grasshopper

  the other a head of hair taller

  you can’t go in there

  the tall one said, pointing to the board

  it’s white people only.

  It is not insignificant that incidents such as this are written about again and again. Through the recurrence of apparent trivialities in a child’s life, certain objects – a swing, a public lavatory – can be seen becoming reified with the value of a sacred totem of white supremacy from whose ground the black child learns he is excluded without knowing why. But the question will come. James Matthews’s poem ends:

  Puzzled, the grasshopper replied

  don’t white people shit like me?

  And Mike Dues, more ominously:

  Later the face stronger

  and voice bigger

  will ask why.

  A child’s three questions in one of Oswald Mtshali’s poems ‘Boy on a Swing’ – ‘Mother!/Where did I come from?/When will I wear long trousers?/Why was my father jailed?’ – illustrate by their unconscious grouping how victimisation undergoes transformation into one of the immutable mysteries of a natural order. The experience of these black children takes on a dreadful logic as preparation for their sort of future in Stanley Mogoba’s poem ‘Two Buckets’ in which two buckets side by side, one a lavatory, the other filled with drinking water, define prison as a destination. Thrown into a cell at night, a man stumbles over the buckets:

  In this startled manner

  I made my entry

  into a dark world

  Where thousands of men

  Pine and are forgotten.

  It is the world of the pass laws, and the pass document is not a booklet of simple identification but a hateful possession that must be cherished because one cannot live without it – another inversion of values demanded by the white man. In ‘City Johannesburg’, Mongane Wally Serote addresses the white city:

  This way I salute you;

  My hand pulses to my back trouser pocket

  Or into my inner jacket pocket

  For my pass, my life

  … My hand like a starved snake rears my pockets

  … Jo’burg City, I salute you;

  When I run out, or roar in a bus to you,

  I leave behind me my love – my comic houses and people, my donga and my ever-whirling dust

  My death

  That’s so related to me as a wink to the eye

  The city as an environment of distortion as well as dispossession creates the image in Njabulo Ndebele’s poem:

  I hid my love in the sewerage

  Of a city; and when it was decayed,

  I returned: I returned to the old lands.

  Oswald Mtshali’s country bird is shedding his identity along with his feathers when he takes a job as a city cleaner and says in ‘The Moulting Country Bird’:

  I wish

  I was not a bird

  red and tender of body

  with the mark of the tribe

  branded on me as fledgling

  hatched in the Zulu grass hut.

  Pierced in the lobe of the ear

  by the burning spike of the elderman;

  he drew my blood like a butcher bird

  that impales the grasshopper on the thorn.

  As a full fledged starling

  hopping in the city street,

  scratching the building corridor,

  I want to moult

  from the dung-smeared down

  tattered like a fieldworker’s shirt,

  tighter than the skin of a snake

  that sleeps as the plough turns the sod.

  Boots caked with mud,

  wooden stoppers flapping from earlobes

  and a beaded little gourd dangling on a hirsute chest,

  all to stoke the incinerator.

  I want to be adorned

  by a silken suit so scintillating in sheen,

  it pales even the peacock’s plumage,

  and catches the enchanted eye

  of a harlot hiding in an alley:

  ‘Come! my moulten bird,

  I will not charge you a price!’

  Njabulo Ndebele, one of the youngest of the new writers, is surely speaking of the same man when he writes, in ‘I hid my love in the sewerage’:

  O who am I?

  Who am I?

  I am the hoof that once

  Grazed in silence upon the grass

  But now rings like a bell on tarred streets.

  Ultimate submission is the acceptance of white materialist values as a goal while at the same time they are by definition unattainable. Again Mtshali has understood this incomparably. In much-imitated poems his city black wears shoes made in America, has a wife who uses lightening cream, a mistress, a car, but:

  He knows

  he must carry a pass.

  He don’t care for politics

  He don’t go to church

  He knows Sobukwe

  He knows Mandela

  They’re in Robben Island,

  ‘So what? That’s not my business!’

  (‘The Detribalised’)

  This city black does the ‘Chauffeur Shuffle’, ‘a carving of black-wood/ in a peaked cap/clutching the wheel of the white man’s car in white-gloved hands’; he is ‘Always a Suspect’, dressed like a gentleman in white shirt and suit but trudging ‘the city pavements/side by side with “madam”/who shifts her handbag from my side to the other/ and looks at me with eyes that say/“Ha! Ha! I know who you are;/ beneath those fine clothes ticks the heart of a thief.”’

  The Sartrian and Fanonist theory of realising oneself in terms of the Other, of becoming someone else’s projection rather than oneself (the orphan Genet a thief because that is the image in which society recognises his existence) reaches its apogee in the term ‘non-white’. That is the official identity of any South African who is black, brown, coffee-coloured or yellow. Mtshali’s non-white describes himself:

  If I tell the truth

  I’m detestable.

