Sing Me a Song of History: South African Poets and Singers in Exile, 1900–1990
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Sing Me a Song of History: South African Poets and Singers in Exile, 1900–1990 Marian De Saxe A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Sydney 2010 Abstract In this thesis I argue that poetry, for the South African poets and singers in exile in the period 1900–1990, was a highly symbolic agent which crossed the divide between verbal discourse and poetic form. Poetry embodied altruistic gestures and trusted encounters which became social agencies of change, reconciliation and hope due to historical exigencies, political imperatives and individual courage and sacrifices. By naming the condition of exile within literary representations of movement, travel and the diaspora, I am asking whether poetic representations of the South African exile validates a positioning of exiles‘ literary archives as a late modernist, ontological concern. I propose that this poetry, exilic poetry, intersects at all times with an altruistic intent that reinvigorates our ideas of humanism or humanisms. I consider the development and relevance of literary theories in South Africa and ruminate on the prose of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Paul Gilroy and Jacques Derrida in relation to the role of poetry in politics. By placing geo- and indeed bio-politics in our frame, we can comprehend the meaning of apartheid in terms of multiple philosophical positions which privilege the major disruptions, the main ―isms‖ of our time: colonialism, humanism and the body politics that have arisen as a result of immense conflict. Apartheid was one such disruption, the after-effects of which are still new as South African histories are being torn apart and rewritten. Through all this, the poets talking to the people rewrote and wrote histories which we are still reading and writing. My thesis has considered whether there were specificities about South African exile which are revealed by looking at the relationship of poetry to exile. I have argued that these poems fall between the real and the imagined as trusted encounters, not as stories. Ultimately exiled writers and singers found the ecstasy of life in their poems or songs and in the fact of being alive, and in this sense they retained a sense of intense individuality despite their collective purpose. There is still much work to be done on the cultural mobility and transculturation that infuses these works with such a rich sense of altruistic, historical purpose. Statement of Originality and Ethics Approval The work presented in this thesis is, to the best of my knowledge and belief, my own original work except as otherwise acknowledged in the text and notes. This thesis has not, in part or whole, previously been presented for a degree at this or any other institute of learning. The University of Sydney Human Ethics Committee approved the protocol of interviewing participants for the purpose of this thesis over a five year period. Jeremy Cronin consented to being identified and his interview is included in this thesis. Marian De Saxe 30th November 2010 This history Sing me A song of history A tune or melody From the ephemera Of words and worlds Trapped Somewhere between The real and the imagined. Let it flow From the work Of the plodders And the warriors Across guarded Borders Of flight and anger, Composed by those Who would not cry. Remind me I resonate If only As a representation Of some thought From long ago. And if In me You find The heart’s ground Made solid By this recurring Displacement Of soul from soil Then sing again This history Let memory Run free. Contents Preface and Acknowledgements vi 1 Belonging to Exile 1 I Was All Things: A History of Exile Poetry, Memory and Exile No Address: Theories of Exile 2 The Heart of Exile 32 The Story of a South African Exile To Remind the Living South African Exilic Poetry and Song 3 Trusted Encounters 58 Exile and Humanism Politics and Poetry Derrida and Shelley Forgiveness and Altruism Ubuntu and Poetic Humanism 4 Language in Exile: Between the Real and the Imagined 83 The Ecstasy of Being Alive Encounters with Violence Debating South Africa‘s Poetic Histories Writing South African Literary Identities Language in Exile 5 A Constellation of Histories 114 Education in Exile Human Rights in Exile South African Influences on Rights Discourse 6 Poets to the People 152 Planting Hope in Stealth Prejudicial to the Safety of the State 7 Write into the Night 186 Es‘kia (Ezekiel) Mphahlele: Coming Home The Melancholy Resistance of Arthur Nortje Jeremy Cronin: Poet Politician Vincent Swart and David Fram: An East African Encounter Dennis Brutus in Defence of Poetry An Altruistic Gaze: the Poetry of Breyten Breytenbach Mazisi Kunene: Keeper of the People‘s Symbols The Exiles of Ingrid Jonker and Bessie Head 8 