Re-Imagining Love and Intimacy in the Poetry of Gabeba Baderoon, Ingrid De Kok, and Makhosazana Xaba
Jenny Bozena Du Preez
Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree Magister Artium in the Faculty of Arts at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University
January 2014
Supervisor: Professor Mary West
Contents i. Acknowledgements ii. Abstract
I. Introduction 1
1. Chapter One: Gabeba Baderoon – „Silences, Secrets, Fragments‟ 1.1. Introduction 10 1.2. Avoiding Sex as Spectacle in ―The Dream in the Next Body‖ 12 1.3. The Sensual in ―Cinnamon‖ 17 1.4. Traces of Intimacy in ―Finding You‖ 21 1.5. Acknowledging the Ex-Lover in ―Old photographs‖ 25 1.6. Reading Absence in ―Today she is not here‖ 29 1.7. Moments in Marriage: ―The night before we married‖ and ―Primal scene‖ 33 1.8. Conclusion 38
2. Chapter Two: Ingrid de Kok – „The Delicious Fiction, Love‟ 2.1. Introduction 39 2.2. Re-Thinking ‗Lack‘ in ―Woman in the glass‖ 41 2.3. Sex in the Sillier Body in ―To a would-be lover‖ 47 2.4. Critiquing Clichéd ―Words of love‖ 51 2.5. Re-Imagining Photographic Representation in ―Woman, leaning away‖ 55 2.6. Writing the Aging Body in ―After forty‖ 60 2.7. Re-Writing the ―Aubade‖ 64 2.8. An Impression of Intimacy in ―Brush stroke‖ 68 2.9. Conclusion 72
3. Chapter Three: Makhosazana Xaba - „Revolution in Poetic Language‟ 3.1. Introduction 74 3.2. The Stark Reality of Rape in ―The silence of a lifetime‖ 76 3.3. Reclaiming the Gaze in ―Your eyes‖ 82 3.4. Metaphors of Land and Water in ―Solitary cloud‖ 87 3.5. Imagery and Imagination in ―The brown pelican‖ 93 3.6. Re-Writing Romantic Clichés in ―Soul-mating‖ 97
3.7. The Semiotic in ―Love poem for my writing group‖ 102 3.8. Challenging the Symbolic Order in ―Waking up‖ 107 3.9. Conclusion 111
4. Conclusion 112
5. Bibliography 114
6. Addendum 6.1. Gabeba Baderoon ―The Dream in the Next Body‖ i ―The Machine‖ ii ―the country after midnight‖ iii ―True‖ iv ―Cinnamon‖ v ―Finding You‖ v ―Morning like Dusk‖ vi ―Old photographs‖ vii ―Today she is not here‖ viii ―The night before we married‖ ix ―Primal scene‖ ix
6.2. Ingrid de Kok ―Woman in the glass‖ x ―To a would-be lover‖ xi ―Words of love‖ xii ―Woman, leaning away‖ xiii ―After forty‖ xiv ―Aubade‖ xiv ―Brush stroke‖ xv ―Night space‖ xv ―Inner note‖ xvi
6.3. John Donne ―The Sun Rising‖ xvii
6.4. Antjie Krog ―how do you say this‖ xviii
6.5. Makhosazana Xaba ―So‖ xix ―And the game plays on‖ xx ―Dignity spills‖ xxi-xxii ―The silence of a lifetime‖ xxiii-xxv ―Your eyes‖ xxvi ―Solitary cloud‖ xxvii ―While I wait‖ xxviii ―The brown pelican‖ xxix ―Tear essence‖ xxx ―Soul-mating‖ xxx ―Flowering rot‖ xxxi ―Heart surgery‖ xxxii ―these hands‖ xxxiii ―Love poem for my writing group‖ xxxiii ―Waking up‖ xxxiv
i. Acknowledgements
Thank you to my supervisor, Mary West, for all her guidance and support, and for lending me what must be half her private library. Thanks also to all the lecturers in the English Literature Department for the roles they have played in my education, and special thanks to Sisi Maqagi for introducing me to the poetry of Makhosazana Xaba. To all my friends, thank you for being there to listen, particularly Anne Pabel for commiserating with me and for always believing that I could do this. And, of course, thank you to my family for everything they have done and continue to do. Special thanks to my mother, for always being interested, for listening to my rants and ramblings and for calmly encouraging me to keep on going.
ii. Abstract This dissertation explores the ways in which the poetry of Gabeba Baderoon, Ingrid de Kok and Makhosazana Xaba challenge the sexist discourses that allow for the exploitation of women‘s bodies. It will also examine how they re-imagine the script1 of heterosexual romantic love which places women in a submissive position and closes down possibilities for human connections which do not fit within the narrow strictures of this notion of love. The poems selected come from Baderoon‘s two collections, The Dream in the Next Body (2005) and A Hundred Silences (2006), an anthology of Ingrid de Kok‘s poetry spanning all her previous collections entitled Seasonal Fires: New and Selected Poems (2006), and Makhosazana‘s Xaba‘s first poetry collection, These Hands (2005). All three of these contemporary, South African, woman poets present critiques of the sexual exploitation of women and offer explorations of romantic love, relationships and sexual intimacy alternative to contemporary, patriarchal heteronormativity. This analysis will take cognizance of the influence of apartheid and colonial history on the formation of gender politics. It will also examine the representation of women as sexual objects and the spectacularized and graphic depictions of sex and how these poets can be seen to re- present women and re-script sex. Whilst Baderoon and De Kok are concerned with re-imagining heterosexual romantic love and sexual intimacy, their rethinking of love can also be read as useful in engaging with ‗queer‘2 sexuality and romantic love outside of the heterosexual norm along with Xaba, who is concerned with lesbian desire. Finally, all three poets experiment with traditional poetic form and techniques and it is through this experimentation with poetic language, and the employment of what Julia Kristeva calls the semiotic, that these poets are able to re-imagine love and intimacy. Thus they might be said, to use Kristeva‘s phrase, to stage a ‗revolution in poetic language‘.
1 A script is generally known as the ―text of [a] play, film, etc.‖ (Sykes 1977) and is used by gender theorists to describe the discourses surrounding romantic love in order to imply that, like a play or film, heterosexual romantic love is always-already written for us and comes with certain expectations, actions, dialogue (‗I love you‘) and compulsory plots (marriage) that must be adhered to if our ‗love‘ is to be considered acceptable by society.
2 I use ‗queer‘ here in the same way as Ninna Edgardh does in her article ―Difference and Desire – a Queer Reading‖ (2009), that is, to stand ―primarily for that which is different and breaks away from the norm‖ as well as ―highlighting the deviation from the norm itself‖ (2009: 43). Thus, while ‗queer‘ sexuality or ‗queer‘ gender usually refers to homosexuality or any kind of identification outside of heterosexuality, ‗queer‘ also encompasses heterosexuality that is lived out in ways that defy the norm.
Keywords
Gabeba Baderoon Ingrid de Kok Makhosazana Xaba Romantic love Sexual intimacy Heteronormativity Patriarchal imaginary 1
I. Introduction Pumla Gqola, in her article ―‗Pushing out from the centre‘: (Black) feminist imagination, redefined politics and emergent trends in South African poetry‖ (2009), identifies a ―creative flourishing‖ (1) in South Africa after 2003, one in which poetry, and particularly poetry written and performed by women, is at the forefront. Since women have historically been excluded from the genre of poetry this phenomenon is noteworthy. This exclusion is also apparent in South Africa where, despite there having always been ―women poets writing and/or performing in English even under apartheid, these were rarely well known‖ (2009: 1). However, this burgeoning of women‘s voices in poetry is not reflected in the critical responses of literary theorists, as illustrated by this anecdote related to me via email by Makhosazana Xaba, one of these poets of whom Gqola speaks:
Imagine this scenario in 2007: I approached Pumla angrily asking her why there are no reviews of Black women‘s poetry when there was evidence that Black women were writing poetry like at no other time in our history. Pumla: Who do you think is interested in it? Me: You and others like you. Pumla: Who are those others? Me: I only know you and Sisi [VM Maqagi]. Pumla: That’s it.
This dissertation takes as its subject the poetry of three South African women: Gabeba Baderoon, Ingrid de Kok and Makhosazana Xaba. Both Baderoon and Xaba are identified as forerunners of the movement Gqola describes in her article, while De Kok has been publishing her poetry for quite a bit longer. Both Baderoon and Xaba have not been given the critical attention they deserve and, while De Kok‘s work has been examined in some depth, most of the articles have focused on her overtly political poems about the TRC. Thus, the thematic examined in this dissertation – the representation romantic love and sexual intimacy – has not been analysed in- depth with regards to any of these three poets‘ work. Although there is a dearth of critical work on Baderoon‘s poetry, both her collections have been quite widely reviewed. Harry Garuba notes that Baderoon ―transform[s] the ordinary and the mundane into sources of profound insight‖ (2005: 1) and suggests that she often ―lays claim to tenderness, the joy of physical merging and sensual celebration that extends beyond orthodox or patriarchal narratives of sex, romance and partnership‖ (2005: 3). This is particularly apparent, as I will argue, in her poems ―The Dream in the Next Body‖3 (2005: 33) and
3 For poem titles I have used the same punctuation employed in the poetry collections. 2
―Cinnamon‖ (2005: 17). Kay Benno also finds that, in Baderoon‘s poetry, ―[t]he mundane and the profound are indistinguishable‖ (2005: 61) and Dan Wylie, like Gqola, notes a concern ―with the tenuousness of personal relationships‖ (2007: 164) rather than the overtly political aspects of South African life. I examine how Baderoon employs silences, absences and fragments to carefully trace the shapes of these personal relationships and the intimacies that can found within them, creating a series of moments which subvert the notion of One True Love. Ingrid de Kok has received a great deal more critical attention than the other two poets, possibly because she has been writing and publishing for longer. Many of the articles written about her work are concerned with her poems about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.4 In his review of De Kok‘s Terrestrial Things, Simon Lewis notes De Kok‘s ―response to apartheid atrocities‖ and how, ―related to the… TRC, and AIDS, De Kok confronts the near- impossibility of making sense‖, but he also lauds the less ‗spectacular‘ of De Kok‘s poetry, noting that it is here that she ―is at her challenging best, poking and prodding at the individual life to see how in the midst of public turmoil one can hang onto the personal‖ (2002). In a review of De Kok‘s collection, Other Signs, Kylie Thomas notes that De Kok ―has used poetry to move us towards imagining ourselves anew, fusing the public and the private, forging and claiming a space for poetic-political intervention‖ (2011) as well as ―hon[ing] in on the particular, subjecting the texture of the everyday world to close scrutiny‖ (2011). In this dissertation I argue that De Kok is concerned, not only with re-imagining the political as it relates to South Africa‘s past and present, but also in acknowledging the political aspects of love and sex and using poetry in order to imagine romantic love and sexual intimacy anew. The poems chosen for analysis were originally published in De Kok‘s first two collections, Familiar Ground (1988) and Transfer (1997), as it is in these collections that the themes of romantic love and sexual intimacy are most prominent. Xaba is a lot less widely reviewed. Her latest collection, Tongues of their Mothers (2008), has not received much attention. It is only Loleba Molema‘s review of These Hands (2005) that contains some critical engagement with Xaba‘s poetry. She identifies These Hands as a collection of love poems, dealing with the love of parents, children, country, ―comrades in struggle‖ (2005: 153) as well as ―the love of a woman for a man, and the love of a woman for a woman‖ (2005:
4 Susan Spearey focuses specifically on De Kok‘s 'A room full of questions‘, ―the second section of Terrestrial Things, [which] consists of a sequence of twelve poems that respond directly to the Human Rights Violations and Amnesty hearing of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission‖ (2008: 2). Sam Durrant‘s article, ―The Invention of Mourning in Post-Apartheid Literature‖ (2005), is also concerned with De Kok‘s engagement with the TRC and how she and other post-apartheid writers invent ―new forms of both mourning and community, offering alternative times and spaces for the expression of grief‖ (2005: 441), while Sam Radithlalo uses a selection of her poems in Terrestrial Things to explore the difficulties of translation, such as the post-traumatic stress experienced by the translators, in relation to TRC proceedings.
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153). She argues that in Xaba‘s poetry, ―[a]ll these forms of love are presented from the perspective of [a woman writer] for whom erotic experience and human life are inseparable‖ and that ―[t]his perspective is nothing short of revolutionary‖ (2005: 153). I take this as a point of departure for a more in-depth study of how Xaba explores erotic intimacy within her poetry and how this representation of love and sex, and the poetic language she employs, might be read as revolutionary. The poems analysed are taken solely from These Hands (2005). Although Tongues of their Mothers (2008) also contains a few poems which deal with romantic love and sex, these themes are less prominent than in Xaba‘s first collection. Thus, running like a thread through the work of all three of these poets is a focus on the personal, especially the particularly personal realm of love and intimacy. This aspect of their writing can be seen to result from women‘s historical exclusion from the male realm of the public and the so-called ‗political‘. Susan Friedman, in her seminal article ―When a ‗Long‘ Poem is a ‗Big‘ Poem: Self-authorizing Strategies in Women‘s Twentieth-Century ‗Long Poems‘‖ (1997), argues that in order to ―reclaim ‗history‘, women poets have re-defined it by breaking down the barriers between the ‗public‘ and the ‗private‘, the ‗political‘ and the ‗personal‘ – they have historicized the personal and personalized the historical‖ (727).5 By writing about those things generally considered to be unimportant in the patriarchal imaginary, women poets, such as Baderoon, De Kok and Xaba, subvert the inherited patriarchal order which attempts to push women and ‗feminine‘ concerns to the margins. Baderoon herself describes, in an interview with Amatoritsero Ede for Sentinel Poetry Online, the ways in which poets are often censored:
Don‘t be diverted by love, beauty, pleasure, people say. Write about this, and write like that. If as writers we listened to these demands, we‘d never reinvent ourselves and create in art the new realities that we are living. (2005: 15)
All three of the poets discussed in this dissertation allow themselves to be distracted ―by love, beauty and pleasure‖ (2005: 15) and it is in writing about these things that they engage politically with patriarchal and heterosexist discourse. Specifically, this dissertation is concerned with how they re-imagine love and intimacy, particularly romantic love and sexual intimacy. Through writing about these supposed ‗diversions‘, the poets re-write the damaging and exclusionary conventions which govern how people are allowed to imagine love and sex and thus, in their poetry, they ―create in art the new realities that we are living‖ (2005: 15).
5 The phrase ―The Personal is Political‖ seems to have appeared for the first time as the title for a 1969 article by Carol Hanisch where she argues that ―personal problems are political problems‖ (2006: 4).
4
The importance of re-imagining these kinds of romantic ‗scripts‘ is most readily apparent, according to Gqola, in ―the highly circulated status of South Africa‘s gender based violence and other public hostilities to women‖ (2009: 2). Indeed, although society today might appear to be much more liberal and tolerant of alternative gender and sexual identities, as well as promoting the equality of women, patriarchal heteronormativity is still apparent, although perhaps in a subtler and more insidious form. As Susan Faludi, in her work Backlash: The undeclared war against women (1992), notes, the equality that authorities claim women now have is not actually apparent and there is now a ‗backlash‘ against the feminist movement where women are told that they are unhappy, not because of inequality, but because they have been too concerned with career and such things and have lost out on marriage and motherhood. This ‗backlash‘, ―these so- called female crises have had their origins not in the actual conditions of women‘s lives but in a closed system that starts and ends in the media, popular culture and advertising – and endless feedback loop that perpetuates and exaggerates its own false images of women‖ (1992: 9). Thus, it is within representation that much of the oppression against women is perpetuated, often in a subtle manner that appears to empower women or to have their best interests at heart. Baderoon, De Kok and Xaba, through their poetry, are arguably attempting to find new ways of handling the ‗backlash‘. Their poetry reveals the ways in which women are still exploited and abused by a heterosexist society as well as re-writing the script of romantic love which continues to suggest the submissive position for women. Thus, contemporary society can still be seen to be dominated by patriarchal heteronormativity. It is patriarchal in the sense that men are still seen as dominant, still dominate mainstream forms of representation and are still seen as more human than women. Society is heteronormative in the sense that it is dominated by binary modes of thinking about gender and sexuality. Heteronormative discourse advocates two distinct gender categories, male and female, and elevates man above woman, dictating that man must be the dominant partner in a romantic relationship and woman submissive. Helene Cixous discusses and illustrates this distinction in ―Sorties‖ (1986) where she shows how the male/female binary can be equated with other binary oppositions such as sun/moon, light/darkness and so on. Heteronormativity is also used to describe the bias against homosexual romantic relationships and the refusal to acknowledge lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex6 people as fully human, with desires and identities that are as valid as those who engage in heterosexual relationships and adopt normative
