THROWING GRAVEL AT GLASS

THROWING GRAVEL AT GLASS. An Immigrant’s Growing Impression of the ‘Mother Country’ (Originally published in The Recusant)

This piece is resurrected in response to an invitation offered today to ‘keep getting it down’. A new friend invited me to list five interesting things about myself, and another (older- in both senses) friend said that my poetry is written for poets, and he would have me write more accessibly for everyone. All my new South African friends might understand this even more. So here goes.

'And Elgar wrote it down' — ‘And Elgar wrote it down’

You speak our language well enough. Try to be exact.
Talk first of where you come from, what place, what climate of sun,
corn of rattling monotony, or rows of sweating pineapple; were you near a beach?

Let us begin at the beginning.

The drum of Africa rolls incessant, a barrel under the feet. It failed to stop for getting born…
We caught a wind off the Kalahari, which snagged us on barbed wire, the shred of a shirt flapping before we hastened on; pioneers are travelling folk, we uitspan where we find ourselves, and mostly for one night…

Very well. What manner of people suckled you? Taught you to walk? Gave you your prayers at sunset, or maybe brushed your teeth?

Some wore socks and veldschoen, banded khaki hats… kept dried peaches in the pocket, corralled a farm on horseback-, often chewed sweet grass…the labour filed in kaalvoet from distant smoking kraals with babies on their backs and calloused dirty feet. Their rivers flowed over boulders, and washing dried on rock. They walked like ants with purpose, carried heads of firewood, and swept the hills with song…

Your people are known to be obstinate, perhaps I’m being harsh. I realise it wasn’t easy. Did you ever go to school?

I opened up the ant spires, and paced the baobab girth. I saw elephants drunk on maroolas, and hyenas bloody jawed. My horse and I in the mountains alone took turns to cast our shadows…the sort of thing you asked?

I had hoped for something else; the merest suggestion of books. I really want to understand you. I am not trying to be perverse.

Oh books, that’s very easy. Books were candle light, and whizz-bangs, and ghosts in the shadows flickering; leather smelt of sweat. Books were made of promises, improvements in design. Damp Keats eventually caught fire, and hectic Percy Bysshe…lit sparks of inspiration, and subtle Austen flavoured fish…but books were about England, there was African life to live…

I thought you said you were thirsty, and that was why you came. What had fed that appetite, identify the hunger? It’s tethered you here for a reason…It seems reasonable to ask.

Now here we come to the doring bush, the wag’n bietjie thorn. It was you who persuaded us we never could belong. Not unless we learned to hold our crude and wagging tongue. So I came for your opinions, and your moderated views, tempered by your literature, I would learn them if it killed me, and it very nearly has…

There was nothing that you valued? Nothing that enriched? Subtle converse taught you no refinements, brought forth nothing new? Could we have had this conversation if you’d never put on shoes?

Is this a conversation? I had not realised that. We talk to one another. It isn’t the same thing. Yes I learned your language, and I worshipped it at first. I believed it would oil my power to show you other things; the glory of the sugar bright stars, thrown by razor wind, the need to pelt down sand dunes and shout injustice to the sky.. oh yes I leaned refinement, let’s call it constipation and have done…

Now who’s being harsh? Was there nothing that you loved? Nothing that explained your blood, or informed your letters home? Did you take no pictures, or stop before a view…Surely there was something…

That’s the point you dimwit, it was all face value so. I found your country perfect, exactly as expected, not a hair astray. There was a quota of eccentrics, and I loved them, every one. There was always mist on the Malvern Hills and Elgar wrote it down. London was Threadneedle Street, and Horseguards all stood still. It lived up to all its promises, and I gulped it like spring water, and thought that I’d come home. You wrapped me up in literature; words and place, one piece. It’s taken my life to unwrap it, and find instead its vacuum heart, and nothing to write back…

What about the politics you hated, we sheltered you from those…

Oh yes, you’re right, I quite forgot; the constant surveillance, the neighbours who informed, the ninety day detentions, the summary arrests, the banning of so many things, speech among the first…Sorry I’m getting distracted; were those the things you meant?