  If I tell lies

  I’m abominable.

  If I tell nothing

  I’m unpredictable.

  If I smile to please

  I’m nothing but an obsequious sambo.

  (‘Always a Suspect’)

  And he accepts his non-white non-value by seeing, in turn, fulfilment as the vantage point from which the white man makes this valuation:

  I want my heaven now,

  Here on earth in Houghton and Parktown;

  a mansion

  two cars or more

  and smiling servants

  Isn’t that heaven?

  (‘This Kid Is No Goat’)

  The ironic note of the last phrase – no trumpet call, but ringing in the ears just the same – serves to mark the transition to the second station in the development of the black ethos as reflected in these poets. Mike Dues uses irony both as approach and technique in a terse poem, ‘You Never Know’, that is at once also an anecdote and a wry joke. We are eavesdropping on a telephone call to a sports event booking service:

  ‘Hello. Duncan Taylor here.’

  ‘I want nine tickets for Saturday.’

  ‘Nine you said. Hold on I’ll check the booking.

  I can give you eight in one row. One in front or back.’

  ‘Thank you. I’ll collect at the gate. How much?’

  ‘Well nine at R1.25. That is R11.25 Sir.’

  ‘Why the difference? A friend paid seventy-fiv
e cents last night.’

  ‘Oh! But that’s non-white.’

  ‘That’s what we want.’

  ‘I’m sorry, you sounded white.’

  Soon the ironic note grows louder. Mandlenkosi Langa sets the scene in a ‘non-whites’ pension office with a white official behind the counter:

  I lead her in

  A sepia figure 100 years old.

  Blue ice chips gaze

  And a red slash gapes:

  ‘What does she want?’

  I translate: ‘Pension, sir.’

  ‘Useless kaffir crone,

  Lazy as the black devil.

  She’ll get fuck-all.’

  I translate.

  ‘My man toiled

  And rendered himself impotent

  With hard labour.

  He paid tax like you.

  I am old enough to get pension.

  I was born before the great wars

  And I saw my father slit your likes’ throats!’

  I don’t translate, but

  She loses her pension anyhow.

  (‘The Pension Jiveass’)

  The rejection of distortion of self, the rejection of reification, take many attitudes and forms. What has to be dismantled is three hundred years of spiritual enslavement; the poet is supremely aware that though the bricks and mortar of pass offices and prisons can be battered down, the Bastille of Otherness must have its combination locks picked from within. And this is not easy. In creative terms, there is a casting about for the right means. The reference of the metaphors of sexual love is extended to become a celebration of blackness as a kind of personal salvation, as in Njabulo Ndebele’s love poems:

  I am sweeping the firmament with the mop

  of your kinky hair;

  … I shall gather you

  into my arms, my love

  and oil myself,

  Yea, anoint myself with the

  Night of your skin,

  That the dust of the soil may stick on me;

  That the birds of the sky may stick on me;

  … let me play hide-and-seek

  With an image of you in the

  Dark, plum-dark forests of

  your kinky hair,

  And I shall not want.

  (‘Five Letters to M.M.M.’)

  (Echoes here of Leon Damas’s Rendez-moi mes poupées noires.) Another means has been a use of the blues idiom of the Langston Hughes–Bessie Smith era, resuscitated in ‘cat’ vocabulary by Black Power writers in America. Pascal Gwala uses it, writing from Durban:

  Been watching this jive

  For too long.

  That’s struggle.

  West Street ain’t the place

  To hang around any more

  … At night you see another dream

  White and Monstrous

  Dropping from earth’s heaven,

  Whitewashing your own Black Dream.

  That’s struggle.

  Struggle is when

  You have to lower your eyes

  And steer time

  With your bent voice.

  When you drag along –

  Mechanically.

  Your shoulder refusing;

  Refusing like a young bull

  Not wanting to drive

  Into the dipping tank

  Struggle is keying your tune

  To harmonize with your inside.

  … Heard a child giggle at obscene jokes

  Heard a mother weep over a dead son;

  Heard a foreman say ‘boy’ to a labouring oupa

  Heard a bellowing, drunken voice in an alley.

  … You heard struggle.

  Knowing words don’t kill

  But a gun does.

  That’s struggle.

  For no more jive

  Evening’s eight

  Ain’t never late.

  Black is struggle.

  (‘Gumba Gumba Gumba’)

  Mongane Wally Serote uses the jazz beat but with vocabulary and imagery less derivative or obviously localised – generalised definitions of blackness, or anything else, are not for him. He puts a craftsmanlike agony to making-by-naming (Gerald Moore’s and Ulli Beier’s definition of the particular quality of African poetry) in a vocabulary and grammar genuinely shaped by black urban life in South Africa. There is a piercing subjectivity in his work, in which ‘black as struggle’ becomes at times an actual struggle with the limits of language itself. He can discipline himself to the device of plain statement:

  White people are white people

  They are burning the world.