6 Often collectively referred to as the LGBTQI community.
5 gender identities.7 Contemporary patriarchal heteronormativity in South Africa has inherited Victorian notions of sexual purity along with colonial notions of sexuality relating to anxieties about nation and empire, as well as traditional patriarchal practices from pre-colonial times. It might thus be argued that patriarchy and heteronormativity are inherently violent, similarly to racism, in that they are unaccepting of difference and thus allow for the dehumanization of anyone who does not live out their identity in an intelligible manner. Patriarchy and heteronormativity can thus be linked to gender violence and rape, violence against the LGBTQI community, as well as subtler forms of violence such as omission from, or stereotypical portrayals in, various forms of representation. For example, Judith Butler notes that ―those who live outside the conjugal frame… are more or less considered unreal, and their loves and losses less than ‗true‘ loves and ‗true‘ losses‖ (2004: 26-27). The fact that only certain people‘s love is considered to be ‗true‘, and even the fact that love is conceptualized as ‗true‘ and ‗untrue‘, is one of the dominant narratives of romantic love challenged by Baderoon, De Kok and Xaba. Romantic love and sexual intimacy are also often relegated to the realm of the spectacular in representation. Njabulo Ndebele, in his essay, ―The Rediscovery of the Ordinary‖ (1991), explains that the ―spectacular,… preferring exteriority to interiority… establishes a vast sense of presence without offering intimate knowledge‖ (1991: 46). Although Ndebele was writing about the representation of the brutality of the living conditions under apartheid in protest literature, this tendency to reduce life to spectacle is also apparent in depictions of romantic love and sex, particularly in mass media. Spectacular depictions of grand romantic gestures and graphic representations of sexual intimacy can obscure other possibilities of intimacy and connection. Angela Carter, in The Sadeian Woman (2000), deals with the extreme example of this kind of spectacularization: pornography. While her analysis is more careful than Andrea Dworkin‘s ―Pornography: Men Possessing Women‖ (1989), which categorically condemns the violence that Dworkin argues is inherent in pornography, Carter reveals the various problematic and dehumanizing elements of this graphic form of representation. She critiques pornography for its reduction of human beings to their genitals, its removal of sex from its place in ordinary life and the heterosexist way in which it depicts sex: ―man proposes and woman is disposed of, just as she is disposed of in rape‖ (2000: 6). Thus, Carter links the graphic depiction of sex to rape by suggesting that it is similarly dehumanizing. However, she also describes pornography as related to ―marriage and the fictions of romantic love‖ (200: 12) as they all assist ―the process of false universalizing‖ (2000: 12) – the abstraction of people, the loss of the particular. Therefore, there
7 Audre Lorde defines heterosexism, which is an integral part of heteronormativity, as ―[t]he belief in the inherent superiority of one pattern of loving and thereby its right to dominance‖ (1984: 45). 6 is a need to re-imagine the ways in which sex, marriage and romantic love are represented, for it is not so much these elements of humanity in themselves that are damaging, but the ways in which they have been conceptualized. As Audre Lorde argues in her essay, ―Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power‖ (1984), graphic depictions of sex function to suppress ―the power of the erotic‖ because they represent ―the suppression of true feeling‖ (54). Lorde‘s call to reclaim the power of the erotic, to represent sex holistically as both sensation and feeling, is a project which, I will argue, all three poets engage in. The problematic depictions of sex and romantic love are also related to the reduction of woman to fetishized sexual objects. In ―When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision‖, Adrienne Rich, whose seminal essay ―Towards a Politics of Location‖ (1985) is also used in this dissertation, notes that ―there were all these poems about women, written by men‖ and these women were always objectified, ―always beautiful but threatened with the loss of beauty, the loss of youth – the fate worse than death‖ (5). Thus, Rich recognises that it is the visual, aesthetic aspect of women that is promoted. Laura Mulvey, in Visual and Other Pleasures (1989), identifies a similar phenomenon in film, where women are not often depicted as agents in the narrative but rather placed in the ―traditional exhibitionist role… [to be] looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact‖ (1989: 19). Mulvey suggests that one must ―break with normal pleasurable expectations in order to conceive a new language of desire‖ (1989: 16) outside of the clichéd, spectacularized depiction of women as passive sexual objects. All three poets are arguably engaged in conceiving of a new, poetic language of desire, which engenders agency rather than passivity in women and does not resort to their reduction to eroticized image. Luce Irigaray, in ―The Sex Which is Not One‖ (1981), also theorises about how female ―sexuality has always been conceptualized on the basis of masculine parameters‖ (363). Thus, lacking a penis, her sexuality and her self are conceived of in the terms of lack, as a mere receptacle for the male phallus. This argument is used most extensively in relation to De Kok‘s poem, ―Woman in the glass‖, where the poet opposes this supposedly female ‗lack‘ with the assertive voice of the woman speaker. Thus, I argue, De Kok and the other poets reconceptualise women‘s identity and sexuality as Irigaray does – as multiple rather than ‗lacking‘. It is also necessary to re-think how desire and romantic love are structured. In this regard, the work of gender theorist Judith Butler is very useful. In all her work, she advocates a more fluid conceptualisation of gender and desire. In this dissertation, however, it is her work from Undoing Gender (2004), the culmination of Butler‘s seminal contribution to gender theory, which is employed. In her essays ―Besides Oneself: On the Limits of Sexual Autonomy‖ and 7
―Longing for Recognition‖, she suggests alternative ways in which relationships and desire might be conceptualized. Firstly, in ―Besides Oneself‖, she argues that ―we‘re undone by each other‖ (2004: 19), that our interactions with others, specifically in relation to sexual desire, unsettle our sense of bounded self and so open us up to responsibility for the lives of others. Thus, within romantic relationships there is the potential for lives lived more ethically. Secondly, in ―Longing for Recognition‖, she suggests that recognition is not simple, but rather a struggle, ―an ongoing process, one that also poses the risk of destruction‖ (2004: 132). For her, love and recognition are not simple, idealized processes, but rather complex and complicated, constantly interrupted by what she terms ‗destructive thirds‘. It is never, she argues, the idealised ‗dyad‘ in which desire is safely contained between the two and it should be recognised as such. All three of the poets represent romantic encounters as complicated and tenuous. This is particularly evident, as I will argue, in Baderoon‘s ―Old photographs‖ (2006:13) in which the existence of past lovers is not only recognised but fully engaged with and in De Kok‘s ―To a would-be lover‖ (2006: 34-35) , which calls for the celebration of the everyday interruptions of sexual encounters. To engage in such a reconceptualization, as called for by these theorists, it is necessary to write about aspects of love and sex that are ignored, but it is even more fundamentally important to re-imagine how these notions are depicted. That is, to rework the language of the symbolic order and the patriarchal imaginary. The genre of poetry, with its especially creative use of language, density of meaning and the tendency of postmodern poets to employ linguistic experimentation, is perhaps especially suited to the reconceptualization of hegemonic discourses. As Kristeva notes, in ―Revolution in Poetic Language‖ (1999), ―incomprehensible poetry‖ (452) particularly underscores ―the limits of socially useful discourse and attest[s] to what it represses‖ (452). While poetic language imparts meaning and thus signifies in the traditional sense, within poetic language there is, according to Kristeva‘s work in Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (1980), ―a heterogeneousness to meaning and signification‖ due to its use of ―rhythms, intonations, glossalalias‖ which produce ―‗musical‘ but also nonsense effects that destroy not only accepted beliefs and significations, but, in radical experiments, syntax itself‖ (133). The musical qualities of poetry, its exploitation of sounds beyond language, are powerfully subversive. Although this dissertation will offer an interpretation of the poetry selected for analysis, it will also take cognizance of the form of the poems themselves, the language and poetic techniques employed and the employment of what Kristeva calls the semiotic. The semiotic being defined as ―a distinctive mark, trace, index, the premonitory sign, the proof, engraved mark, imprint – in short a distinctiveness admitting of an uncertain and indeterminate articulation because it does not yet refer… or no longer refers… to a signified 8 object‖ (1980: 133). Helene Cixous, ―The Laugh of Medusa‖ (1976), also notes the subversive power of the semiotic, focusing specifically on the sound of laughter. It is in Xaba‘s work that the semiotic aspect of poetry is most apparent, particularly in her extensive use of the sound- based poetic technique of alliteration. She also makes use of the subversive power of women‘s laughter in ―Love poem for my writing group‖ (2005: 27). It is in her poetry, I argue, that the potential for ‗revolution in poetic language‘ is most clearly revealed. While Baderoon, De Kok and Xaba are all South African women poets, they cannot be considered to share precisely the same subjectivities. There are various ways in which one could consider the subjectivity of each of the poets. For example, Baderoon and De Kok are both academics as well as poets while Xaba is a nurse by profession. Likewise, they differ in relation to age, locality and, to some extent, language. However, due to the highly racialised history of this country, it is important to take cognisance of their racial positionalities. Taken together, these three women represent three of the major racial groups made official by the apartheid government: Baderoon being coloured, De Kok white and Xaba black. Race has implications in a discussion of female sexuality as colonialism and colonial discourse altered the ways in which gender and sexuality were imagined. The introduction to Women Writing Africa: The Southern Region suggests the following: ―In colonies, where the concept of femininity was often harnessed to the discourses of empire and nationalism‖ concerns with racial purity led to an obsession with notions of white ―feminine purity‖ (2003: 32), while black women ―were depicted in literature, medical discourse, and art as excessively and aberrantly sexual‖ (2003: 11-12). Furthermore, this colonial discourse influenced the ways in which women and land were represented, resulting in the problematic use of the metaphor of land as woman‘s body, as discussed by Alison Blunt in Writing Women and Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies (1994) and Grace Musila in Embodying Experience and Agency in Yvonne Vera‘s Without a Name and Butterfly Burning (2007), which is rewritten by Xaba in her poem ―Solitary cloud‖. Due to ―gender‘s deep implications in the violence of colonial relations… white and black women were ‗tethered to‘ one another rather than simply opposed…, but in a fraught and profoundly ambiguous way‖ (2003: 32). The fact that all three of these poets reveal similar concerns with regard to gender issues and the re-imagination of romantic love suggests that the hegemony of patriarchy and clichéd discourses of romantic love affect women of all races, but their differences might mean that they re-negotiate love and intimacy in different ways. Another aspect to be considered, specifically since this dissertation is concerned with heteronormative representations of sex, is the sexual identity and gender identities of the lovers represented in the poems analysed. In their poetry, both Baderoon and De Kok, if they mention 9 the genders of the people involved, appear to refer to heterosexual couplings. However, the genders of the lovers are rarely foregrounded and much of their poetry eschews gendered pronouns altogether in favour of the personal, gender-neutral pronouns of ‗you‘, ‗I‘ and ‗we‘. Xaba also often employs a similar technique. However, many of her poems, like ―Waking up‖ and ―Solitary cloud‖ (2005: 28), deliberately emphasise the fact that the female speaker is in love with another woman. In this way, she writes against the historical exclusion of lesbian love and desire from representation. Ultimately, this project aims to demonstrate the necessity of finding a new language of desire and, through the analysis of the poetry of Baderoon, De Kok and Xaba, to examine how new kinds of poetic forms can subvert the inequality of certain aspects of gender and power relations which we have inherited. The poetry selected is a radical re-writing of sex, gender and the romantic script and, as I hope to show, offers what Kristeva might call a ‗revolution in poetic language‘. 10
Chapter 1: Gabeba Baderoon – „Silences, Secrets, Fragments‟ 1.1. Introduction In an interview with Amatoritsero Ede for Sentinel Poetry Online, Gabeba Baderoon talks about the expectations that come with being a Black,8 female poet writing in post-apartheid South Africa. She explains that she has been criticized for not writing overtly about gender violence, racial prejudice and the horrors of apartheid; in other words, criticized for not being political enough. Baderoon‘s response is to re-define the term ‗political‘:
I write deeply political poems, though perhaps my definition of politics is broader than might be expected. Politics for me means to see the wholeness of people, their vulnerability, their fractures and their pleasures. It is easier to kill people, to forget them, if you do not know their love stories. (2005)
In her poetry, Baderoon enacts this kind of political endeavour. She politicizes the personal and personalizes the political, relating the ‗big‘ questions about the world to the ‗small‘, intimate, ordinary and everyday aspects of peoples‘ lives. Most specifically, this chapter is concerned with how Baderoon humanizes the people in her poems by writing ―their loves stories‖ (2005). She writes about sexual intimacy, sharing a bed, the parting of lovers, the attempts to find one another and the difficulties and joys of marriage, all in a language that is subtle and suggestive, revealing, through its beauty, the beauty to be found in these moments. The first poem examined in this chapter, ―The Dream in the Next Body‖ (2005: 33), describes the separation of two lovers at dawn and retrospectively recalls the intimacy of the night before. The subject of the poem marks it as the traditional poetic form of the aubade, but Baderoon‘s poem re-writes this form in ―The Dream in the Next Body‖. This section examines the various ways in which Baderoon subverts the conventions of the aubade, specifically in relation to Donne‘s ―The Sun Rising‖. Most particularly, it is argued that the suggestion and juxtaposition of images within Baderoon‘s poem, offer an alternative way of describing sex outside the realm of the objectification of the female body and the graphic depiction of sex. ―Cinnamon‖ (2005: 17) also uses alternative imagery in order to suggest the sensual. The image of cinnamon is unpacked and it is argued that it evokes the spice trade and the history of slavery in the Cape and well as being re-deployed as a means of suggesting the tactile, sensual aspects of sexual intimacy. Baderoon‘s discussion of spices, the slave trade and modes of resistance in relation to these from her article ―The African Oceans – Tracing the Sea as Memory
8 I capitalize ‗Black‘ here, taking my cue from Baderoon herself, while choosing not to capitalize other usages of the appellation when it refers only to the racial category. Baderoon can be seen to reclaim Black as a valuable subjectivity rather than as a symbol of the dehumanization of the majority of South Africa‘s population. 11 of Slavery in South African Literature and Culture‖ (2009) is used in order to unpack the implications of the use of the image of cinnamon in the poem. The next section analyses ―Finding You‖ (2005: 55), which takes as its subject, not sexual intimacy, but the intimacy that comes from sharing one‘s life with another person. The poem is an exploration by the speaker of the absences and presences of her lover in her life, through the traces she finds of him. I examine the ways in which Baderoon plays with absence and presence in the form of the poem as well as how she evokes various forms of representation to suggest how important representation is to how we perceive one another and the connections between ourselves. In this poem, poetry itself is suggested as an important way of finding and making meaning. ―Old photographs‖ (2006: 13) is also concerned with the traces people leave in one another‘s lives, specifically the photographic trace of an ex-lover. Examining the image of a photograph of her lover taken by his ex-lover, which she has chosen to keep, the speaker muses about this past lover. Judith Butler‘s argument from ―Longing for Recognition‖, found in Undoing Gender (2004), that a relationship cannot be dyadic, but is constantly interrupted by ‗destructive thirds‘ is used here and I argue that ―Old photographs‖ depicts the recognition that this is so. Through her imaginative engagement with her lover‘s past and the traces that remain of his past love, the speaker appears to accept that a romantic relationship cannot be hermetically sealed off from the past and from the world and that it is important to acknowledge, rather than ignore, these aspects. This representation of an alternative way of thinking about a romantic relationship can be read against Baderoon‘s critique, in ―Today she is not here‖ (2006:34-35), of the ways in which institutionalised romance, in the form of marriage, can trap women in abusive relationships. The critique in ―Today she is not here‖ pivots on the absence of the abused woman at an engagement party and employs a first person account of someone else‘s experience, whose inability to reveal the motivations of the characters arguably mirrors the detachment and incomprehension of those close to the woman. Finally, having discussed Baderoon‘s critique of a damaging marriage, I move on to examine two brief poems, ―The night before we married‖ (2006: 48) and ―Primal scene‖ (2006: 19). Both discuss aspects of life in relation to marriage, but describe scenes that are normally excluded from mainstream representation. The first poem focuses, rather than on the wedding day, on the night before and presents the fear the two people getting married feel as something worthy of consideration and sympathy. The reasons for this fear are elaborated upon with reference to Angela Carter‘s critique of marriage from The Sadeian Woman (2000). Furthermore, 12 the poem also presents a couple who spend this night of fear with each other – not in bed but in the dining room – in silent solidarity, suggesting that the valuable aspects of marriage – partnership and support – should be celebrated. Furthermore, the wedding is not couched as the doorway to ‗happily-ever-after‘, but rather a very real commitment between two people. ―Primal scene‖ describes an intimate scene between two parents as heard by their child. The description is not explicit, but it suggests sexual intimacy between two long-married people as well as a great enjoyment of each other‘s company. This poem reveals the small, private ways in which people find joy in each other even if they are not the traditional characters within the romantic script. Thus, this poem, as all her others do, suggests that every person is capable of joys and sorrows, of finding intimacy or losing it, and that they should all be recognised as such – as fully human.