You draw a false analogy, we don’t do it the same way, your comparisons are facile, nobody here protests. We accept when things are necessary, and we have after all the freedom of our Press…

To spin you like a marionette, too giddy to take heed of the swirling fascist state. Compulsory tolerance is your poison coated pill… you swallow without tasting…At least we knew we were pariahs, and not just because we smoked..

Come come you exaggerate, it really isn’t done. The essential rule you never learned is what makes us what we are; never to speak loudly…or criticise with emphasis or most of all, enthuse. Let me give you some advice, it will serve you everywhere, curtail your indignation, it sits so very ill, make a joke of outrage, keep it well to heel…

Ag ja, my outrage is exhausted, like a cur behind a wagon, snapping at the flies. I know I have nowhere to stand, and nothing left to say. Your literature has tamed me like a mangy lion penned. You are all so very certain about such little things.

High Five! (Narrative Top Picks for the Year)

Blerrie Fockin Beautiful takes the Platteland ( circa 1950) into every Inbox that asks.

An Audio Reading by the Author will be on the site soon but for the moment you can read it here. Good friends advised me to diversify, so I did, in Stories and Reviews.

The original title was ‘Royce Rolls’ and the inversion had its reasons! Hope you will enjoy . Cheers, Prost; Salud, Skal, Gesondheid Jambo,

Nuisance Value.

Story of the Week- this week! Reposted because… Find it here and take like a biscuit on the side.

Nuisance Value is a story that you may think is my own swan song. Or more likely a self-description. It has, rather wonderfully, been selected as a finalist for Magazine’s Spring Story Competition. It is my rather tongue-in-cheek exposure of the heartlessness of petty local government when it has an agenda for which rather poor people are simply in the way, but in this case they win, though rather poignantly.

Sole and Soul Comfort for the heroes of Nuisance Value

It dogs the heels of its companion ‘Blerrie Fockin Beautiful which TODAY has been selected as on of the five top stories of the year (2013-2014) and will be published by Narrative as an audio (read by yours truly with full-throated tobacco effects hopefully edited out!) Watch this space for links in due course.

Just a small celebration.

Delusions- An Irreverent Demolition

Delusions- Pragmatic Realism by Stanislaw Kapuscinski.. Sounds heavy, travels light but does as much damage as a wrecking ball.

Product Details

Deciding to review a book is like being a hotel receptionist in Monaco. Your recommendations are expected to be impartial but with the dullness of uniform options you steer your guests towards the hidden restaurant you fortuitously discovered. You hope they will unfold their napkins and enjoy it as much as you did. This book, the chef claims, was inspired by Richard Dawkins’ ‘The God Delusion’. He may well have observed the famous atheist in the polished steel kitchens of the Royal Society, cooking up traditional fare, steak and kidney pudding, shepherds pie, boiled mutton with gene caper sauce, knowing the palates of his readers will be satisfied with what they had expected, solid and kind to the digestion. Honestly presented certainly, but then the chef has become famous for that, no dressing things up with persuasive parsley. No foreign muck.

In contrast, the author of Delusions, Stanislaw Kapuściński, improvising in a beach shack, has produced a smorgasbord of samples, surrounded by heaps of bright chillies, unusual spotted gourds, sparkling sea salt, freshly slaughtered cows…Read more Continue reading “Delusions- An Irreverent Demolition”

A Poetic Definition of Love?

An unexpected visitor to my ‘other blog’ pulled out this post I had forgotten. Like visiting the drawer I had not opened for a year or more.

It seemed worth airing again.

The Poetic Definition of Love?

Originally Posted on November 10, 2012

I have missed Friday! Sorry. Proofing a book to a deadline somehow collapses the passing days. BUT how can anyone ignore the euphoria occasioned by this enquiry?