  Black people are black people

  They are the fuel.

  White people are white people

  They must learn to listen.

  Black people are black people

  They must learn to talk.

  (‘Ofay-Watcher, Throbs-Phase’)

  He can see the elements of an almost untainted black identity in the old people and children who are recurring lyrical motifs in his work. But when he seeks to recreate that identity by learning how it was destroyed, deeply wounded and marked himself, he wanders among the signs of signs, the abstractions of abstraction. The persona of his poems is often named ‘Ofay-Watcher’ – one who watches Whitey, a definition that has overtones of the negative non-white clinging to it like grave-clothes around the resurrected. Ofay-Watcher says:

  I want to look at what happened;

  That done,

  As silent as the roots of plants pierce the soil

  I look at what happened,

  Whether above the houses there is always either smoke or dust,

  As there are always flies above a dead dog.

  I want to look at what happened.

  That done,

  As silent as plants show colour: green,

  I look at what happened,

  When houses make me ask: do people live there?

  As there is something wrong when I ask – is that man alive?

  I want to look at what happened,

  That done

  As silent as the life of a plant that makes you see it

  I look at what happened

  When knives creep in and out of people

  As day and night into time.

  I want to look at what happened,

  That done,

  As silent as plants bloom and the eye tells you: something has happened. I look at what happened

  When jails are becoming necessary homes for people

  Like death comes out of disease,

  I want to look at what happened.

  (‘Ofay-Watcher Looks Back’)

  Not only to look, but to express his findings in the long expletive of ‘What’s In This Black “Shit”’, gagging on its own bile of force-fed humiliation:

  It is not the steaming rot

  In the toilet bucket,

  It is the upheaval of the bowels

  Bleeding and coming out through the mouth

  And swallowed back,

  Rolling in the mouth

  Feeling its taste and wondering what’s next like it.

  Finally he turns the term ‘black shit’ on those who coined it:

  I’m learning to pronounce this ‘shit’ well,

  Since the other day

  at the pass office

  when I went to get employment,

  The officer there endorsed me to Middleburg

  So I said, hard and with all my might, ‘Shit!’

  I felt a little better;

  But what’s good is, I said it in his face,

  A thing my father wouldn’t dare do.

  That’s what’s in this black ‘Shit’.

  The Word becomes Weapon. At times, for this writer, there is no calligraphy capable of containing the force of resentment and he destroys his very medium by exploding the bounds of coherence:

  WORDS.

  Trying to get out.

  Words. Words. Words.

  By Whitey

  I know I’m
trapped.

  Helpless

  Hopeless

  You’ve trapped me Whitey! Meem wann ge aot Fuc

  Pschwee ep booboodubooboodu blllll

  Black books

  Flesh blood words shitrrr Haai,

  Amen.

  (‘Black Bells’)

  You taught me language; and my profit on’t/Is I know how to curse. Not from the political platform or the prisoner’s dock, but howling from the subconscious, hate is conjured up in Serote’s work. Yet he himself is not free to hate; he is tormented by its necessity for the black in South Africa:

  To talk for myself

  I hate to hate

  But how often has it been

  I could not hate enough.

  (‘That’s Not My Wish’)

  Preoccupation with the metaphysics of hate belongs to the station of rejection of the distorted black self-image: James Matthews refers to the book he has published with Gladys Thomas as a collection of ‘declarations’ and the unspoken overall declaration is that of those who have learned how to hate enough, and to survive. His is the manifesto of the black ethos as challenger, confronting the white ethos on black ground. In a kind of black nursery jingle by Gladys Thomas, entitled ‘Fall To-morrow’, it speaks to blacks:

  Don’t sow a seed

  Don’t paint a wall

  To-morrow it will have to fall

  and to whites:

  Be at home in our desert for all

  You that remade us

  Your mould will break

  And to-morrow you are going to fall.

  The book is called ‘Cry Rage!’ and the theme is often expressed in terms of actual and specific events. James Matthews is not diffident about taking a hold wherever he can on those enormous experiences of the long night of the black body-and-soul that prose writers have ignored. His obsession with the subject of resettlement is no more than an accurate reflection of the realities of daily life for the tens of thousands of blacks who have been moved by government decree to find shelter and livelihood in the bare veld of places dubbed Limehill, Dimbaza, Sada, Ilinge – often poetic names whose meanings seem to show malicious contempt for the people dumped there:

  Valley of plenty is what it is called;

  where little children display their nakedness

  and stumble around on listless limbs

  … where mothers plough their dead fruit into the soil

  their crone breasts dry of milk

  … where menfolk castrated by degradation

  seek their manhood in a jug

  of wine as brackish as their bile.

  (‘Valley of plenty’)