1.2. Avoiding Sex as Spectacle in “The Dream in the Next Body” The poem ―The Dream in the Next Body‖ (2005: 33) also lends its title to Baderoon‘s first collection, in which it appears. It takes as its subject the separation of two lovers at dawn after spending the night together. The poem can thus be seen to adopt the poetic form of the aubade. The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Literary Terms (2001) defines an aubade as ―a song or lyric poem lamenting the arrival of dawn to separate two lovers‖ (Baldick 2001: 21). The dictionary also mentions a number of examples, revealing its use by many famous, male, poets, such as ―Chaucer, whose Troilus and Criseyde includes a fine aubade‖ (2001: 21), as well as John Donne, specifically his poem ―The Sun Rising‖, and William Shakespeare, whose play, Romeo and Juliet, includes an aubade. It is thus apparent that the poetical form of the aubade has been extensively and prominently used in the representation of romantic love. Baderoon‘s poem, however, adopts the form in order to subvert it. Specifically, she can be seen to be writing back to Donne‘s ―The Sun Rising‖ through her reference to the old man painting a picture of the sun. Thus, this section will analyse how Baderoon re-writes the conventional romantic script, as it appears in forms of representation such as the ubiquitous aubade. The poem begins at the end of what appears to have been a sexual encounter between two lovers: ―From the end of the bed, I pull/ the sheets back into place‖ (ll.1-2), thus positioning the poem as an aubade, which is generally concerned with the end of sexual intimacy and the return of everyday responsibility in the form of the dawn. The poem then moves on to the description of the old man painting his picture of the sun and only then, in the third stanza, does the speaker reminisce about the experience that disturbed the sheets from their place on the bed: ―When you touched me in a dream,/ your skin an hour ago did not end/ where it joined mine‖ (ll.11-13). The 13 odd placement of ―an hour ago‖ (l.12) results in a deliberately interrupted line, confusing past and present. Furthermore, the run-on line plays with the ―end‖ (l.12); the literal ending of the line and the experience of time. This run-on line resists ending and, coupled with the unusual placement of ―an hour ago‖ suggests an elusiveness; a refusal to abide by the ontological regulations of chronological time which are meant to govern experience. Thus, the sentence structure here creates the sense that the moment of intimacy described spills over into a continuity of experience, that it is not defined by a single experience, such as orgasm. After this, the poem goes on to recount the separation of the lovers (for, no matter the subjective experience of time, everything does come to an end) and then, in the final stanza, in the present tense, to note the traces that still remain, ―the impress/ of [their] bodies‖ (ll.18-19) on the mattress. The erotic experience is thus presented as a memory. In this way, the poem plays with the notion of time and of loss – time moves on in a linear fashion and moments of joy and intimacy necessarily pass. However, by structuring the poem in a non-linear fashion, Baderoon exploits the power of memory in its ability to revive the past. The poet‘s use of the word ―impress‖ (l.18) to describe the hollow left by the lovers‘ bodies in mattress also reinforces the idea of memory. Its usage here is unusual, as the word ‗impress‘ is normally used as a verb meaning to elicit admiration from someone else. Here, however, it is used in its noun form, meaning an imprint, the physical trace of the body that remains. This literal, physical meaning of the word interacts with the idea of an abstract ‗impression‘ – the mental trace left by a physical experience. In this word, the abstract notion of an impression is embodied, intermingling experience and memory in a ―warm hollow‖ (l.19) on the bed. The positioning of this moment as a memory also reinforces the effects of the description of sexual intimacy as a continuity of experience, as it spills over from past to present through the medium of memory. In the life of the mind, experiences are not necessarily ordered chronologically, but rather merge into one another in ways that blur boundaries between the past and the present, the real and the imaginary. The lines between reality and fantasy are also blurred by the fact that the encounter is described as taking place in ―a dream‖ (l.11). While ―dream‖ could refer to ‗it felt like a dream‘ – that is, that the experience was so wonderful that it did not seem as if it were real – it could also mean that the encounter was literally a dream; that the speaker dreamt the events described in stanza three and that, when ―the hardening light parted‖ (l.17) the lovers, it was not dawn light signalling the obligations of a new day, but rather dawn light awakening the speaker and ending the dream in which the lovers are joined together. Even the final ‗evidence‘ of the intimacy experienced is ambiguous. Although the speaker refers to ―the impress‖ (l.18) as being a result of both their bodies, it is only ―a single, warm hollow‖ (l.19). Thus, the images that suggest just 14 how close the lovers were in the night also suggest that they were never really together. This reading suggests the extent to which the erotic is imagined; that it is never purely ‗real‘. The ambiguity about whether the lovers were really together is not meant to suggest that the speaker is delusional. Rather, the poem refuses to elevate physical experience over the imaginative. The experience of connection and harmony is just as powerful whether or not it is purely a dream experience. This also serves, as I will discuss in more detail later, to undermine a tradition of depicting sex graphically – its physical and visual ‗reality‘ the source of its titillating quality. The fact that Baderoon employs the dream as an alternative way of representing sexual intimacy within a poem which functions to represent sexual intimacy in alternative ways, suggests a link between dreams and poetry. This link is apparent in Sigmund Freud‘s ―The Dreamwork‖ from The Interpretation of Dreams (1991), as he explains that a process of condensation takes place in dreams. That is, ―[d]reams are brief, meagre and laconic in comparison with the range and wealth of the dream-thoughts‖ (1991: 383).9 A similar process of condensation occurs in poetry. Poems are brief in comparison with prose, but contain just as much meaning in this condensed form. Since both poetic language and dream language work in the realm of suggestion, implication and connotation rather than denotation, they require a similar type of analysis, one which attempts to find the psychological depth of meaning. What Freud‘s psychoanalysis of dreams offers is a means of finding hidden truths within complex symbolic representation. Thus, by invoking the dream form, Baderoon suggests a reading of the poem that is focused on drawing out the subtle psychological and transcendental aspects of the experience described, rather than on the physical ‗reality‘ of the sex act. Baderoon‘s attempt to write about a sexual encounter with a focus on more than the physical and outside of graphic modes of representation is apparent in the cumulative images of the poem, but specifically in the third stanza, which is most overtly concerned with the lovers‘ connection:
When you touched me in a dream, your skin an hour ago did not end where it joined mine. My body continued the movement of yours. Something flowed between us like birds in a flock. (ll.11-15)
The touch, the joining of skin, their bodies moving together and the flowing of something between them can all be seen to allude to sexual intimacy. However, at no point is this made
9 The use of Freud in reading this poem is suggested by the collection itself, as Baderoon explicitly references Freud in ―The Machine‖ (2005: 26) where she examines his fort da game and in, ―the country after midnight‖ (2005: 35), she mentions Freud‘s notion that ―we plot/ our cities and our adorations/ on an unconscious map‖ (ll.7-9). 15 explicit. This stanza, and indeed the whole poem, relies on suggestion, innuendo and a reading of what is not there. Here, Baderoon employs a kind of synecdoche, ―in which the name of a part is substituted for that of a whole‖ (Baldick 2001: 154), where a single touch is intended to represent the other physical contact involved in a sexual encounter. However, the stanza could also be read, rather than to be describing the act of sex, to be simply describing the sensation of that single touch. To endow a single touch with such significance and to suggest that so much meaning and connection can be transferred through a single moment of physical contact is another way in which Baderoon writes against sex as spectacle. The kinds of graphic sexual depictions in currency in the mass media are concerned with a very limited type of sexual pleasure – that of the interaction of the genitals. However, in ―The Dream in the Next Body‖, the poet describes a single touch as deeply erotic and suggests that it can connect two people as much, if not more, than the interlocking of genitals. Baderoon also phrases intimacy outside of this interlocking of genitals through the final image in the stanza: ―Something flowed/ between us like birds in a flock‖ (ll.14-15). Once again, the poet uses a run-on line which serves to emphasise the content of the line – the meaning of one line flows into another, just as ‗something‘ flows between the lovers. The organic flow of the line reinforces the organic imagery, which suggests, rather than domination and subservience, a rhythmical give-and-take; a harmonious relationship. By likening the flow from one lover to the next to a flock of birds, Baderoon suggests a relationship in which each person is highly sensitive to the other and so their bodies can continue the movement of the other‘s, just as a flock of birds knows when and where to turn so that they can bank in unison. This unison comes to an end, however, with the coming of the dawn. In Donne‘s ―The Sun Rising‖, the sun is personified as a ―[b]usy old fool‖ (l.1 80) because of its bothersome interruption of the sexual connection of the lovers. In Baderoon‘s poem the interruption of the sun is suggested by the interrupting second stanza, which moves from the bed of the lovers to unexpected image of an ―old man‖ (l.3) painting ―a large sun‖ (l.3). As in Donne‘s poem, the image of the sun intrudes into the bed of the lovers, but here it is literally an image of the sun and the interruption is structural. Baderoon‘s use of the image of this old man painting a sun is difficult to make sense of unless it is read against Donne‘s aubade. Instead of personifying the sun as an old man, however, Baderoon links the image of an old man with that of the sun through his painting of it. In this way, the interruption of the dawn is recast. The irritation evident in the denigration of the sun in ―The Sun Rising‖ is replaced with the respect due an old artist. The dawn itself is, rather than bothersome, full of creative possibility. 16
Through the reference to an artist and his depiction of dawn, Baderoon also, arguably, self-reflexively refers to her attempt to find alternative ways of representing sexual intimacy by referencing the painting and the painter. This figure of the artisan, or artist also appears in the very first poem of the collection, ―True‖ (2005: 9-10), as a ―master tiler‖ (l.5 9). ―True‖ seems to suggest that this master tiler has taught the speaker something about the act of creation. In ―The Dream in the Next Body‖, the figure of the painter and his composition of the dawn reveal the power of representation and imagination in composing a life. The ―old man paints a large sun striped/ by clouds of seven blues‖ (ll.3-4). By painting the clouds blue instead of grey, the painter alters their meaning. He merges the colours of the sky in the clouds, taking away their connotations of darkness. In a similar manner, Baderoon re-paints the interruption of dawn in this poem, removing Donne‘s negativity and replacing it with celebration. Donne‘s speaker employs derogatory, hyperbolic rhetoric in order to maintain the supposedly ideal relationship between himself and his lover in bed – a relationship structured ‗dyadically‘. In Undoing Gender (2004), Judith Butler uses this term to describe the idealized, but unrealistic, structure in which desire exists solely between two people engaged within a heterosexual encounter. This concept is discussed in more depth later in this chapter in ―Old photographs‖, but even here Baderoon writes against the simplistic notion of an idealized ‗dyadic‘ relationship by embracing the dawn and separation as part of the composition of a sexual encounter. Furthermore, the colours of the clouds and their relation to one another can be seen to correspond to the theme of sexual intimacy suggested more overtly in the third stanza. Just as the two lovers seem joined together as one during the act of making love, their skin melding, so the different blues used to paint the clouds blend into each other. ―[E]ach/ blue is precisely itself and yet,/ at the point it meets another,/ the eye cannot detect a change‖ (ll.5-8). Baderoon‘s use of the blending of colour as an analogy helps the reader imagine, and thus embrace, the concept of being both intimately connected with another person and yet distinctly separate. She appropriates the language of painting and of colour in order to undermine the binary structure of written language, which relies on something either being one thing or another, never both. Indeed, she offers up a new language of love, one which allows for contradictions and ambiguities – just as it is never clear whether the encounter between the lovers in the poem is a dream or a reality. Thus, cumulatively, the images in the poem oppose the graphic depiction of sexual intimacy which relies on what Angela Carter, in The Sadeian Woman (2000), calls the ―abstraction of human intercourse in which the self is reduced to its formal elements… represented by the probe and the fringed hole… the simplest expression of stark and ineradicable sexual differentiation‖ (4). Here, Carter is specifically referring to pornographic graffiti, a visual 17 medium which relies on this simplification in order to depict sex. Baderoon‘s reference to the visual medium can thus be seen to invoke and then refute the potential of the visual to depict sex in a graphic and reductionist manner. The poem itself serves as a visual depiction of sexual intimacy that not only avoids the oversimplification of ―the probe and the fringe hole‖ (2000: 4), but to avoid any kind of anatomical forms. Indeed, the painting is not so much a representation of sexual intimacy, but an image which can be linked to various aspects of sexual intimacy in order to open up a more nuanced and complex understanding of the intimacy between the lovers. Furthermore, the stark sexual difference highlighted by the images of the probe and the fringed hole is nowhere apparent in the poem. Instead, the poem describes ―the impress‖ (l.18) of the lover‘s bodies, ―a single, warm hollow‖ (l.19). The images within the poem powerfully evoke the sense of sexual intimacy without describing the ‗mechanics‘ of sex, which would reduce it to mere biological function. At the end of the description of his painting, the artist speaks. He says: ―The air shifts… / and the colours‖ (ll.9-10). This might refer to how light alters the way colours are perceived; the way light changes due to the position of the sun in the sky and so human perception of the world is altered. Even sight is not empirically reliable. This little manifesto reflects Baderoon‘s project to write the world in a way that acknowledges the changing ways in which people perceive it. This, in itself, works against graphic depictions of sex, as Carter argues that ―our contemporary ideology of pornography does not encompass the possibility of change… as if sex itself were an external fact, one as immutable as the weather, creating human practice but never part of it‖ (2000: 3-4). Rather, Baderoon suggests that sex is deeply part of our lives, that it is both ordinary and the transcendental, and that our experience of it changes. Sex is in our beds in the morning, in our dreams at night and always in our memories.
1.3. The Sensual in “Cinnamon” ―The Dream in the Next Body‖ is not the only poem of Baderoon‘s which describes a sexual encounter in language and imagery. In his review of The Dream in the Next Body, Harry Garuba identifies ―Cinnamon‖ as one of the poems in which ―the poet lays claim to tenderness, the joy of physical merging and sensual celebration that extends beyond orthodox or patriarchal narratives of sex, romance and partnership‖ (2005). In ―Cinnamon‖ (2005: 17), the poet uses the titular spice as a means of evoking sensations of sexual intimacy in unexpected ways. The poem reads:
I fall outside the warm stole of history. 18
Eyes run down my skin like a single finger.
I find you
open as a tent. You are cinnamon curved around me. (ll.1-9 17)
Although brief, the poem condenses much meaning into the three sentences out of which it is formed. However, due to its brevity, the meaning contained in the poem is not made explicit and so requires active contextualisation and interpretation. This brevity and the reliance in the poem on implication and allusion rather than graphic or explicit depiction is one way in which it avoids exploitative modes of the representation of sexual intimacy, modes which require little imaginative effort on the part of the viewer or reader. Indeed, graphic representation easily allows for sexual objectification, most often of women, and for sexual arousal and gratification without the acknowledgment of another person as fully human and as an active partner in sexual pleasure. ―Cinnamon‖, by its very structure, requires a different approach. The reader is required to imaginatively engage with the images in the poem in order to make sense of it, refusing a superficial reading of the sexual intimacy described. In the first stanza, the speaker/poet explains that she falls ―outside/ the warm stole/ of history‖ (ll.1-3). This suggests that she is in a marginal position, ―outside‖ (l.1) of the ―warm‖ (l.2), comforting centre-position of those who are validated by a racist, sexist History. Baderoon is a coloured woman with Malay heritage, who self-identifies as Black, and it could be these aspects of racial and gender identity, historically denied the same validity as the identity of white man, which result in such exclusion. The image of history as a garment, specifically a stole, reinforces this idea. A stole is worn by a priest during mass in the Catholic Church and so has connotations of ritual. History, here, appears as the carrier of ritualized ways of doing things – the carrier of norms that have become so intrinsically part of life that they are no longer recognised as constructed and are seen merely as ‗normal‘ or ‗natural‘. Furthermore, it is a garment reserved for men – the Catholic Church still denies the right or possibility of women‘s ordination as priests – and so it suggests that the history identified here is one that clothes and comforts a select group, leaving any Others10 outside.
10 I use Other here with regards to its usage in the Self/Other binary of group identification, which is inherently prone to categorise based on inside and outside, centre and margin. In order to define the Self, an Other is required against which to define it. Within a heteronormative, patriarchal and racist society, the Other is not only what the Self is not, but is also woman, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, not white or any other person whose identity is not the norm and so is Other to the white, male, heterosexual Self. In this moment, I use Other to suggest 19
The use of the general term ‗history‘ also raises the question of what specific aspect of history the poem is referring to. I argue that this is not specified because the poem is asking for a reconsideration of all histories, not just the history of South Africa. However, the title of the poem does suggest a specific aspect of history. Entitled, ―Cinnamon‖, the poem evokes the idea of spice and, when read in the context of the poet‘s Malay heritage and childhood in the Cape, suggests the history of the spice trade. The Cape spice trade in South Africa is linked to both colonialism and slavery, specifically in relation to the Malay people. Thus, the title of the poem suggests that it be read against the backdrop of the history of slavery and colonisation in the Cape and the various exploitations of the body that resulted from this. In her essay, ―The African Oceans – Tracing the Sea as Memory of Slavery in South African Literature and Culture‖ (2009) Baderoon examines the Colour Me exhibition by South African artist Berni Searle. ―Colour Me is an installation of photographs of Searle‘s naked body covered in a plenitude of spices‖ (2009: 101) which makes a clear allusion to the ―spice trade in the Cape‖ (2009: 101). In it ―the prone body of the artist appears to re-enact all the conventions of availability that slavery and colonialism had designated for a body such as hers‖ (2009: 101). Searle subverts these conventions by enacting these positions ―so deliberately” that she ―enacts the requirement to-be-looked-at‖ and, thus, her body ―‗gazes back‘‖ (2009: 101). Baderoon, however, subverts the objectification of the Black female body in a different manner. Rather than self-consciously enacting the conventional positions into which these bodies have been placed, she deliberately obscures the sexual encounter that is the subject of ―Cinnamon‖ in order to avoid making the bodies involved ‗available‘ to the reader. The use of the image of a garment, the stole, is the first suggestion that ―Cinnamon‖ might be about sexual intimacy. To fall outside of it suggests removal of clothing. Now naked, the speaker feels ―[e]yes run down [her] skin/ like a single finger‖ (ll.4-5). Here, there is the suggestion of admiration of the naked physical form of the speaker as well as of a gentle caress. Here, the spectacular depiction of sex, so favoured by mainstream forms of representation, is carefully avoided. The bodies of the two lovers are never described except in the most oblique terms. There is skin, and a gaze ―like a single finger‖ (l.5), but the clichéd signifiers of sexual intimacy do not appear. This single finger, recalling the single touch in ―The Dream in the Next Body‖, works in opposition to the ubiquitously graphic depictions of sex which are the staple of the mass media. This opposition to a form of representation that subordinates and dehumanizes one of the participants in the sexual act is also apparent in the third stanza, which is a single line, the difficulty of relating to someone who is ostensibly different to oneself and the one‘s with whom one identifies, as well as the necessity of recognising the humanity in the Other. 20 emphasising: ―I find you‖ (l.6). Here, intimacy is suggested in the culmination of a search that brings two people together. Rather than a pornographic image of domination and submission, this image is reciprocal, mutual, as is the pleasure of this intimacy. The brevity of the line means that ―I‖ is linked to ―you‖ only by the verb ―find‖. The very structure of the sentence brings them together and the verb linking them formulates intimacy as an active engagement rather than as passive submission. The female ‗I‘ is also given the active position in this sentence, countering Carter‘s observation that ―[w]omen do not normally fuck in the active sense‖ (27). While Carter‘s identification of this phenomenon is useful, her language, specifically the use of the expletive ‗fuck‘ to describe sex, stands in contrast to Baderoon‘s gentle depiction of sexual intimacy. Furthermore, Baderoon does not merely invert gender roles, making the woman the active participant and her (probably) male partner submissive. In the sentence following ―I find you/ open as a tent‖ (ll.6-7), Baderoon places the lover in the active position: ―You are cinnamon/ curved around me‖ (ll.8-9; my emphasis). This equality played out in the repetition and variation of the structure of the poem highlights the reciprocity of the encounter. Baderoon‘s destabilisation of traditional gender roles – the female as passive, the male as active – and her careful alterations of the conditions of romantic engagement are also apparent when the speaker finds her lover ―open as a tent‖ (l.7). The idea of openness corresponds with the notions of intimacy and vulnerability but it is also usually associated with the female position in the sexual encounter. Here, there is a subtle reversal of this positioning. Furthermore, the pronouns used in the poem are all gender neutral, highlighting the humanity of the people – ‗I‘ and ‗you‘ – rather than the gender specific. In order to describe the lovers‘ experience, Baderoon evokes four of the five senses: touch, sight, taste and smell. The very first allusion to these senses, however, is in relation to the ―warm stole/ of history‖ (ll.2-3) and thus the sensorial elements are used throughout the entire poem, and not just in relation to sexual intimacy. The second sense that Baderoon evokes is sight, in the gaze of the lover on the speaker‘s skin. This is the sense that is usually exploited in graphic depictions of sex in the visual objectification of women. However, the domination of the male gaze is avoided, firstly by never specifying the genders of the lovers and, secondly, by couching the gaze in the terms of the delicate touch of a ―single finger‖ (l.5). The gaze, here, is not all- encompassing and, although it might be explorative, there is no sense that it is exploring in order to know and control. By describing the gaze in terms of the sense of touch Baderoon employs the technique known as synaesthesia. This is ―a blending or confusion of different kinds of sense- impression, in which one type of sensation is referred to in terms more appropriate to another‖ (Baldick 2001: 254). In this moment, the technique collapses the sense of sight with the sense of 21 touch. One sense is not allowed to dominate another. Thus, the visual aspect of sexual intimacy, so often privileged by visual representation of sex, is comingled with the sense of touch, an aspect which is lost in hyper-visual pornographic representation. The poem evokes the tactile experience of sexual intimacy by describing her lover as ―cinnamon/ curved around [her]‖ (ll.8-9). The verb ―curved‖, suggests physical closeness, the pleasure of flesh against flesh. However, this is not physical intimacy in the sense of phallic penetration; even the word ―curved‖ stands in opposition to the image of an erect penis. Instead, the poem celebrates the pleasure of other aspects of such an encounter. The use of the image of ‗cinnamon‘ evokes the pleasures of smell and taste, pleasures ignored by graphic depictions of sex that cater to the voyeuristic tendencies of the watcher. Baderoon, writing about the subversive potential of the space of the kitchen for slaves notes that it is ―the site of small resistances encoded into tastes, sound, touch, glances, and smells‖ (2009: 99). In a similar manner, Baderoon uses the taste and smell of cinnamon, the gaze on bare skin and the touch of a finger to encode sexual intimacy in manner which resists its exploitation. Carter, describing graphic depictions of sex, argues that they are ―tableaux of falsification [that] remove our sexual life from the world, from tactile experience itself‖ (2000: 9). Through a focus on sensation, on tactile experience, Baderoon avoids relegating sex to the realm of the visual and reclaims its sensual aspect. Finally, the poem seems to suggest the removal of the lovers from the public sphere of History when they engage in lovemaking. That is, the gender norms and colonial conceptualizations of race and sexuality are left behind in favour of the personal. ‗Cinnamon‘ is reclaimed as a sensual delight within the intimate moment of the final stanza. The speaker, excluded from racist, patriarchal history, appears to reclaim a space for herself and another within sexual intimacy. While the history that informs the encounter cannot be erased, as Carter argues ―our flesh arrives to us out of history‖ and although ―[w]e may believe we fuck stripped of social artifice… we are deceived‖ (2000: 9), the poet arguably writes a space where history can be engaged with on the most personal level and can be re-negotiated through the interactions between two lovers. There is thus the suggestion that the renegotiation of racial and gender oppression begins not in a grand, conventionally political way, but within the politics of personal intimacy.