‘I absolutely love this sonnet. I thought it might be one of Shakespeare’s but it sounds too new. Please tell me who the author is.’

I posted it to a thread on Linked In that asked for ‘Your poetic definition of love?’

Ergo…
If you bequeath me all your dreams unspent
that had their birth beneath the sheeted sky
Once dressed in music, they went penitent
Through gold and gorse, for you walk solitary.
If I can turn a page within your past
and my slow eye peruse your slow delight…
The landscape of your heart has found a mast
to lend perspective to its breadth and height.
I mapped your longing long before you thought
to give account of thirst, or dust or wine
I laid your blooms of hope amidst the grass of doubt
I spread your pasture, I reseeded time.
What can I know but what I recognise?
You are myself and yours are my own eyes.

On Easy Street? (In Medias Res)

With the plethora of good advice, from grammatical niceties to beat sheets, from POV to first versus third person, none of it helps me at this moment. I am struggling with the whole damn fangle of a book that will insist on escaping from enclosure between covers. Rather like trying to bury a corpse that thinks it has a veto when it comes to incarceration.

But my good husband who only reads-and re-reads- the classics sometimes has his uses. He thought after much dinner table discussion of the stray hairs and neglected detail, that this perhaps might help me, and insisted on reading it aloud over post-prandial wine. For once he was spot on. I thought there may be others for whom this high vantage perspective might prove useful.

A flourish of authority-Anthony Trollope.

“In Medias Res”

Perhaps the method of rushing at once “in medias res” is, of all the ways of beginning a story, or a separate branch of a story, the least objectionable. The reader is made to think that the gold lies so near the surface that he will be required to take very little trouble in digging for it. And the writer is enabled,— at any rate for a time, and till his neck has become, as it were, warm to the collar,— to throw off from him the difficulties and dangers, the tedium and prolixity, of description. This rushing “in medias res” has doubtless the charm of ease. “Certainly, when I threw her from the garret window to the stony pavement below, I did not anticipate that she would fall so far without injury to life or limb.” When a story has been begun after this fashion, without any prelude, without description of the garret or of the pavement, or of the lady thrown, or of the speaker, a great amount of trouble seems to have been saved.

The mind of the reader fills up the blanks,— if erroneously, still satisfactorily. He knows, at least, that the heroine has encountered a terrible danger, and has escaped from it with almost incredible good fortune; that the demon of the piece is a bold demon, not ashamed to speak of his own iniquity, and that the heroine and the demon are so far united that they have been in a garret together. But there is the drawback on the system,— that it is almost impossible to avoid the necessity of doing, sooner or later, that which would naturally be done at first. It answers, perhaps, for half-a-dozen chapters;— and to carry the reader pleasantly for half-a-dozen chapters is a great matter!— but after that a certain nebulous darkness gradually seems to envelope the characters and the incidents. “Is all this going on in the country, or is it in town,—or perhaps in the Colonies? How old was she? Was she tall? Is she fair? Is she heroine-like in her form and gait? And, after all, how high was the garret window?” I have always found that the details would insist on being told at last, and that by rushing “in medias res” I was simply presenting the cart before the horse . But as readers like the cart the best, I will do it once again,— trying it only for a branch of my story ,— and will endeavour to let as little as possible of the horse be seen afterwards.

Extract from Trollope’s ‘The Duke’s Children’ Chapter Nine.

I bow to the Master and bid you adieu.

Blerrie Fockin’ Beautiful: Narrative Magazine Story of the Week

Blerrie Fockin’ Beautiful has been selected as this week’s Story of the Week in Narrative Magazine. They have rendered it beautifully.

Set in the Apartheid era, circa 1950’s on a Platteland farm near Pretoria, it tells a biblical tale of pride and retribution. An audio on Narrative is scheduled soon. Recovering it made me homesick.