Singing a Way Out of Exile 259 The Travelling Metaphor of Belonging Politics and Song: The Poetics of Connection Becoming Our Histories: What Can Songs Do in the Face of Death? Epilogue: Sing Me a Song of History 290 Bibliography 296 ii In a sense this book is a collective epic. If it is read carefully, there is a story to it, a unity of growth and composition, facets of a single people.1 1 Tim Couzens and Essop Patel, ―Introduction,‖ in The Return of the Amasi Bird, eds. Tim Couzens and Essop Patel (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1982), 14. Preface and Acknowledgments My own empirical attitude toward experience tells me that as a South African product I have to attend more urgently and first to the defence of human dignity. Es‘kia Mphahlele, Voices in the Whirlwind and Other Essays Making choices in our lives is one of the characteristics which make us human beings, and choice remains with us even as we face death at the hands of torturers – the choice to submit or to die in dignity. I have had to learn that the courage to take risks is not given to all of us. Mamphela Ramphele, A Life But these broken sentences stumble to heaven on the hill despite the man with the whip who beats my emaciated words back They die, but at last get us all together as a vision incontrovertible, take me as evidence. Arthur Nortje, ―Poem: South African‖ Preface It is tempting to suggest that this thesis is a personal expression of nostalgia for the words of my compatriots whose poetry and song accompanied me from country to country on my own trek around the world. The personal infuses both the political action and poetic form of South African poets and singers in exile during the period 1900 to 1990. A multitude of African poetics has populated the constantly shifting maps of Africa throughout the twentieth-century and has inhabited the history of South Africa‘s literary cultures with words of hope which have flourished in and out of South Africa in a hybrid synergy against hegemonic dominance and the language and structures of apartheid. Poetry has always been a vibrant, energetic and important aspect of South Africa‘s cultural production and memory, a high-point of modernist representation and an inescapable adjunct of the escape from, the movement towards, and invention of, language and identity, defiant and defining, running from or to exile by engagement with distinctive, developing and shifting literary palimpsests, layering meanings of memory on relationships with words, people and history. South African poetry rests in the mine, the campus, the workplace, newspapers, vi journals, the web, slim volumes, anthologies, tiny rooms or cells or elsewhere, the elsewhere relying on an audience to acknowledge the act (Shelley), the track (de Certeau), the trace (Derrida) and the train2 (Masekela) that trundles homewards to the poem or the place or the person or people. Embodied in ideas of home are the hopeful social agencies of creation, transformation, reconciliation and imagination. In apartheid South Africa the African National Congress (henceforth ANC) invested particular political agency in the production of poetry; however, many writers3 have proposed a broader notion of poetry pre-1990 as peopled, as communal, as travelling companions shifting in space and time incorporating African-Anglo, African-American and European influences to reach a point, as John Matshikiza wrote, where ―I continue to move. My African exile has taught me that I am more than a South African . Somehow you find a way to stitch the textures of home and exile together.‖4 Privileging the poet‘s critical awareness of the communal as a trope in the poetry of South African exiles embeds (whether as a positive or negative force) the much contested, grand projects of humanism/s into the poetry considered in this thesis. Rob Gaylard‘s contention that ―the hope of constructing a democratic and caring society in South Africa‖ (I would add and elsewhere) ―depends in part on a belief in a common or shared humanity to which one can appeal‖5 is the vexed question with which we must constantly grapple; whether we can or should locate a common ground and if so, what that might be. There are many literary publications devoted specifically to creating dialogues between cultures.6 Usually ongoing impasses resulting from political issues challenge us to consider this question, as do the metaphors of home and displacement which dog our creative and critical writings stemming from and reverberating back to the political dimension. Apartheid (indeed many systems of indiscriminate domination) produced a legacy of violence which became a potent symbol of a past in which legislated and 2 ―The train has always been a symbol of [loss] … the train was South Africa‘s first tragedy,‖ said Hugh Masekela in Amandla! A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony, dir.