1.4. Traces of Intimacy in “Finding You” In ―Finding You‖ (2005: 55) from Baderoon‘s collection The Dream in the Next Body (2005), the significance of the speaker‘s love for her partner and his impact on her life is explored in a 22 moment of his absence. The title itself suggests this explorative, searching process while also writing against the idea of ‗finding Mr Right‘ or simply finding someone, anyone, so that you are not alone. Instead, the poem is about the intimate process of ―Finding You‖ (my emphasis). By examining her lover‘s belongings and remembering his actions in his absence, the speaker acknowledges the traces he has left in her life, recognising both the importance of their relationship and also the tenuous nature of any interaction, no matter how apparently permanent. The binary distinction between absence and presence is confused by the use of the present tense throughout the poem, even though certain events clearly take place at different times, chronologically speaking. The beginning of the poem establishes the lover‘s absence but then the lover‘s ―sudden, angled smile‖ (l.3) is mentioned and it only becomes clear in the next line that it is ―not here‖ (l.4). The fact that the speaker is counting ―the artist‘s pencils [the lover] grabbed for notes‖ (l.2), initially suggests their presence, though their absence is also established in the final line of the stanza. Thus, the absence of items – and of the lover – becomes something tangible, something that can be quantified, counted. Rather than in presence, it is in absence that the speaker is able to evoke these incredibly real moments of intimacy. The second stanza also confuses absence and presence, placing the speaker‘s observation of piles of gifts, which could occur in the lover‘s absence, within the same stanza as her lover being intrigued by her drawings, an event which would logically have to take place in his presence. It is also worth noting that the speaker constantly addresses her lover, speaking not of ‗he‘ and ‗his‘, but of ―you‖ and ―your‖. Thus, even in the lover‘s absence, the speaker is still engaged in conversation with this person. This confusion between absence and presence and a preoccupation with the traces left behind in absence is also apparent in Baderoon‘s ―Morning like Dusk‖11 (2005: 40) where ―the blanket/ in a tangled heap and the half-drunk tea are all/ signs that you have just left‖ (ll.9-11). The physical traces, the ordinary items like the blanket and the tea, left behind reveal a full life, which is not diminished by the person‘s absence. These traces denote a life that cannot be erased simply by absence and speak to their importance in the world and, specifically, to those who love them enough to observe these traces and to allow the tangible presence of the lover to emerge into the place of absence. There is a refusal here to let absence dominate and thus lessen the significance of the presence of the lover within the speaker‘s life. In ―Finding You‖, the extent to which the lives of the two lovers are entangled is revealed through the mundane and minute detail of ―an envelope addressed‖ (l.11) to the lover on which the speaker ―scribbled a list of groceries‖ (l.12). Physical items, labelled as belonging to one person, are used by the other. Although a shopping list on an envelope is not a particularly
11 ―Morning like Dusk‖ is also, like ―The Dream in the Next Body‖, a re-writing of the poetic form of the aubade. 23 important item, its holds a great deal of significance because it illustrates the intersection of two lives. In this moment, Baderoon employs the most ordinary and minute of details to reveal a deeply felt human connection. She avoids clichéd declarations of Love and instead recognises the easily-overlooked physical evidence of the shopping list which shows, instead of tells, of the interconnectedness of the two lovers. The speaker herself seems to be specifically examining the absence and presence of these mundane items for meaning. She notices ―the slow leak of meanings‖ (l.10) as she observes the absence of her lover‘s smile and the list of her groceries scribbled on the envelope addressed to him. This subtle revelation of what her lover means to her stands in opposition to the grand revelation of Love expected by the traditional romantic script. Instead, there is a gradual realisation of the intimacy and connection between two people as the speaker appreciates the nature of their love through observation of the smallest details of their lives. However, despite the intimacy suggested by this shopping list, the poem also reveals limits to this intimacy. In the second stanza, when the speaker examines the pile of gifts that her lover received she does not ―know/ the names on the cards [he has] received‖ (ll.5-6). There are limits to her knowledge of her lover, as there are limits to anyone‘s knowledge of another person. Indeed, the very fact that her lover is absent at the moment of the poem is part of the reason for this. No matter how in love two people are, their lives only intersect at certain moments, and the rest of their lives are lived apart. This poem reveals a quiet respect for the privacy of another person‘s life, rather than a need to know and control every aspect of the other‘s life. The poem is a celebration of a romantic relationship in which the lovers do not have to constantly be in each other‘s company. The need for the other‘s constant presence in order to maintain the illusion of the perfect ‗dyadic‘ form of desire, which often marks romantic relationships, is absent here. Instead, there is recognition that within the lover‘s absences from the speaker‘s life there are other people, other experiences that the speaker will never fully know. The poem is dominated by imagery that refers to various types of representation. It seems that both the speaker and her absent lover are artists of some sort as he grabs ―artist‘s pencils‖ (l.2) in order to make notes and finds her ―drawings‖ (l.7) intriguing. In this way, Baderoon self- consciously refers to the artistic endeavour. Furthermore, through suggesting that the lovers themselves are artists, there is the implication that the maintenance of a relationship requires some kind of creative invention. The form that this artistic maintenance takes in the poem is the speaker‘s imaginative exploration of the traces of her lover. The poem also references ―the sly beauty of [the lover‘s] books‖ (l.13) and the speaker is described as drinking the words from these books ―like an indiscreet guest‖ (l.15). This image of the ―indiscreet guest‖ (l.15), suggests 24 the speaker‘s hunger to know him. However, this is no carnal desire. The speaker longs to know her lover‘s thoughts, rather than simply to know him physically. In these books, her lover‘s ―thoughts‖ act like ―bookmarks‖ (l.16). Through getting to know the books he owns, the speaker gets to better understand what has informed his thinking. It is knowing this life of the mind, rather than knowing him in bed, that is fundamental to the intimacy between them. However, the attempt to ‗find‘ the lover is not only apparent in the examination of his books, but through the very poem itself. This is suggested in the first two lines of the third stanza: ―As I pace this line, I notice/ the slow leak of meanings‖ (ll.9-10). Here, ‗line‘ can be read as literal – as the path the speaker walks, perhaps through the house she shares with her lover, as she notices the traces of their life together. However, this ‗line‘ can also refer to a line of poetry, suggesting that the speaker is also the poet and it is through the process of writing the poem that the objects she describes reveal their meaning to her. This play on the word ‗line‘ also appears in ―True‖ (2005: 9-10), the first poem in The Dream in the Next Body:
To judge if a line is true, banish the error of parallax. Bring your eye as close as you can to the line itself and follow it. (ll.1-4 9)
Here, Baderoon describes the lessons taught by a ―master tiler‖ (l.5). Although this advice is ostensibly about the art of tiling, it can also be applied to the art of poetry. The idea of following the line in order to judge if it is true – if its meaning is authentic – then appears in ―Finding You‖ where, by following the line, the speaker/poet is able to recognize ―the slow leak of meanings‖ (l.10). Thus, it is through the medium of poetry itself that the speaker is able to recognise the ways in which she and her lover live within each other‘s lives. The final line of the poem, also the final stanza, ―Love is shuffling us like cards‖ (l.17), suggests a lack of control and a lack of knowledge about the outcome of their love. This shuffling motion is reflected in the construction of the poem, where various images, without apparent links between them, appear beside one another. For example, the image of the pile of gifts appears alongside the lover‘s intrigue with the speaker‘s drawings in the second stanza, without any indication as to whether these events are grouped by time or something else not apparent to the reader. The image of shuffling cards suggests randomization, of a movement out of order, movement outside of ‗logic‘. Cards are shuffled in order to create a lack of knowledge about where the cards are in the pack, which is necessary in order that the game begins on a fair basis. In the same way that players in a card game start on equal footing, this card image in the poem suggests that there is equality between the lovers. Neither lover is in control of the ‗game‘. 25
Instead, love is personified as the dealer. There is thus a reworking of the notion of the ‗game of love‘, in which the players are not manipulating each other in order to get what they want out of the relationship. The shuffling of cards also a relationship in which the lovers are still getting to know each other, are still ‗finding‘ each other and have not yet fallen into a familiar routine. Rather, love is a disrupting force, as new and unknown things about the lovers are constantly revealed to one another. ―Finding You‖ is thus a poem about the exploration of a relationship, of what the love between two people means and the extent to which two lives can become entwined. It is a poem about the ways in which people are still present even in absence, through the physical traces that remain and through the memories of the person left behind. Finally, it is a poem about the ways in which representation reveals and shapes these discoveries and how poetry itself can act as a way of illuminating the meaning in the ordinary, the beauty of which might otherwise go unrecognised.
1.5. Acknowledging the Ex-lover in “Old photographs” ―Old photographs‖ (2006: 13), from the Baderoon‘s second collection, A Hundred Silences (2006), takes as its subject an old photograph of the speaker‘s lover taken by the woman with whom he was involved at the time. Through the examination of this visual trace of the lover‘s past, Baderoon explores how relationships are necessarily marked by a past in which the Other is absent and rethinks the typical, exclusionary reaction to this past. The poem opens with the lines: ―On my desk is a photograph of you/ taken by the woman who loved you then‖ (ll.1-2). These lines suggest that the speaker is the woman who loves him now and, thus, it is ‗normal‘ enough that she has a photograph of her lover displayed somewhere close to her. Photographs are often used as a way of keeping a loved one close even in their absence. In fact, Walter Benjamin notes in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935), that ―[t]he cult of remembrance of loved ones, absent or dead, offers a last refuge for the cult value of the picture‖ (6). However, the speaker‘s choice of photograph is less conventional. Instead of choosing a photograph taken by herself or including herself, she has chosen a photograph taken by his former lover – the woman who used to occupy the position in his life that is now hers. By acknowledging a former lover, ―Old photographs‖ can be seen to refuse to recognise one love as ‗truer‘ than another. While one might expect the speaker to elevate her relationship with her lover over the relationship between him and the other woman, because they are no longer together, she does not. Instead, she seems curious about this ex-lover. Romantic 26 narratives often paint the ex-lover as the villain of the tale or ignore her completely. In contrast, in ―Old photographs‖ there is recognition of the former lover as a human being with her own story. She is not merely a minor character in the narrative of the speaker‘s past. The speaker is aware of the traces of this woman in her lover‘s life and, thus, in hers, even keeping this photograph in which ―her body is not that far from [her lover‘s]‖ (l.5). Rather than rejecting the thought of this closeness, there is an acknowledgment of the lover and his past lover‘s physical intimacy. This ex-lover ―is not invisible, not/ my enemy, nor even the past‖ (ll.8-9). There is thus an active refusal on the part of the poem and of the speaker herself to ignore the fact that the man she is with has loved before, a refusal to unfairly stereotype the other woman as ‗villain‘ merely because of who she loved, and a refusal to relegate to the past a love that has left traces in her lover‘s life and her own. The speaker even acknowledges the ‗trueness‘ of the love between her lover and his ex-lover: ―I think I love the things she loved‖ (l.10). In a way, this suggests a kinship with this ‗other woman‘, rather than the required rivalry between women. Thus, the woman stops being the ‗other woman‘ and becomes an integral part of the lives of both the lovers. In this way, the poet offers an alternative to the jealously that is so characteristic of the traditional conceptualization of romantic relationships and how they should function. Thus, in ―Old Photographs‖, romantic love is conceptualized outside of the ‗dyadic‘ structure that is upheld as the ideal in contemporary Western society. As already mentioned, Judith Butler provides useful insight into the ways in which desire is structured in Undoing Gender (2004). She engages with Jessica Benjamin‘s arguments about desire and recognition, with particular regard to the structure of desire as it is reflected in romantic relationships. Both Butler and Benjamin argue against the dyadic structure as a viable form for desire and love. As Butler notes, ―[i]t seems that the dyadic structure, when it is imposed upon gender, comes to assume a gender complementarity that fails to see the rigors at work to keep the ‗dyadic‘ relation reassuringly between those two‖ (2004: 139). If the speaker in ―Old Photographs‖ were to keep her relationship with her lover hermetically sealed off from the past, for example, it would require her to throw away all the old photographs of him and to commit the violent act of representing his past lover as the ―enemy‖ (l.9) or erasing her identity completely by making her ―invisible‖ (l.8). Butler argues that this, often violent, simplification does little to aid an understanding of how desire might truly function. As an alternative to the reductive, dyadic structure, Benjamin suggests a triadic structure. While Butler is not opposed to this concept, she considers Benjamin‘s definition of the ‗third‘ aspect of the relationship of desire as overly ‗happy‘, ―an ideal of transcendence… a reference point for reciprocal desire that exceeds representation‖ (2004: 135). Butler asks: 27
If the ‗third is redefined as the music or harmony of a dialogic encounter, what happens to the other ‗thirds‘? The child who interrupts the encounter, the former lover at the door or on the phone, the past that cannot be reversed, the future that cannot be contained, the unconscious itself as it rides the emergence of unanticipated circumstances? (2004: 145-146)
The speaker in ―Old photographs‖ recognises the possibly destructive ‗thirds‘, specifically ―the former lover‖ and ―the past that cannot be reversed‖ (2004: 146). More than merely recognizing these, the speaker seeks to actively engage with these ‗thirds‘, in order to understand her lover‘s past and to see her own desire for her lover (and his for her) reflected in his past love. She thinks she loves those things that her lover‘s ‗ex‘ loved. That is, she desires ―the Other‘s12 desire‖ (2004: 138) and that Other is not only her present lover, but his past lover. Love is thus depicted as extremely complex, rather than within binary terms which simplify love down to a dyad and ignore all outside factors. Butler suggests that ―part of what it means to ‗recognize‘ the Other is to recognize that he or she comes, of necessity, with a history which does not have oneself at its centre‖ (2004: 146). Certainly, the speaker in ―Old photographs‖ recognizes this, even seeks out evidence of this history. Rather than ignoring her lover‘s past, she looks for the trace of his past lover, seeking out her shadow in the titular photographs. This recognition of another‘s past, Butler argues, is ―part of the humility necessary in all recognition, and part of the recognition that is involved in love‖ (2004: 146). Thus, ―Old photographs‖ can be read as describing a powerful act of love. The way in which the speaker reads the photograph is also marked by tentativeness. She does not prescribe meaning, does not assume she understands what the photograph means or how the photographer and the photographed experienced the captured moment. However, she does attempt to gain meaning from it. Thus, the poem is marked by two questions: ―Did you hold your head that way/ because she loved it?‖ (ll.7-8) and ―Was this the beginning of leaving?‖ (l.15). Furthermore, other than what appears in the photographs and who it was taken by, every other aspect of meaning derived from the photograph is either a question or is prefixed by ―I think‖ (13). The photograph, therefore, cannot be seen to provide definitive meaning, but rather leads to an exploration of meaning, and of the past. Baderoon herself deals with the ways in which photographs create meaning in her essay ―Reading South African Media Representation of Islam after 11 September 2001‖ (2007). She argues that photographs ―[appear] to shimmer and leak, and the relations of the image to the word is never settled‖ (2007: 2). In ―Old photographs‖, the
12 Butler‘s usage of the capitalized Other reveals her awareness that the processes of Othering are dictated to by inherited scripts of normativity even in the most intimate of relationships. 28 words of the poem which ascribe meaning to the image acknowledge that the relation between them is uncertain – that it is merely one interpretation that is not necessarily accurate and will likely change based on who is reading the photograph as well as where, when and in what state of mind they are examining it in. Thus, the poem suggests that an imaginative engagement with a photograph allows for an engagement with multiple meanings and multiple moments outside, but related to, the one ‗captured‘ in the photograph. ―Old photographs‖ also appears to recognise that love is predicated on the possibility, or inevitability, of loss. Butler argues that the recognition of loss should not leave us ―feeling only passive and powerless‖ but should rather return us ―to a sense of human vulnerability, to our collective responsibility for the physical lives of one another‖ (2004: 23). To love, to care about another person, their well-being, their happiness, and to integrate one‘s life into theirs, is to become vulnerable to loss. ―The attempt to foreclose that vulnerability, to banish it, to make ourselves secure at the expense of every other human consideration, is surely to eradicate one of the most important resources from which we must take our bearings and find our way‖ (2004: 23). Baderoon‘s ―Old photographs‖ can be seen to embrace the vulnerability to loss that love causes and to treat it, not as tragedy, but as an integral part of the experience of a loving relationship. In the poem, the particular photograph of the lover is chosen because the speaker sees in it, in the way he is ―starting to turn [his] head a little‖ (l.13) and is ―looking slightly to the side‖ (l.14), what she believes might be ―the beginning of leaving‖ (l.15). Our ideas about romantic love have been so influenced by the will to eternal togetherness that people often fail to take cognisance of the reality that the human experience of love is marked by loss rather than by permanence. The focus on this moment of leaving and the inclusion of the past relationship so centrally in the poem, acknowledges the tenuousness of relationships – that they are not necessarily going to end in happily ever after. Rather than a fixed narrative arc that ends with ‗happily ever after‘, love is suggested to consist of multiple, cyclical narratives, each as important as the other. The clichéd ending for every ‗true‘ love story is undermined, as this poem ends with the ―beginning of leaving‖ (l.15) rather than ‗happily ever after‘. Thus, the poem gives value to the love stories that do not end with marriage, rescuing them from the status of lesser relationships that were only stepping stones on the way to One True Love. Furthermore, rather than embracing the notion of a static, unchanging ever-after as being the path to happiness, the poem rather embraces the notion of change and the possibilities it brings with it, even if those possibilities come with loss.
29
1.6. Reading Absence in “Today she is not here” Baderoon‘s poem in A Hundred Silences (2006), entitled ―Today she is not here‖ (2006:34-35), takes as its subject the absence of a woman at an engagement party. As the poem progresses, it becomes apparent that this woman‘s husband is abusive and it is a particularly brutal beating that has kept her from the party. Similarly to ―Finding You‖, absence is presented as containing meaning – here, the woman‘s absence at the party is what draws attention to her situation. The speaker herself is similarly absent, suggesting the silencing of women on yet another level, while the matter-of-factness of tone reveals the ways in which idiomatic language, specifically the ways in which romantic love and marriage are describe, obscures the truth. The poem is marked by gaps and silences, incompletion and fragmentation and the story comes to the reader piecemeal, through snippets of conversation and partial impressions. The particular collection of fragments results in a poem which refuses to glorify marriage and the illusion of ‗happily-ever- after‘ by juxtaposing an abusive marriage with an engagement party, suggesting the possible, and quite likely, outcome of this supposedly joyous event. The poem begins with a kind of disclaimer from the speaker/poet: ―There are things I cannot tell you/ about beginnings‖ (ll.1-2 34). The ‗I‘ in the poem refutes an omniscient role, highlighting the limits of human knowledge and understanding of the life of another. Furthermore, this is the last time where the speaker appears in the poem and thus point of view is marked by absent presences or present absences. In the case of the abused women she is not there because she is disfigured as a result of a beating and in the case of the speaker she is not there to support the abused woman because she is at the engagement party while the woman is not. The speaker all but disappears into the details as they emerge, a disappearance which announces her complicity. Unable to offer deep insight because of the speaker‘s various limitations, the poem instead offers fragments of information. The poem is put together out of pieces – a definition of an engagement, a description of the engagement party, the fact that one sister is missing from this party, a prediction that she will be there for the wedding, an account of this woman‘s father‘s attempt to get her to leave her husband and, finally, a reassertion that she is absent from the party. The fragmented nature of this poem is emphasised by the frequent use of single lines interspersing the longer stanzas, each single line stanza serving to emphasise the information provided within and thus suggesting the focus of the poem. It is from these fragments of information that the situation, and its cause, is suggested. After stating her limitations in the first two lines, the speaker goes on to define ―an engagement‖ (l.3) as ―an exchange/ of intentions between two people/ and the relation of two 30 families‖ (ll.3-5). This dictionary description of an engagement highlights the legal and familial implications of marriage, rather than the two individuals entering into the agreement – their situation is only revealed two stanzas later. Marriage is not only a contract between two individuals, but the binding together of two families and thus breaking the bond has consequences for an entire community. This draws attention to the fact that the romantic script of the wedding – two people who are madly in love giving themselves to each other – is an illusion. The reality is that marriage is a binding, legal contract rather than a fairytale ending. Indeed, it is a beginning rather than an ending and, in a single line stanza, the speaker identifies it as such, as ―A beginning‖ (l.6). At this point in the poem this assertion seems fairly obvious and innocuous. An engagement is the beginning of a certain kind of relationship between two people and their families. However, as the poem progresses, this ‗beginning‘ begins to seem more ominous. When it is revealed that the absent woman is being beaten by her husband, an engagement is revealed to be the possible beginning of an abusive relationship. Furthermore, the description of the particular engagement party that is the subject of the poem does not seem to promise much better. ―At this engagement party the two young people/ barely look at each other‖ (ll.7-8), suggesting that there is no connection or intimacy between them. The personal benefits of marriage, such as partnership, make no appearance here. The engagement does not seem to be for the benefit of these ―young people‖ (l.7), but rather as a result of pressures put to bear upon them to get married, which overwhelm the personal aspects of partnership. The poet notes that one would ―hardly know‖ (l.8) that the party was for the two people getting engaged ―among the many/ who have come for the food,/ the ritual, the talking‖ (ll.9-11). While the community as a whole benefits from this ritual and from the institution of marriage because of how it neatly orders society, the young people getting engaged are ignored, even dehumanized, for the sake of ‗ritual‘. While the speaker does not suggest that this engagement party is the beginning of another marriage like the one the missing sister is in, there is the suggestion, through the juxtaposition of this engagement party with an abusive marriage, that this ‗beginning‘ could have a tragic result. The stanza describing the engagement party is followed by the observation that ―One sister is missing‖ (l.12). Once again, this is a single line stanza, isolated to emphasise that this fact is significant. The next stanza notes that ―He is usually careful/ not to draw attention like this‖ (ll.13-14). This stanza suggests what is clarified later – that the sister‘s absence is due to her husband‘s abuse – and that this is a regular occurrence. It can be assumed that her husband lost control for some reason and hurt her in some way that cannot be easily covered up. The speaker‘s awareness that the husband usually takes more care suggests that his abusiveness is well known 31 but that, as long as he does not draw attention to it, it is accepted in the community. As long as a façade of a happy marriage is maintained, the community is happy to continue on as before, just as they enjoy the engagement party even though it is clear that ―the two young people‖ (l.7) are less than happy with the arrangement. Furthermore, this statement reveals that there is meaning in her absence, for it is her absence that draws attention. However, the next stanza reveals that there will be no change. Rather, ―[s]he will be alright/ for the wedding‖ (l.15-16). The use of the future tense here suggests the inevitability of this future; that her actions at the wedding can be predicted. That her presence and smiles will happen, rather than might happen, reveals the predictability of the script of a woman trapped in an abusive marriage. The speaker recognises the pattern of abuse as well as the complicity of the community in allowing this pattern to continue unquestioned. The fact that marriage is so ritualized, its norms so entrenched, allows for very little space renegotiation; for the woman to act outside of expectations. The perpetuation of this kind of patriarchal abuse, enabled by the conditioning of women to accept the submissive role in a relationship, is also revealed in this stanza. At the wedding ―her sons will be there/… her sons/ whom she is teaching/ about softness and yielding,/ as her father taught her‖ (ll.18-22). Here, the notion of acceptance and submission appears to be passed down from generation to generation. In this moment, this role is initially taught by the patriarchal figure of the father to his daughter and is then passed on from her, despite her experience of patriarchal abuse, to her sons. It is interesting that she passes this on to her sons, rather than to daughters. This could suggest that she is instilling an alternative notion of masculinity in her sons, one that is gentler and non-violent. However, it could also suggest that she is teaching them, through her relationship with their father, that women are soft and yielding and so can be exploited. This ambivalence, I argue, can be read as possibility. While the woman‘s future can be predicted, the actions of her sons cannot and so they hold the potential for breaking the cycle of violent male dominance and passive female submission. After noting that this ―softness and yielding‖ (l.21), which the poem implies might be part of the reason she has not left her husband, has been taught to her by her father, the poem then notes the father‘s attempt to help his daughter. This somewhat contradictory moment, where the father who has taught her to yield tells her she doesn‘t have to, that she can ―Come home‖ (l.27 35), suggests the complexity of human beings, that their imperfections exist alongside deep compassion. The encounter where the father ―came to her house‖ (l.23) is marked by awkwardness. When he talks to her he looks ―a little past her shoulder‖ (l.24) and it seems that what he is doing is beyond his conditioned masculine role, that his love for his daughter is warring with his propriety. 32
Furthermore, he phrases his assertion that his daughter‘s situation is intolerable in the most euphemistic of terms: ―no one needs/ to stay in a house where a man raises/ a hand to his wife‖ (ll. 25-27). The fact that ―no one needs‖ (l.25) is placed on a line on its own suggests the universality of this statement, that it is not only his daughter who should not have to live in such a situation, but that no one should have to. The fact that he said ‗needs‘ suggests that no matter how much ‗need‘ a person appears to be in, no matter how much society implies that one ‗needs‘ a husband, such a situation is not acceptable and should not be tolerated. However, ―where a man raises/ a hand to his wife‖ (ll.26-27) is euphemism that does no justice to the violence that could render a woman unable to attend an engagement party. While the father appears to recognise this violence, since he is asking his daughter to leave her husband, the language he uses suggests a societal taboo on the frank discussion of such violence. He appears to be embarrassed by the situation, rather than enraged. It is this that Makhosazana Xaba writes against in her factual descriptions of rape in ―The silence of a lifetime‖. There, she faces rape head on, bluntly stating the facts of the violence without resorting to either euphemism or metaphor. This is what is happening, she seems to say, now start doing something about it; an approach which is clearly lacking in the characters in this poem. When the missing sister turns down her father‘s offer to return home, it is described as follows: ―And, who knows why, she said,/ kassie, Da, but I will stay‖ (l.30-31). Firstly, the use of the word ‗kassie‘ marks this situation as particularly South African as well as identifying the subjects of the poem as Malay coloured people. This is apparent as the word, as defined in the glossary at the end of A Hundred Silences, means ―thank you‖ and is ―Afrikaans, derived from Bahasa Melayu‖. Bahasa Melayu is a Malay language and its appropriation into Afrikaans speaks to the complex cultural identities of the people of Malay heritage in South Africa. Thus, the critique which the poem offers of marriage, while it can be read as universal, also appears to be based on marriage traditions that are not simply Western. Furthermore, there is a suggestion of the arranged marriage, reminding the reader of the traces of the origin of marriage, with its baggage of ownership, which remain evident in the contemporary marriage contract. Secondly, like the father‘s words, there are no quotation marks around them. While both father and daughter speak, they are still effectively silenced, as they speak words that are, in the father‘s case, clichéd and, in the daughter‘s case, words which are complicit in her own subjugation. The daughter‘s silencing is also emphasised by the fact that she looks ―silently‖ (l.29) at her father as well as the display of ‗alright-ness‘ predicted for the wedding. Finally, the speaker‘s addition of ―who knows why‖ (l.30) before the daughter‘s answer reveals the ways in which social inanities and clichés are used to cover up the truth. The next stanza reads: ―And who knows if that stopped 33 him for a while/ or made him worse‖ (ll.32-33), which suggests the same. The fact that these two stanzas mirror each other in their beginnings, ―And who knows‖, suggests that both the wife‘s and the husband‘s decisions and motivations are influenced by similar discourses – arguably a patriarchal discourse that dehumanizes woman and legitimates male ownership of the female body, even if it now does so in a less overt manner. Thus, the phrase ‗who knows why‘ does not indicate real incomprehension, but rather a refusal to admit the reason why a man would abuse his wife and why a woman would stay – society has conditioned them to accept these roles. The final stanza is also a single line and asserts, as the title does: ―Today she is not here for the engagement‖ (l.34). The placement of this statement suggests that this is the end point, in a sense, that this is where she has ended up – so beaten up that she cannot attend an engagement party. Furthermore, in this moment, the ending collides with the beginning – the abusive marriage going back to meet its beginning; the engagement party. Baderoon‘s placement of this statement is strategic, implying the significance of this absence. The structure of the poem requires the reader to attempt to piece together what they know, to somehow fill in the blanks in order to understand how something like this begins in order to know how to stop it from happening again – how to prevent the ―two young people‖ (l.7) barely looking at each other at the engagement party from ending up in the same situation as the missing sister and her abusive husband.
1.7. Moments of Marriage in “The night before we married” and “Primal Scene” While in ―Today she is not here‖, Baderoon examines the ways in which violence can be legitimated within marriage, other poems in A Hundred Silences have a more positive take on marriage. ―The night before we married‖ (2006: 48) describes two people who are afraid of their upcoming nuptials who wait out the night together. ―Primal scene‖ (2006: 19) depicts two people who have been married for a while, and are already parents, and describes how they still experience sexual intimacy. These two brief, single stanza poems, both approach the issue of marriage from unusual angles and, read together and alongside ―Today she is not here‖, they provide a view of the institution of marriage that is marked by multiplicity and contradiction, suggesting that marriage is experienced in many different ways. The very title of ―The night before we married‖ and the focus it suggests can be read as subversive. In the traditional romantic script, the wedding day is the day that is anticipated and celebrated. It is the wedding day that is recorded in photographs and on film, which is to be witnessed as a sign of the love between the two people and the start of their life together. This discourse ignores the personal relevance of other, less obviously significant days. By 34 representing a moment on the periphery of the central wedding day, Baderoon resists elevating the wedding as the symbol of romantic love. ―The night before we married‖ functions to fill in an omission from the metanarrative of heterosexual Love and the matrimonial ceremony that validates it. Marriage is generally conceptualised as the ‗happiest day of a woman‘s life‘, the defining pinnacle of romantic love. Any anxieties regarding marriage and what it connotes are generally dismissed as ‗cold feet‘ and, in fictional narratives, tend to be glossed over in favour of the moment when the anxious person sees their soon-to-be-spouse and forgets all about these anxieties. ―The night before we were married‖, however, devotes itself to this anxiety. In the poem, this anxiety about marriage is not limited to one person – they are ―both afraid‖ (l.3 48). By describing their feelings about their marriage as ‗fear‘ rather as ‗cold feet‘, Baderoon grants their feelings validity and weight. Fear is less easy to brush off as inconsequential than ‗cold feet‘ is. The depiction of feeling afraid about getting married is a jarring one, no doubt due to the dominant representation of a wedding as a time of happiness, joy and fulfilment. Baderoon‘s poem, notably, uses the term ‗married‘ in the title, referring to the real-life consequences of a marriage rather than the spectacle of the wedding itself. By focusing on their imminent marriage, rather than their imminent wedding the poem highlights that marriage is a serious matter. Firstly, marriage is a binding legal contract that does not only impact one‘s personal happiness, but also one‘s ownership of property and financial status. In The Sadeian Woman (2000), Carter notes the complications of intermingling sexual relations and legal concerns within the institution of marriage: ―If one sexual partner is economically dependent on the other, then the question of sexual coercion, of contractual obligation, raises its ugly head in the very abode of love and inevitably colours the nature of the sexual expression of affection‖ (2000: 9). The status of marriage as a legal contract, which shackles their economic welfare together, has frightening implications for both financial and personal reasons. Marriage is a commitment on a number of levels with regards to responsibility for another person, something which can (or should) be daunting. Secondly, marriage is an institution that comes with a number of connotations, expectations and historical baggage. Marriage changes one‘s position in society and even one‘s identity. This is especially apparent for a woman, whose surname is erased and replaced with her husband‘s in Western tradition, but even a man becomes integrally part of a ‗we‘ – the secure, individual notion of oneself as an ‗I‘ is destabilised. While this can be negative, for example, a woman losing her identity within a marriage, there are also positive aspects to this kind of collective identity. Butler argues that ―[t]he particular sociality that belongs to bodily life, to 35 sexual life… establishes a field of ethical enmeshment with others and a sense of disorientation for the first-person, that is, the perspective of the ego‖ (2004: 25). That is, if both people involved in a sexual partnership recognise the importance of the other person to them and their own humanity, this kind of sociality – in this case, marriage – can lead to the destabilisation of a bounded sense of the ‗I‘ and so to an empathic and ethical engagement with the other person rather than the adoption of an abusive or domineering position over their partner. In Baderoon‘s poem, the pronoun ‗we‘ is used three times within the six lines of the poem and also appears in the title of the poem. This suggests that these two people about to be married already see themselves as linked to one another. Here marriage is simply a means of making their bond recognisable to society, rather than legitimizing their connection. Furthermore, there is no sense that one person is the superior figure in the relationship. It is not the case of the woman being afraid and the man comforting her. Rather, they are ―both afraid‖ (l.3) and they share this fear. The man comes to the woman‘s mother‘s house and they pass through the night together. The poem gives no sense of this fear being unfounded. It is not something irrational to be rationalised, but rather something to be experienced, to be lived through ―till the morning‖ (l.6). The fear is not negated by the other‘s presence, as idealised notions of romantic love might suggest. Indeed, there is nothing grand or idealistic about the image created in the poem. They sit in ―the cold dining room‖ (l.4), first ―by the table and then on the couch‖ (l.5). The coldness of the room is not countered by the warm glow of love and the positions of the couple in the room and their movement from dining table to couch are no grand gestures of love, but everyday movements in a familiar and quite ordinary space. By writing about the day before they were married rather than the wedding itself, Baderoon draws focuses on the ordinary moments of love rather than the spectacular. The wedding ceremony might be the performance, might bear all the trappings we have come to expect to go along with True Love, but it is this night before the wedding, spent together in fear in a cold dining room that Baderoon arguably captures what is most valuable about marriage – the necessity of solidarity, community and partnership. Furthermore, by focusing on a private moment between the two people getting married rather than on the public ceremony of their wedding day, the poet arguably uses one of the strategies, which Susan Friedman identifies in her essay ―When a ‗Long‘ Poem is a ‗Big Poem‘‖ (1997), that women poets employ in order to write themselves into poetry. Friedman explains that one of these strategies is a ―reclamation of the public domain from which women have been largely excluded through a discourse of history – a (her)story in which the inside is outside and the outside is the inside‖ (1997: 724). In ―The night before we married‖, this inversion is apparent. The poet‘s choice to represent the night before the marriage rather than the wedding 36 day inverta the traditional binary between what is inside and what is outside. Here, the personal, the private, becomes worthy of representation, while the public ceremony – the wedding – is not the concern of this poem. There is a similar focus in ―Primal scene‖, where the private intimacy of the parents in their bedroom is the subject of the poem rather than their overtly public role as parents, as husband and wife and so on. This poem is only three lines and is focalized through the point of view of the child:
The murmur of my father and mother in their bedroom down the passage, her soft, private laugh. (ll.1-3)
The point-of-view from which this encounter is described affects how the scene appears to the reader. Firstly, the fact that the speaker is outside of the room and some distance away allows for the suggestive rather than explicit depiction of intimacy, a technique that performs the same function as the dream in ―The Dream in the Next Body‖. Furthermore, the speaker is apparently the child of the two people in the bedroom. The poem thus presents a situation in which the children are not cut off from the lives of their parents nor is it a living arrangement in which the parents no longer speak. Rather, there is the suggestion that the intimacy out of which the child was conceived is still a vital part of the parents‘ lives and that their marriage – in contrast to the marriages suggested in ―Today she is not here‖– is one in which intimacy flourishes. While the parents have their own private, intimate space in ―their bedroom‖ (l.2) it is still close enough, just ―down the passage‖ (l.2), to allow their child to hear the audible traces of their connection. The home, as a whole, is thus structured within the poem as a space for intimacy. Furthermore, the child‘s awareness of this intimacy between the parents – whether sexual or otherwise – suggests a family space in which such intimacy is not seen as shameful nor the sharing of a bedroom between the parents an obligation. Sex today tends to be marketed to the young and in love. Thus, to represent sexual intimacy between parents, in a society where children do not like to think of their parents as sexual beings and nor does mainstream representation, is to reclaim an aspect of ordinary life that is often ignored or scorned. The ―Primal scene‖ takes place in a clearly domestic setting, in ―their bedroom down the passage‖ (l.2 19). This private setting of the bedroom along with the title and the mother‘s ―soft, private laugh‖ (l.3) suggest a sexual encounter, but the real emphasis of the poem is on the intimacy that is evident between them and their enjoyment of each other‘s company. Thus, the poem is another example, like ―The Dream in the Next Body‖ and ―Cinnamon‖, of a representation of sexual intimacy that avoids the reduction of sex to spectacle. Once again, 37
Baderoon avoids visual imagery in evoking the sensual, instead focusing on sound – the ―murmur‖ (l.1) of voices and the ―soft, private laugh‖ (l.3). The rather odd construction of the sentence which makes up the poem means that sound begins and ends the poem, the setting sandwiched between them. The sounds themselves suggest intimacy, communication and enjoyment. The fact that their voices are a ―murmur‖ (l.1), suggests, firstly, a sharing of words that is meant only for the other, and, secondly, a physical distance between the parents and the child already indicated by the description of their location in the second line. The title of the poem itself can also be unpacked. The title, ―Primal scene‖, dsecribes the poem, identifying it as a ‗scene‘, as a single moment. The use of the word ‗primal‘, however, is more complex. ‗Primal‘ is defined by The Concise Oxford Dictionary as: ―Primitive, primeval; chief, fundamental‖ (Sykes 879). If the poem is considered to be a ‗primitive‘ scene there is the suggestion that it is ―uncultured‖ (879) as well as that it is ―radical, not derivative‖ (879). That is, the scene is suggested to be unaffected by discourse, by cultural taboos and so on and, in contrast to the clichéd ways in which the married relationship is often portrayed, it is ―original‖ (879). This connotation of the word ‗primal‘ also suggests that the encounter behind closed doors might very well be a sexual one, as this word is often used to suggest sexual desire and the ways in which this is a ‗primal‘ human urge. Furthermore, the understanding of ‗primal‘ to mean ―fundamental‖ (879) suggests that the poet and the speaker both perceive the described scene to be important. Rather than being marginal or unnatural, this form of intimacy is represented as fundamental. Thus, this tiny glimpse into an aspect of married life that is generally ignored is conceived of as important. In both ―The night before we married‖ and ―Primal scene‖, Baderoon writes about the unique ways in which individuals experience marriage; ways that are not immediately recognisable as experiences of marriage and married life. She thus writes against what Carter calls ―the process of false universalizing‖ (2000: 12), a process which she argues marriage, ―[p]ornography… and the fictions of romantic love‖ (2000: 12) assist. By false universalizing, Carter means the assumption that sex, marriage and romantic love are universal human experiences, thus ignoring their social construction and the individuals who experience these things. Pornography, like marriage, Carter argues, ―belong[s] to that timeless, locationless area outside history, outside geography, were fascist art is born‖ (2000: 12). Through these two brief poems, Baderoon arguably attempts to restore the personal to the depiction of marriage, sex and romantic love; to describe these as they are experienced in particular moments in time, to particular people, in unique ways. The brevity of these poems underscores this attempt, as they cannot be read as encompassing the whole experience of marriage or romantic love – rather, they 38 have to be read as moments, as personal experiences. It is not the institution that Baderoon is writing about, but the way the marital participants live out their lives.
1.8. Conclusion In this chapter I have argued that Baderoon opposes the grand metanarrative of romantic love through a focus on the minutiae of life rather than the ‗grand‘ romantic gestures. Wylie notes that ―[d]espite, or because of, their tangential brevity, most of [Baderoon‘s] poems open up soft but intriguing spaces for the imagination‖ (2007: 166). Indeed, Baderoon‘s use of absence and silence, both in structure and content, requires the reader to actively engage in re-imaging the subjects of the poems along with the poet. This is evident in her poems which deal with romantic love and sexual intimacy, specifically ―The Dream in the Next Body‖ and ―Cinnamon‖, where she opposes pornographic depictions of sexual encounters. I have also examined how Baderoon self-reflexively considers the role of representation, both with regards to finding intimacy in ―Finding You‖ and in the reading of the photograph in ―Old photographs‖. This poem also provides an alternative conceptualization of a romantic relationship, one which takes into account the ‗destructive thirds‘ – those things which interrupt the supposedly ideal ‗dyadic‘ structure imposed upon desire. Furthermore, Baderoon‘s employment of the absence of a woman at an engagement party, both in content and structure, allows her to critique the abuse of the institution of marriage in ―Today she is not here‖. She also presents moments of married life that are normally ignored. Firstly, in ―The night before we married‖, she describes an event normally deemed to be on the periphery of the central wedding day and of married life in general and, in it, reveals two people who, even in their fear, support one another. Secondly, ―Primal scene‖ celebrates a moment of intimacy between two parents and is subversive in its focus on the joy people can find in each other as long-married parents. In all these ways, Baderoon interrogates the silences and absences in depictions of romantic love and sexual intimacy. Furthermore, she shows us the meanings of silences and the spaces of possibility in absences and so suggests new ways in which to imagine love.
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Chapter 2: Ingrid de Kok – „The Delicious Fiction, Love‟ 2.1. Introduction Kylie Thomas, reviewing Ingrid de Kok‘s newest poetry collection, Other Signs (2011), asks: ―What do white South African women poets working in the lyric tradition write about?‖ (2011). The fact that the reviewer questions what someone who fits into this demographic might write about, suggests that white South African women poets find themselves in a somewhat uncomfortable position in relation to their triangulated location pinpointed by race, nationality and gender. Thomas‘s question can perhaps be rephrased as follows: What do white South African women, privileged by race though not by gender, write about in post-apartheid South Africa, to which they both belong and in which they are alien? The answer, according to Thomas is, ―[l]ove, of course; even sex; gardens, especially in the mornings; childhood and the family members who populate them; childbirth; illness; loss; and sometimes events reported in the newspaper‖ (2011). Thomas notes that De Kok writes about these things and that she ―also marks her own way of seeing and its limits‖ (2011). Thus, De Kok can be seen to write about those things which make us human, but in a way that does not claim to present the universal Truth but rather an individual perspective no less valuable for its limitations and all the more valuable for recognising them. It is pertinent to this dissertation that Thomas begins her list of subjects with love, followed by sex. There is a privileging of these two concepts in the decision to begin here. Firstly, Thomas appears to enact a kind of feminist resistance, beginning with the personal (love, sex, gardens, childhood) and ending with the political, the ―events reported in the newspaper‖ (2011). But her phrasings also suggest something else. It is ―[l]ove, of course‖ and ―even sex‖ (2011; my emphasis). The ‗of course‘ that follows ‗love‘ positions it as the natural subject of poets, perhaps suggesting that it is particularly the subject of women poets, while the ‗even‘ that precedes ‗sex‘, suggests some kind of surprise that women poets might be dealing with such a subject. Ingrid de Kok writes about love and about sex, of course she does. She writes about the politics of sex, about the awkwardness of sex and romantic love, about the way love and sex are represented, and about the way women are exploited as lovers, as sex-workers and as objects of sexual desire. The first sub-section of this chapter examines De Kok‘s ―Woman in the glass‖ (2006: 32- 33) as a critique of women‘s sexual exploitation and the erasure of their identity and desire that takes place in order for this to happen. The patriarchal construction of women as ‗lack‘ is essential to this reading and Luce Irigaray‘s seminal article, ―The Sex which is Not One‖ (1981) forms the theoretical basis for the analysis of this poem. I argue that De Kok not only critiques 40 the positioning of women as sexual objects and a ‗lack‘ against which men can be defined, but counters this through the use of an assertive female ‗I‘ as speaker. ―To a would-be lover‖ (2006: 34-35) also asserts female subjectivity as well as the agency of women to make choices about whom they desire. In the poem, the speaker rejects a suitor because she finds his approach to sex too mechanical. The poem goes on to assert the speaker‘s desire for a representation of love that takes into account the flawed and the human; a new way of thinking about ―the inelegance of ordinary love‖ (l.22 35). That is, a love which takes into account the ‗destructive thirds‘ that Judith Butler, in ―Longing for Recognition‖ (2004) posits are unavoidable in the struggle for recognition. ―Words of love‖ (2006: 36-37), analysed in the next section, is an exploration of the clichéd ways in which lovers communicate with one another, as well as a critique of the inadequacy of the language of love available to us. The poem exposes the superficiality of the types of connection advocated by the romantic script and recognises the damaging ways in which language can occlude other ways of thinking about intimacy. Butler‘s discussion of the difficulties of recognising the Other is employed in this chapter, as well as her discussion on Julia Kristeva‘s theory about the patriarchal structuring of language. The next section examines ―Woman, leaning away‖ (2006: 28-29), with specific focus on how De Kok critiques the reduction of women to mere image. Laura Mulvey‘s work in Visual and Other Pleasures (1989), on women‘s treatment as image in the medium of film, is essential to this analysis. The poem also explores the complex relations between two lovers, the people who influence them and the ways in which they relate to them. De Kok continues to re-write the representation of woman‘s body in ―After forty‖ (2006: 70), which describes the speaker‘s experience of her body and her life as someone who is no longer considered young. Not only does De Kok describe the flaws of the aging body, in a manner which aligns with Adrienne Rich‘s call to reclaim the particular body in ―Towards a Politics of Location‖ (1985), she also employs image upon image in order to find a new vocabulary for aging – one which can more adequately represent the contradictory ways in which life is experienced in the aging body. The use of references to various poetic forms and techniques, such as trochee and iambic rhythms, suggests an attempt to re-deploy poetical tradition in revolutionary ways. ―Aubade‖ (2006: 77), examined in the next section, appropriates the traditional poetic form of the aubade, a lament for the parting of lovers at dawn, in order to write about the ordinary experiences of a shared life at the moment of parting. Through plain language and simple details De Kok breaks down the barriers between the personal and the political, the public 41 and the private, which Susan Friedman, in ―When a ‗Long‘ Poem is a ‗Big Poem‘‖ (1997), argues is a subversive strategy employed by women poets in order to reclaim the poetic genre. In ―Brush stroke‖ (2006: 76), De Kok writes about the intimacy between two lovers sharing a bed. She does so using dense imagery and subtle suggestion, avoiding the violence of pornographic depictions of sex and creating an ‗impression‘ of the sensations experienced by the speaker. Impressionism, both the movement in French painting and the term in a literary sense, are employed to better understand the poem‘s representational intentions. All the poems examined in this chapter share a concern with the ways in which women, sexuality and romantic love are represented. From reflections to photographs, words to brushstrokes, poetic techniques to poetic forms, De Kok evokes and subverts the conventions of various forms of representation in her poetry. This technical subversion reinforces her critique of certain representational practices in relation to women and romantic love, as well as her more subtle subversions of the conventions surrounding the depiction of sexual intimacy. In most of these poems, women‘s voices emerge without apology, describing their bodies, their choices of lovers, their experience of sexual (and other) intimacy and stating, as in ―Woman in the glass‖ not only who they are but who they refuse to be. De Kok‘s project is thus marked by a very real attempt to insert women into a genre in which they have been objectified or from which they have been excluded.
2.2. Re-thinking „Lack‟ in “Woman in the glass” Ingrid de Kok‘s poem, ―Woman in the glass‖ (2006: 32-33), first published in her collection Familiar Ground, examines and critiques the sexual exploitation of women and turns the phallocentric notion of woman‘s ‗lack‘ in upon itself in order to reassert female autonomy. The first five stanzas of the poem each briefly describe a woman and her interaction with a lover. Collectively, these stanzas present various ways in which women are exploited, erased and silenced. The way this happens is often subtle, revealing the many insidious forms of patriarchy, but the poem echoes Makhosazana Xaba‘s, ―The silence of a lifetime‖ (2005: 18-20), discussed in depth in the following chapter, which details the rapes of a number of women. Both poems are concerned with how sexuality and desire are twisted and used as a tool in the service of male dominance, whether it is in the act of sexual assault or the way in which societal pressure disallows women agency with regard to their own sexual desire. The next two stanzas in ―Woman in the glass‖ are longer and, rather than presenting images of women, rather explicitly critique women‘s sexual exploitation. In the final stanza, which once again utilises the three-line structure of the first five stanzas, the ideas of the poem are summarized and, furthermore, the 42 idea of ‗rescuing‘ women through poetry and voice, implied in the rest of the poem, is made clear. In the poem, the speaker addresses ‗you‘. This ‗you‘ is arguably a man, as he is presented as the lover in scenarios that are critiqued for their adherence to heteronormative scripts. This ‗you‘ also arguably represents mankind in general. The speaker begins by asserting that she is not the silent, submissive, sexual plaything of the addressee, and continues to assert this sentiment throughout the poem. She states: ―I am not the woman in the train‖ (l.1 32; my emphasis), ―I am not the woman with the henna hair‖ (l.4; my emphasis) and so on. The negative form of identification that the speaker adopts in this poem can be read in relation to Luce Irigaray‘s argument about the conceptualization of women and their sexuality in ―The Sex Which is Not One‖ (1981). Irigarary notes that ―women‘s erogenous zones‖ are conceptualized as ―a non-sex‖ (1981: 363) and that woman‘s ―lot is that of ‗lack‘‖ (1981: 363). That is, woman is defined as not having a phallus; as not being a man. Instead of being defined as who she is, woman is defined by what she lacks; what she is not. The women are not present in their sexual interactions with men, they are, in Irigaray‘s words, ―more or less an obliging prop of man‘s fantasies‖ (1981: 364). The woman in the first stanza might instigate sexual contact, pulling the man‘s ―hand between her legs‖ (l.2), but then she ―looks out of the window‖ (l.3). She turns away from their sexual interaction, distancing herself, absenting herself. The possibility of agency, of owning her own desire, suggested by her initial action is counteracted by her turning away. Women‘s desire, it seems, is never allowed to be their own. By turning away, the woman is also denied the power of the gaze. This is apparent again in the third stanza where the woman ―looks at [the man] look at her‖ (l.8). Although she returns the gaze, it is only to recognize the male gaze and its primacy in their interaction with each other. In the second stanza, the woman ―in a city street‖ (l.5), likely a prostitute, lacks a voice. She only ―beckons‖ (l.6) to the man and ―never says a word‖ (l.5; my emphasis). The suggestion of prostitution, of engaging in sexual ‗intimacy‘ for money, highlights the commodification of female sexuality. Indeed, according to Irigaray, woman herself ―is traditionally a use-value for man, an exchange-value among men: in other words, a commodity‖ (1981: 368). The fact that the woman once again initiates relations merely makes it appear that she has the agency in this moment but her lack of voice suggests otherwise. Her actions seem rote – like the act of the woman who pulls her lover‘s hand between her legs in the first stanza – remote from any personal desire for sexual pleasure or intimacy. 43
In the fourth stanza, the woman is a disposable lover, there to comfort the man as he calls ―out the names of lost lovers‖ (l.11) as he will call out her name in time. These names are not recorded here, so the women remain anonymous, merely names to join a list, a litany, of male conquest. Furthermore, the inevitability of the end of this relationship is made clear in ―as you will call out this one‖ (l.12). There is no possibility that their relationship will endure. While casual sexual encounters should not necessarily be condemned, there is the suggestion here of woman as interchangeable, as something to be used and then discarded. In the fifth stanza, the woman is ―in the dark‖ (l.13) – her identity erased by lack of light. Her absence of voice functions as ―the meteor/ in the sky of [man‘s] conversation‖ (ll.14-15), echoing Laura Mulvey‘s argument in ―Visual and Other Pleasures (1989), that women only appear in absence and then only in order to exhibit the phallus – that is, to reinforce man‘s power or to act as the object of his desire. Her silence allows the man‘s opinion to remain unchallenged, as ubiquitous as the ―sky‖. The woman‘s silence might serve to brighten up this sky, but the image of a ―meteor‖ suggests that even her silence only has a brief use. Once again, the woman‘s use-value13 to the man is temporary. If the women in the poem embody lack, then the speaker‘s identification in opposition to their identities, their lack, functions as a sort of double negative. She asserts a lack of lack and, thus, asserts a positive identity. Furthermore, this negative identification, functions similarly to Irigaray‘s notion of the female sex. Irigaray argues that the supposed ‗lack‘ of the female sex organ in fact allows for autoeroticism ―for her genitals are formed of two lips in continuous contact‖ (1981: 363). Thus, instead of being lacking, woman in fact can take pleasure from this supposed ―incompleteness of form which allows her organ to touch itself‖ (1981: 365). In the same way, De Kok uses a negative assertion to (re)claim a female identity. The use of a female speaker, of the female ‗I‘ in the poem, is an essential way of returning agency, and voice, to women. The ‗I‘ employed in the various stanzas indicates the struggle of the speaker to assert herself and her desires. The first stanza begins with ‗I‘, as does the second, but both serve to assert what the speaker is not. This initial assertion of identity begins to get lost, as in stanzas three to five, the ‗I‘ no longer stands as the subject of the line. Instead, the lack takes the primary place: ―Nor am I the woman in the glass‖ (l.7), ―Nor am I the woman in the dark‖ (l.13) and, in stanza four, disappears altogether: ―Nor the woman who holds you‖ (l.10). In stanza six, the ‗I‘ disappears again. This stanza begins ―That woman‖ (l.16) and focuses entirely on the woman who lacks any identity. The use of ‗that‘ still serves to
13 In This Sex Luce Irigaray argues that the ―society we know, our own culture is based upon the exchange of women‖ and that this is ―because women‘s bodies – through their use, consumption, and circulation – provide for the condition making social life and culture possible, although they remain an unknown ‗infrastructure‘ of the elaboration of that social life and culture‖ (1999: 799). 44 differentiate the speaker from the woman who embodies ‗lack‘, but the presence of the speaker is temporarily absent. This sense of distance remains in the seventh stanza, when the ‗I‘ re-emerges: ―I stand to the side and watch her‖ (l.24). Here, the speaker‘s assertion of an autonomous identity still relies upon a distancing of herself from the women who cannot assert themselves. In the final stanza, the male Other initially dominates. Man, referred to as ‗you‘, is identified as possessor of the women: ―Your woman‖ (l.30), and his desire is recognised: ―You want‖ (l.31). However, the final line once again begins with ‗I‘, and it is the first time in the poem that the speaker asserts her own desire and does so in relation to the ‗woman in the glass‘. She claims: ―I want‖ (l.32). In this way, the speaker moves from an initial assertion of identity, which relies on negation, through the conceptualization of woman as ‗lack‘, to a more positive, though still ambiguous, assertion of desire. The woman that the speaker defines herself in opposition to appears to be complicit in her own subjugation. She is ―bent over, offering her sex to [the man]/…, asking for nothing‖ (ll.17- 18). This bent over position suggests submission and, due to its link to the sex act, speaks to the inherited patriarchal binary in which woman must submit, both in life and in sexual relations, while the man is expected to be dominant. More than this, as Irigaray suggests: ―Not knowing what she wants, ready for anything, even asking for more, so long as he will ‗take‘ her as his ‗object‘ when he seeks his own pleasure‖ (1981: 364). Thus, denied the discovery of her own desires and pleasures, woman can only ‗offer‘ herself to man as the object of his sexual pleasure. That the woman ―[asks] for nothing‖ (l.18) speaks to the silencing of women, especially in relation to their sexual desires. In Irigaray‘s words, ―she will not say what she herself wants; moreover, she does not know, or no longer knows, what she wants‖ (1981: 364). Thus, woman offers herself up for the man‘s pleasure and does not ask for pleasure in return, because this kind of vocabulary is denied to her. Furthermore, the fact that she offers herself suggests that she has so internalized the script of heteronormative sexual interaction that she does not even attempt to resist or to break the silence surrounding such practices. She becomes ―the one without fingerprints‖ (l.19) – an image of the ultimate erasure of identity, and one which is countered in one of De Kok‘s later poems, ―After forty‖ (70), where the speaker reclaims her ―one of a kind thumbprint‖ (l.4). However, the ―Woman in the glass‖ is faceless, lacking any individual identity; she is everywoman who is exploited and says nothing. She is ―cousin, sister, twin‖ (l.30 33); both all women and none. Thus, the speaker defines herself against a female stereotype, against a way of thinking about women that not only erases their voices and agency, but their unique, individual identities. The 45 speaker refuses to be Woman, refuses to be simply the victim that women are perceived to be, and thus refuses to be complicit in her own oppression. While the speaker clearly works at reclaiming her own identity in the poem, it is only in the final line of the poem that she voices a desire to save the faceless, voiceless woman she defines herself against. She wants ―to save, and tear, her tongue‖ (l.32). Firstly, it is interesting to note that she does not express a desire to save the woman (or womankind) herself, but to save her ‗tongue‘ – her voice. This is the speaker‘s power in the poem, that which the woman she is speaking of lacks: a voice with which to proclaim an identity, with which to protest. The patriarchal system demands that women remain ―dumb‖ (l.31), both in the intellectual sense of the word and in the sense of being mute; silenced. Her silence allows for patriarchy to go unchallenged. However, the final line of the poem reveals a certain amount of ambiguity which is present throughout the poem. Not only does the speaker want to save the woman‘s tongue, but also to ‗tear‘ it. There is an inherent violence in this image, suggesting a resentment of those women who are complicit with patriarchal oppression, who offer their sex to men and ―ask for nothing‖ (33). There is also a similar sense of violence towards the part of herself which still promotes male dominance. The complexities of identity and identification bleed through and the final image undermines the stereotype of the silent, willing woman. The poem culminates in an assertion of desire, but one which is completely contradictory. The speaker desires to save the tongue that has been silenced, but also to tear the tongue that refuses to speak. De Kok‘s use of the image of the burning woman also has implications regarding the violence the speaker wishes to enact, the desire to ‗tear‘ woman‘s tongue. The image of a woman being burnt appears in Xaba‘s ―Waking up‖ (2005: 39), where the speaker is scorched by the sun which seems to represent an oppressive patriarchal, heteronormative system.14 In ―Woman in the glass‖, burning ―on [man‘s] pyre‖15 (l.25) implies both the heat of desire, of ‗burning‘ with sexual desire for someone, as well as calling to mind the burning of ‗witches‘ at the stake. In this moment the heteronormative sex act becomes complicit with the wholesale destruction of women. It is interesting to note, however, that the woman who burns is described as a ―widow- virgin‖ (l.25). The conjunction of these two words neatly covers the acceptable states of womanhood, married woman being implied by the hyphen as the assumed state between virgin and widow, while also erasing the sexual woman completely. In this poem, it is not the ‗whore‘
14 A similar idea can be found in the final image of Yvonne Vera‘s novel, Butterfly Burning (2000), where the female protagonist sets herself ablaze in a moment that is both her defeat and her ultimate act of resistance.
15 In De Kok‘s poem, ―To a would-be lover‖, the image of fire is also evoked in relation to man. The lover whose idea of love-making is unacceptable is described as a ―pyrotechnic suitor‖ (l.28 35). The link here is between fire and machinery – the idea of the combustion engine – and this sheer force with its destructive connotations, is rejected by the speaker as a suitable partner in a sexual encounter. 46 who burns. Here, the ‗witch‘, the woman who does not fall into the accepted categories of womanhood, is not the one who is burnt. Rather, it is the woman who does not resist, who remains bound by the patriarchal norms, whose identity is destroyed. Her mouth ―drips wax‖ (l.27), which speaks once again of her silencing, and whose ―eyebrows peel off‖ (l.28) so she cannot even communicate through facial expressions. It seems as though the woman who the speaker watches burn trusts in the system and is betrayed by it; destroyed by it despite her conformity. She is an ―Acrobat‖ (l.26) who believes she will be caught if she falls, only to discover that it is a disintegrating ―net of ash‖ (l.26) below her. However, although this ‗fire‘ is destructive, it also holds the potential for revolt. In Xaba‘s ―Waking up‖ (2005: 39), discussed later, it is only through experiencing the harshness of the patriarchal heteronormative system that the speaker comes to shun it, opening up the possibility for an alternative way of living and loving.16 In ―Woman in the glass‖ it is only whilst burning on the metaphorical pyre that the woman‘s ―sex unstitches its tiny mirrors‖ (l.29). Although such an extreme destruction of identity by patriarchal oppression is a terrible and painful process to observe, it is perhaps only through such absolute destruction and betrayal that a woman who is completely complicit can come to see the system for what it is and stop reflecting it. Irigaray notes that ―[f]emale sexuality has always been conceptualized on the basis of masculine parameters… women‘s erogenous zones never amount to anything but… a masculine organ turned back on itself, self-embracing‖ (1981: 363). The image of the tiny mirrors on the woman‘s sex in the poem suggests a similar notion. If the woman‘s ‗sex‘ is covered in mirrors it is not a discomforting lack. Rather, it serves to reflect man‘s phallus to himself, comforting him in his phallocentric, patriarchal view of the world. If these mirrors are unstitching then it suggests the possibility for women to stop reflecting man back upon himself, to stop serving as a mirror for patriarchal notions, to stop acting as a means to validate oppression of women. There is something violent about change, probably because it is so resisted so much of the time. To truly change perceptions, to change an oppressive system, violence must be done, not physically (though too often it is), but metaphorically. There must be a violent deconstruction of the language, norms, stereotypes, prejudices and assumptions that are used to maintain such systems. It is not only men who must change their way of thinking, but women too. Women need to stop being satisfied with their silence being ―the meteor/ in the sky of [man‘s] conversation‖ (ll.14-15) and drag their voices up into this sky like the night sun that rises in Xaba‘s ―Waking up‖.
16 In Butterfly Burning, it is only through destroying her body that the protagonist, Phephelaphi, can come to claim her body as her own outside of the man she loves. 47
2.3. Sex in the Sillier Body in “To a would-be lover” ―To a would-be lover‖ (2006: 34-35) follows after ―Woman in the glass‖ in Familiar Ground and also deals with the sex act and sexuality and the way they are enacted. However, this poem focuses on the idealization of sex and critiques the notion that it can be performed perfectly as well as attempting to rescue ordinary and flawed moments of intimacy. As in ―Woman in the glass‖, the poem begins with ‗I‘ and the poem, addressed ―To a would-be lover‖, re-claims the right of women to choose, not only whether or not to have sex, but also who they find desirable and what they desire in terms of a sexual encounter. In the first stanza, the speaker notes that she ―once knew a man who made love/ with pockets of iron filings‖ (ll.1-2 34). To be made love to by someone with ―pockets of iron filings‖ (l.2) would be uncomfortable, abrasive and so this man‘s love-making is immediately suggested to be undesirable. De Kok goes on to liken the sex act, as it was performed in this encounter, to a mechanical or automated process: ―The machines were oiled, the pistons shone,/ we were stapled together and sent through a shute‖ (ll.3-4). This image implies that the conjugal process was performed seamlessly, everything working together with machine-like precision. The critique of this approach to sex is inherent in the images themselves. The most obvious implications are coldness and impersonality. Here, sex is performed without consideration for the emotional, human aspects of a sexual encounter. There is no intimacy apparent in this moment and the only connection is described in rather violent terms. The lovers are ―stapled together‖ (l.4) before being expelled from the process, having perhaps reached what this man considers to be the ‗end goal‘ of the act. In the second stanza, while the metaphor of the machine is momentarily abandoned, the machine-like precision of the previous stanza is advanced by the image of ―a gymnast on the cross-bar,/ just before the triple turn‖ (ll.6-7). Although it is the human body performing this act, it is as fine-tuned as a machine. Lack of human connection is emphasised once again. The person being made love to is not even referenced in this stanza, there is only an ―audience‖ (l.8). Here, the act of sex is staged. It is a show, artifice, one that the man is intent on performing perfectly. His concern here seems to be his own performance and the ‗audience‘s‘ anticipation for what is to follow. What De Kok is arguably critiquing, and it is indeed a critique as the speaker goes on to note that she ―cannot love athletes or makers of metal things‖ (l.10), is a conceptualization and enactment of sex that is pornographic. Angela Carter‘s discussion in The Sadeian Woman (2000) of what characterizes the pornographic provides a theoretical basis to examine what precisely makes the kind of sex described in the first two stanzas so problematic. To begin with, the man in 48 the first stanza treats sex in a pornographic manner in that he reduces it to a mechanical process – to its functionality. Carter writes that pornography ―reduces the actions in the sexual drama to instruments of pure function‖ (2000:16) and that ―our culture, with its metaphysics of sexuality, relegates the descriptions of the mechanics of sex to crude functionalism‖ (2000: 12). By likening the mechanics of sex to the functions of a machine, De Kok can be seen to highlight society‘s tendency towards the reduction of sex to a mere process, divorced from other aspects of reality and not taking into account the emotional and transcendental aspects of sex. In the first stanza, the movements of the machines and the ‗processing‘ of the lovers suggest an automated assembly line, the ultimate symbol of efficiency. It is made to achieve one purpose, to create one particular object. Thus, this image reveals that sex is often simplified, its complexities and messy realities ignored as well as the ways in which it is intertwined with other aspects of the lives of the people engaged in it. The second stanza is more usefully read through Carter‘s description of pornography as a ―tableaux‖ (2000: 8), as a staging of sex that does not truly capture it. She argues that through constant exposure to representations of pornography people ―become voyeurs upon [their] own caresses‖ (2000: 8). The would-be lover‘s performance, which the speaker speculates upon in the second stanza, suggests a similar staging of the sex act. The ‗audience‘ watching, part of the extended metaphor of sex as a gymnastic performance, can be seen to suggest that the woman herself would act merely as audience to the man‘s sexual prowess. However, it also echoes the way in which pornographic material is viewed: a sexual performance made with an audience in mind, the watchers‘ release contingent on the performers‘, just as, in this stanza, the audience is ―still/ energy parallel with intention‖ (ll.8-9). The would-be lover seems to desire this kind of voyeuristic aspect to his sexual encounters, desiring someone to ―watch [him] in the mirror‖ (l. 33 35). Similarly to ―Woman in the glass‖, the lovers are reduced to a reflection, and even then it is only the male would-be lover whose reflection is to be recognised. The sexual act that the would-be lover offers is one that, in Carter‘s words, ―does not acknowledge the participation of the individual‖ and so cannot bring ―to it a whole life of which the act is only a part‖ (2000: 8). For the would-be lover, the act, and the act performed to mechanical ‗perfection‘, is the only part. The speaker in this poem, however, demands alternative ways of representing and experiencing love. She rejects love that is a careful display, rather desiring love and lovemaking that acknowledges the flaws and awkwardnesses of romantic encounters that are so often elided in the representation of such moments. She refuses the ‗would-be lover‘ because his ―skin is far too sleek‖ (l.28 35) – an image which recalls the taut, oiled skin of body-builders and models – desiring rather ―the sillier body‖ (l.12 34). The seriousness of intent of the robotic lover and the 49 athletic lover is in contrast here to the rather jocular image of ―a squat figure on a sweaty mat‖ (l.14). This image is overtly bodily, ―earthbound‖ (l.12), and is not a traditionally attractive figure. However, it is a more real figure, an image which recognises the realities of the human body rather than holding the human figure up to idealized standards. However, despite the call for a love or a representation of love that is more in tune with the realities of the human experience, it is not suggested that this be replaced with a completely realistic vision of love and lovemaking. Rather, there is a celebration of the fictional aspect of the experience, love being described as ―delicious fiction‖ (l.15). What is called for is not a denial of the fictional aspects of love, but rather that this narrative ―dangle its infinitives,/ forget to close its clauses,/ offer alternative endings‖ (ll.16-18). Thus, the poem suggests the need for a new language of love and new fictional conventions that are less prescriptive and which are open to new possibilities of envisioning love and lovemaking, preferably ones that resonate with people‘s lived experiences of love. The call for the fiction of love to ―dangle its infinitives‖ (l.16) suggests the breaking of conventional rules of grammar. This might refer to experimental poetry itself and its potential, through new formulations of language, to describe the world anew. However, the specific phrase used in the poem also suggests that this new language should not be closed to interpretation. Dangling an infinitive is considered to be incorrect because it means that there is no subject in the sentence. While this might be problematic in conveying empirical information about who is acting in the sentence, this ‗gap‘ can be read as useful in subversive creative representation. To dangle the infinitive is to write against a male language which requires that a sentence be driven by a subject. To leave out the subject is to de-emphasise the dominating ego and to open up the potential for Others to occupy that space. It suggests a language that does not prescribe the subject of the infinitive ‗to love‘. If the infinitive ‗to love‘ dangles then, structurally, it allows for the insertion of any subject, with any type of subjectivity. Thus, this phrase suggests a language that can open up possibilities for representations of love outside of the heterosexist norm. There is also the suggestion that fictional conventions should be re-written. The stanza calls for ―alternative endings‖ (l.18) to the impossible ‗happily ever after‘, thus suggesting less sutured modes of representation and other ways of being. The two lovers are still described as ―hero‖ (l.19) and ―heroine‖ (l.20), but in alternative ways. The speaker asks for a representation of ―a hero whose shirt hangs out/ and a heroine who trips over the bed/ because her contacts are lost under the sink‖ (ll.19-21). Both these peoples are presented as flawed, but they are not the tragic flaws of the heroes of Shakespeare. Instead, De Kok writes a hero and heroine who are flawed in ordinary, everyday ways. By presenting a ‗hero‘ who cannot keep his shirt tucked in 50 and a ‗heroine‘ who has bad eyesight, the poet juxtaposes the extraordinary with the ordinary. In these images, ordinariness does not keep these people from the status of hero and heroine in their own lives – of having the agency to drive their own narratives. Carter argues that ―[s]ince all pornography derives directly from myth, it follows that its heroes and heroines… are mythic abstractions (…). Any glimpse of a real man or a real woman is absent from these representations of the archetypal male and female‖ (2000: 6). So, once again, the poem works against pornographic tendencies by recognising the ways in which lovers are idealized as heroes and heroines, but also undermining their ‗mythic abstraction‘. The ‗hero‘ and ‗heroine‘ that the speaker wishes to see fictionalised are flawed human beings attempting to find some connection with each other. These ‗protagonists‘ are neither perfect in their enactment of sex, as they would be in pornography, nor perfect in their enactment of romance, as they would be in a fairy-tale. The fourth stanza celebrates ―the inelegance of ordinary love‖ (l.22 35). Here is the alternative form of representation that is called for in the previous stanza. In this representation, the awkward and the inconvenient are acknowledged. Nothing here fits together with machine- like precision. Lovemaking is interrupted by the sounds of children skateboarding outside, the ringing of the doorbell and ―the pillows are too soft/ and the feet are much too cold‖ (ll.26-27).17 This description of love is, although less idealized, a lot richer and more specific. There is a sense of real people attempting to make a connection and the difficulty of this. Furthermore, there is beauty in ―the inelegance of ordinary love‖ (l.22) as it is described here. The nature of sexual intimacy is transformed through poetic representation rather than becoming completely altered into an idealized act following a stereotypical script. It is also recognized outside the pornographic script which attempts, as Carter argues, to ―keep sex in its place… under the carpet… outside everyday human intercourse‖ (2000: 18). Sex is returned to its place in ordinary human life, with ordinary distractions, discomforts and sensations. This celebration of ―ordinary love‖ (l.22) acknowledges what Judith Butler calls the ‗destructive thirds‘ of any sexual or romantic relationship, as already discussed in relation to Baderoon‘s ―Old photographs‖. Butler writes against a dyadic formulation of desire because it does not take into account the inconvenient realities, the ‗destructive thirds‘, such as the ―child who interrupts the encounter, the former lover at the door or on the phone, the past that cannot be reversed, the future that cannot be contained‖ (2004: 145-146). In this poem of De Kok‘s, other thirds are acknowledged – the somewhat awkward, everyday occurrences that unsettle the idealized notions about romantic love and sex. That is, the cold feet and the too-soft pillows
17 A similar concern is apparent in De Kok‘s ―Night space‖ (2006: 74), originally published in Transfer. The supposedly idyllic image of two lovers sharing a bed is disturbed by De Kok‘s description of a man‘s ambiguity about the woman‘s presence in his bed. He cannot decide if he wants the pleasure of her overwhelming physical presence – she is taking up the whole bed - or the peace of a bed to himself. 51 discussed in the previous paragraph. The poem, rather than celebrating ‗perfect‘ True Love, celebrates the day-to-day imperfections of more authentic love. Indeed, ―To a would-be lover‖ contains a deep scepticism, even aversion, to the notion of a ‗perfect‘ lover. In the poem, the ‗would-be lover‘, is mechanically perfect, too perfect: ―So pyrotechnic suitor,/ your skin is far too sleek,/ your arms too architectural,/ your timing much too neat‖ (ll.28-31). There is nothing extraneous here, no uncomfortable ‗third‘, no threat of destruction. Everything about the possibility of this romantic encounter is controlled, ―stapled together‖ (l.4 34) so to speak. This scepticism of such a flawless romantic encounter is also apparent in Butler‘s writing. Butler critiques Benjamin‘s argument that the destructive aspect of recognition as something that ―is somehow overcome, even overcome once and for all‖ (2004: 147), asking, ―is this ever really possible – for humans that is?‖ (2004: 147). De Kok‘s poem answers in the negative. The ‗would-be lover‘, who can offer the kind of love that has overcome the possibility of destruction – of awkwardness, hurt – is described as inhuman; a machine. Furthermore, this kind of love without the possibility of destruction is no kind of recognition at all. Rather, it is a self-centred display. It is not a recognition of the self in the Other, but the validation of the self reflected in the self. This kind of lover desires someone ―to watch [him] in the mirror‖ (l.33 35), nothing more. He is willing for someone to be enthralled with him, but not to be enthralled with the Other. He is unwilling to risk his own sense of self, which the enthrallment with the Other necessitates. Without taking that risk, he is unable to engage in the process of recognition; of love. Thus it is as Butler notes: ―Recognition is… the name given to the process that constantly risks destruction and which… could not be recognition without a defining or constitutive risk of destruction‖ (2004: 133). It is arguably for this reason that the speaker prefers ―the sillier body‖ (l.12 34) and the moments which threaten to destroy the idealized fantasy of love, such as the heroine tripping over the bed (l.20). Rather than to be overcome, these ‗destructive‘ moments are to be celebrated as part of what makes the recognition of love possible.
2.4. Critiquing Clichéd “Words of love” While ―To a would-be lover‖ is concerned with the narrative of romantic love, De Kok‘s ―Words of love‖ (2006: 36-37) critiques the inherited language of love and its inadequacy. Furthermore, it examines the ineffectuality of the directions of the romantic script in creating an intimate connection between two people. The poem is divided into three sections. The first presents a tentative conversation between two people in the throes of ―early anxious love‖ (l.7 36). The second part can be read as a deconstruction of the idealization of love, revealing the effort that 52 goes into maintaining the appearance or performance of love. This section critiques the inherited definition of ‗love‘ and charts its, seemingly inevitable, descent into betrayal. The final, and shortest, part, consisting of only one four-line stanza, does not speak about love. However, it does critique clichéd language and so emphasises the deconstruction of romantic clichés in the rest of the poem as well as suggesting that the problem of idiomatic language is apparent in all spheres of life, not just romance. The first part of the poem is divided into two stanzas, the first beginning with ―He said‖ (l.1 36) and the second with ―She said‖ (l.8). This structure arguably alludes to the binary distinction between man and woman and the heteronormative assumption that any relationship necessarily consists of a man and a woman. Each stanza, through the use of direct speech, provides an enactment of the predictable kinds of conversations between lovers. The fact that most of this speech is in the form of questions reveals uncertainty and also a certain level of awkwardness between the two lovers. The questions themselves, ―‘Are you happy?‘/ ‗Are you alright?‘/ ‗What are you thinking?‘/ ‗Are you alright?‘‖ (ll.2-5), are predictable. They are the questions prescribed for the interaction between new lovers, revealing a desire to discover more about the other person but also to assuage their anxiety about the other person‘s difference, their ‗unfathomability‘. The limitations of this kind of language are also apparent in the repetition of ―Are you alright?‖ (l.3) in the first stanza and then again in the second stanza. Furthermore, the questions are overly simplistic. They appear to have simple answers, but are, in fact, very difficult to answer. Thus, the language of the questions ignores the complexity of the language necessary to answer such questions. For example, the question, ―Are you happy?‖ (l.2) seems to require a simply ‗yes‘ or ‗no‘ answer, but an honest answer would most likely be much more complicated, since feelings tend to be complex and paradoxical rather than clearcut. The same is also true of the state of being ‗alright‘ and one‘s thoughts, at any one moment, tend to be much more complex. In part two, the superficiality of the language of love is critiqued. The three stanzas which make up this section are dominated by images which suggest falseness and are generally to do with surface appearance. The appropriation of ―the words of our lovers‖ (l.16) is described using images of ―icing tubes‖ (l.18), ―vases‖ (l.18), ―lipstick‖ (l.19), ―hall mirrors‖ (l.20) and ―silicon… breasts‖ (l.38 36). They suggest that the words of love are applied decoratively; that we ―lipstick the words of love/ onto hall mirrors, onto ourselves‖ (ll.19-20). This kind of cosmetic application of language in order to attain the desired appearance of being in love seems, although shallow, harmless enough, until the final image in stanza three. Here, rather than merely ‗swallowing‘, ‗carrying‘ or ‗lipsticking‘ these words of love, we ―have them implanted/ silicon 53 deep in our pointed breasts‖ (ll.21-22 36). By likening the appropriation of the words of love to plastic surgery, De Kok draws links between physical augmentation as an attempt to achieve the supposed feminine ideal and idealization of romantic love through language in order to achieve the supposed romantic ideal. The use of the image of cosmetic surgery also suggests the violence of such ‗augmentation‘. Although plastic surgery is often considered to be routine, it is still surgery, which requires cutting open a person and inserting, in the case of breast implants, a foreign substance into the body. In her book, Backlash: The undeclared war against women (1992), Susan Faludi describes the physical dangers of plastic surgery. Discussing breast augmentation she writes: ―Contracture of scar tissue around the implant, separation from the breast tissue and painful hardening of the breasts occurred in one-third of women who had the operation‖ (1992: 252). This is only one sentence from a litany of statistics and examples that Faludi cites, but is enough to suggest the pain and violence of such a surgery. Thus, the ―Words of love‖ currently available are suggested to be the basis for a damaging fiction about romantic love. While it might be, in the words of ―To a would-be lover‖, a ―delicious fiction‖ (l.15 34), eventually, ―like gum‖ (l.33 37), it loses its flavour and must be ―spit out at last‖ (l.35). The images relating to falseness have the cumulative effect of suggesting the superficiality of this kind of fiction. Connection is enacted, by pretending to know ―the thoughts of the beloved‖ (l.23) and this pretence of ―having the same thoughts‖ (l.24) is considered to be ―close enough‖ (l.24). However, this attempt at inserting intimate knowledge of the Other like ―false teeth/ caps, crowns, bridges‖ (ll.24-25), is not really to gain a connection. It is to believe that the Other can easily be known, or that this knowing can easily be faked. The poem describes how we let these thoughts, supposedly the thoughts of our lover, ―rise out of our mouths/ into bubbles, into an adult comic strip‖ (ll.27-27). This image reinforces the idea of the inherited notions of romantic love as fiction. Furthermore, the idea of a comic strip is telling since it has a limited amount of space in which to tell its story. It is neatly scripted, setting up the joke in the first few squares, delivering the punchline in the last. It is this kind of simplification of another‘s words and thoughts, this kind of distance from reality, that the poem suggests ―is called love‖ (l.38). That such a definition, or fiction, of love is inadequate and unsustainable is apparent in the fifth stanza. Having just set up the general definition of love, the poem then goes on to state that this definition only holds until ―the bubbles blow off the page,/ are spiked on thorntrees,/ collapse like Chinese lanterns‖ (ll.39-41). In other words, as soon as the appropriated words, the falsified thoughts or the flimsy fictions of love encounter lived-experience they begin to buckle under the pressures of living in the real world. Since they do not truly take into account the 54 difference of the Other or the deeper emotional and practical considerations of having a lover, they are little use in negotiating a relationship. Since this idea of love is based upon the appropriation of alien concepts and the augmentation or obscuration of the self, as soon as the words of the lover are ―spit out‖, what emerges is ―a trickle of sounds/ more like our own‖ (ll.45- 46). However, it is now too late to build a relationship based on honesty and a truer representation of one‘s self and so this rejection of the fiction of love ―is called betrayal‖ (l.47). That ―love‖ is the only other word in the poem in italics links the two concepts together. Thus, it is suggested that this kind of love inevitably leads to betrayal. The difficulty in forming a real connection depicted in the poem can be read in relation to Butler‘s discussion about the struggle for recognition. The awkwardness and uncertainty of the conversation presented in the first part of the poem can be read as a first attempt to connect and the appropriation of the lover‘s words and thoughts in the second part is seen as succeeding in connecting, as ―this is called love‖ (l.29). However, this is revealed to be a false connection, through the use of imagery suggesting the superficial and it ultimately leads to betrayal; to the supposed connection being broken. The poem thus presents lovers who, because of a desire to be recognised in the Other, appropriate traits of the Other in order to be recognised as the same. This is a failure in the struggle for recognition, since it only allows for a recognition of sameness but not of difference. Butler argues that recognition is rather ―a process that is engaged when subject and Other understand themselves to be reflected in one another but where this reflection does not result in a collapse of the one into the Other‖ (2004: 132). By appropriating various aspects of the Other, the lovers in the poem collapse the distinction between the them. By attempting to annihilate ―the alterity of the other‖ (2004: 132) in themselves, the lovers only destroy the possibility of true recognition. The poem arguably suggests that this failure to find true recognition is a failure of the language available to us. Not only do lovers appropriate the words and thoughts of the one they are attempting to connect with, they also appropriate the discourses and clichés surrounding romantic love, and this language fails them. It does so partly because it fails to take into account the differences between lovers and the complexities of lived experience. The final stanza of the poem consolidates the poem‘s critique of clichéd language:
No woman ever says ‗It‘s in the pipeline‘ even in countries with large oil reserves and women on the rigs. (ll.48-51).
55
The cliché used in this poem, ―It‘s in the pipeline‖ (l.49), means something along the lines of ‗It‘s waiting to be expedited‘. This is not a cliché to do with romantic love, but it does have links to gender politics, something which De Kok notes in the stanza by commenting on the fact that women never use this phrase. While this is not empirically accurate, it does reflect the fact that this cliché is part of a masculine discourse. The idea of a pipeline has to do with construction and the phrase itself is often used in the context of business deals, both areas which are traditionally male dominated. The suggestion that women do not use this kind of language, even in countries where women have equal opportunities in lived experience, reveals a gap between language or discourse and reality. Thus, language itself is exclusionary, functioning to maintain various hierarchies and divisions. Furthermore, the phrase ―in the pipeline‖, due to its clichéd nature, is arguably an example of the inadequacy of language. While perhaps suitable for scientific or business discourse, it lacks the potential to usefully describe lived experience. There is an inevitability about the phrase as it suggests that whatever is in the pipeline will eventually follow a set path and arrive at a specific destination. Within this kind of language, there is no possibility for change, for the invention of new routes or new destinations. As Judith Butler explains in her essay ―The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva‖ (1993), Kristeva argues that it is paternal law which ―creates the possibility of meaningful language‖ which ―in turn structures the world by suppressing multiple meanings… and instating univocal and discrete meanings in their place‖ (164). Thus, patriarchal discourse is buttressed by language which is patriarchal, and which excludes women in various ways. The structuring of romantic love through patriarchal language limits the possibilities that women have concerning who and how they love. Clichés, like idioms such as ―It‘s in the pipeline‖ (l.49), not only exclude women but also suppress ―multiple meanings‖ (1993: 164). The ―Words of love‖ need to be rewritten in order to open up possibilities for new ways of thinking and new ways of experiencing romantic love.
2.5. Re-Imagining Photographic Representation in “Woman, leaning away” De Kok‘s concern with representation, apparent in her examination of the ―delicious fiction, love‖ (l.15) and her critique of the clichés of the ―Words of love‖, extends to visual forms. ―Woman, leaning away‖ (2006: 28-29) is not only the title of the poem, but also functions as a title for the subject of the poem – a photograph. This photograph is presented to the speaker by her lover and is a ―picture of his mother‖ (l.3 28) who is ―leaning away from herself,/ from the photograph‖ (ll.6-7). The speaker goes on to examine, describe and interpret the photograph, imagining what this woman may have been like. Through the depiction of this examination of a 56 single image, the poem subtly explores the relationships between the speaker, the lover and the lover‘s absent mother. Thus, similarly to Gabeba Baderoon in ―Old photographs‖ where the speaker muses on her lover‘s former love, De Kok acknowledges the fact that the love between two people is always-already influenced by other loves, and losses. The poem begins with the speaker‘s lover handing her the photograph of his mother. On its own, this suggests that the lover is attempting to share his life and his past with the speaker, as photographs often act as records and function both to stir memories as well as to inform others about events that happened when they were not there. This photograph, however, is clearly particularly precious to the lover. He hands it to the speaker ―as if it were [his mother‘s] wedding ring‖ (l.2), an object heavy with symbolic meaning and normally made out of precious metal. Certainly, this image endows the photograph with great importance and suggests it cannot be easily replaced. Furthermore, the image of a wedding ring implies marriage and commitment and thus, the lover passing the speaker the photograph as if it were a wedding ring, suggests that he is requesting some kind of deeper commitment from her. This is reinforced in the final paragraph when the speaker, ―lying beside him in the cool‖ (l.33 29) realises that showing her the photograph ―was a test‖ (l.34) to see if she ―too would lean/ away from him and open the window‖ (ll.35-36) like his mother in the photograph. This suggests that the speaker‘s relationships with women have been influenced by his relationship with his mother and, more generally, speaks to the ways in which people have various expectations and preconceptions about relationships. Thus, the poem depicts how the lover attempts to better understand the speaker by reading her reaction to the photograph, just as the speaker reads the photograph in an attempt to understand the absent figure of the mother through this visual trace of her. The absence of the mother from the poem is reflected in the photograph. Although the mother‘s image is present in the photograph, it is characterised by what is not there and by the distance between her and the camera. Even the title of the poem emphasises that this woman is ―Leaning Away‖. Furthermore, she is described as ―remoter than the island/ she couldn‘t leave‖ (ll.4-5 28) and ―silent‖ (l.38 29) and her face is turned away in the photograph. The speaker has to imagine what colour this woman‘s eyes are and what she might have been like, which suggests that she is now dead. It also appears that she was separated from her children by distance, remaining on the island when ―her children left for the mainland‖ (l.25). Thus, the photograph is marked by what appears to be the lover‘s loss of his mother and his desire to have her present in his life once again: ―He will give her anything,/ corals, pearls, all his photographs of her/ if she will turn just once/ to see him watching her‖ (ll.12-15 28). 57
Meaning, in ―Woman, leaning away‖, is to be found in that which is not there. The language here is one of loss and it can only be interpreted through an imaginative reading of visual traces marked by what they did not capture. Gabeba Baderoon, in her essay ―Methodologies: Silences, Secrets, Fragments‖ (2007), writes about her approach to her research into alternative depictions of Islam, which is useful in reading ―Woman, leaning away‖. Baderoon notes than ―an archive‘s holdings are marked crucially by what is not there‖ (2007: 279). What is excluded has as much, if not more, to say about the past as what has been recorded. In her research, Baderoon is concerned not with authoritative sources, but with the personal, with ―traces of the unimportant‖ (2007: 278). Similarly, De Kok‘s poem is not concerned with History, but with the history of a woman whose importance is personal. The photograph might seem unimportant in the grand scheme of things, but to the lover the photographs of his mother are as precious to him as ―corals, pearls‖ (l.13). However, the photograph and the mother‘s absence also speak of the personal impact of greater trends, here the migration of people. Presented with the photograph, the speaker begins to interpret it. She reads the mother‘s body language as well as interpreting other visual cues. In this way, she imaginatively engages with what is absent in the photograph in order to create a tentative picture of the woman who is so important to her lover. The speaker does not state any of her interpretations of the image of the mother as facts. Instead she muses that ―perhaps her hands are folded‖ (l.11; my emphasis), ―think[s] of her as a woman/ whose eyes must have been grey‖ (ll.19-20; my emphasis) and imagines that ―[w]hen her children left for the mainland/ she may have laid out her clothes on the bed‖ (ll.25-26 29; my emphasis). She imagines not only the physical characteristics that are missing from the photograph, but also speculates about her reactions to certain moments. She imagines a woman who ―said nothing of her own mother/ or the things she heard as a child‖ (ll.21-22 28), suggesting someone who did not pass on her personal history unlike her son, who is intent on sharing his past with his lover. The fact that the mother appears as someone whose personal history has been lost reflects how women‘s personal (her)stories are often lost or erased due to their historical exclusion from representation. Thus, by imaginatively extrapolating from the image of the mother, the speaker recreates this women‘s story which would otherwise have been lost. Furthermore, she imagines how the mother dealt with the loss of her children, standing ―stiller than the photograph‖ (l.29 29). This particular line reveals how the medium of representation affects how the image is read. Here it appears that the stillness of the photographic medium influences the way in which the speaker imagines the mother. While the speaker‘s reliance on speculation in reading the photograph reveals the limits of photographic representation – it shows only a moment, a fragment of a life – it also reveals the 58 wealth of meaning embedded in such a moment. Baderoon speaks about the ―disorderly array of meanings‖ (2007: 20) in photographs in her essay ―Reading South African Media Representation of Islam after 11 September 2001‖ (2007). She argues that photographs ―[appear] to shimmer and leak, and the relations of the image to the word is never settled‖ (2007: 2). This means that photographs should not be read as closed or authoritative forms of representation. Rather, the process of making meaning is necessarily a continuous one and should be recognised as such. In ―Woman, leaning away‖, the information extracted from – or imbued in – the photographs by the speaker is generally speculative, and so there always remains the possibility for other readings. Thus, the speaker‘s interpretation should not be read as accurate, but rather as an active form of (re)creation. For her, the photograph in the poem is useful for reaching a deeper understanding of her lover. Furthermore, this imaginative space also allows for a (re)imagination of the narrative of Love, influenced, but not defined, by its past representations. What is also revised in this poem is woman‘s relation to image. The title of the poem, phrased in a way that recalls the title of a painting, can be seen to allude to a long history of the objectification of the female form in various mediums, most recently in images on film. Larua Mulvey writes that women ―are constantly confronted with their own image in one form or another‖ and that they ―are being turned all the time into objects of display, to be looked at and gazed at and stared at by men‖ (1989: 13). This is critiqued in ―Woman in the glass‖, where the speaker refuses to identify with the sexually objectified image of woman. In this poem, woman‘s objectification is linked to their visual representation, as the woman ―bent over, offering her sex‖ (l.17 32) is ―the one surrounded by photographers/ printing her supple smile, her skin‖ (ll.21-22). In this moment, her physical appearance is not her own, but rather replicable, it can be photographed and printed, produced over and over again. This replicability of the image of woman suggests the danger of reducing woman to image. Walter Benjamin‘s work on photography in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935), although concerned with the purpose of art and the production of meaning rather than with gender issues, can be used to investigate the implications of women in photographs. Benjamin argues that, due to the way that photographs can be replicated, there is a loss of an ‗original‘ against which the value of all reproductions of it can be measured which means that works of art lose their authenticity. What arguably happens with the image of women in photographs is that, although the image they capture is based on a real person, the ease of the replication of the image allows for a separation between image and person. Women‘s sexual objectification is exacerbated by the fact that photographs can be replicated and distributed 59 among a theoretically infinite number of men. Woman as image is thus the ultimate commodity, to be bought and sold and shared amongst men – completely dehumanized. In ―Woman, leaning away‖, the female speaker is confronted with the image of a woman in the form of her lover‘s mother. While this image is not sexually objectified, as it is the speaker‘s mother presented in a non-sexual pose and in a dress that is not titillating but rather ―soft, unstylish‖ (l.10 28), the photograph is initially subject to the male gaze. The son is described as ―watching her/ the way one watches for a bird‖ (ll.15-16) and this watching arguably has to do with his desire for his mother, a desire for her to return to him, to ―turn just once‖ (l.14) and return his gaze. This desire does complicate the traditional active/passive binary usually associated with the male/female division of the gaze. That is, his mother is currently the passive recipient of his gaze, but he desires her to actively return his gaze. Furthermore, the image itself – marked by absence – also undermines the way the male gaze is often used to explore, penetrate, know and, thus, control. Here, although the son watches his mother, it is in ―the way one watches for a bird/ whose sound in the dense green/ promises shape just before it is silent again‖ (ll.15-17). Rather than exposed in an explicit manner, as sexually objectified women in photographs often are, the image of the mother refuses to reveal anything overtly. Her visual presence in the photograph is likened to sound, suggesting an alternative, more careful way of reading her image. Furthermore, the male gaze in the poem is mediated through the female speaker. It is her voice and her interpretation of his desires that are presented in the poem. It is her gaze on the image of woman that is foregrounded. While the interaction with the photograph has a lot to do with the desires of the male lover, the female speaker is very much present. Although she takes into account her lover‘s interpretation of the image, she also actively interprets the image herself, imaginatively filling in the missing details. Mulvey argues that ―woman… stands in patriarchal culture as a signifier of the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his fantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them upon the silent image of woman‖ (1989: 15). While the women in the images might be presented as woman ―still tied to her place as bearer, not maker, of meaning‖ (1989: 15), the speaker is positioned as maker of meaning, actively examining the images of recognisable portraits of women and refusing to identify with them. Thus, the spectacle (here, woman as sexual spectacle) is, as Mulvey argues, vulnerable, as it ―isn‘t prepared for anything other than passive spectators‖ (1989: 5). It is not prepared for a spectator, like the speaker who watches the image of woman in this poem, who actively engages with this spectacle and refuses to be reduced to an image. In fact, De Kok demands nothing less than a voice with which to speak. 60
2.6. Writing the Aging Body in “After forty” The sexualised image of woman that so pervades the mass media and other forms of representation, is also written against in De Kok‘s ―After forty‖ (70), taken from her collection Transfer, where she writes about a woman‘s life after forty. She begins, in the first stanza, with a description of the body, focusing on particular flaws. In the second stanza, she uses a variety of unusual images to describe life as an ‗old‘ person, arguably searching for, as Antjie Krog, another South African woman poet puts it, a new ―vocabulary of old age‖ (2006: l.38 29).18 She also uses poetic terms in order to describe this life, using both the form of poetry itself and, self- reflexively, references to traditional poetic techniques in order to rewrite the aging body. Finally, De Kok explores the illusion of immortality by examining a photograph of the speaker‘s young self posing with her parents. The poem begins with a description of a particular woman‘s body. This is a body with ―two birth marks and slasto cellulite‖ (l.2 70) and ―a one of a kind thumbprint‖ (l.4), a description which highlights distinguishing marks on the body, as well as its flaws. Along with ―cellulite‖ (l.2), the speaker also has ―astigmatic vision‖ (l.5). Adrienne Rich, in her seminal essay ―Towards a Politics of Location‖ (1985), writes extensively about the importance of starting with the particular body if one is to write against inherited patriarchal tradition. She argues that it is necessary to reclaim the body, to ―re-connect our thinking and speaking with the body of this particular living human individual, a woman‖ (9). There is thus a necessity to ―write ‗my body‘‖ because this plunges one ―into lived experience, particularity… scars, disfigurements, discolorations, damages, losses‖ (1985: 10). Thus, by beginning this poem with the body and describing some of its particularities and imperfections, De Kok can be seen to attempt to reclaim the body, specifically, as identified in the title, the body considered to be no longer young. In recognising the reality of the aging body, De Kok recognises the importance of the bodily and refuses the abstraction of the body. Similarly, she acknowledges the ways in which every human life is written, not only on the body, but by the body. This is most clearly apparent in her reference to the body as a ―gene basket‖ (l.1). In this image, the body is reduced to a mere receptacle for the genes, those nucleotide strands into which is coded, as some would argue, our destinies. The image ―gene basket‖ suggests an awareness of the ways in which life is determined by the physical constraints of our bodily-ness – we will age, we will die.
18 The poem in which this line is found, ―how do you say this?‖ (28-29), appears in Antjie Krog‘s collection Body Bereft (2006). The theme running through the entire collection is aging, love and the female body. ―how do you say this?‖ expresses the difficulty of finding the words to describe love, desire and sex as experienced in the aging body while, at the same time, beautifully describing the body of a lover in ways that challenge stereotypical ideas about sexual intimacy and youth. 61
However, having foregrounded the body in the first stanza and the body‘s role as the vehicle of experiencing life, in which one can hitch ―a longish ride‖ (l.3), De Kok moves away from the concrete and into the realm of the symbolic in the second stanza. Thus, the structure of the poem suggests that while the body might be a productive starting point, a reclamation of life in an aging body is also necessary and that language is essential to understanding it. This also suggests the ways in which experience is not biologically determined – the ways in which we can creatively describe and invent ways of being. This stanza begins: ―Now life‘s a honeycomb, an anagram,/ ammonite, ant trap, knot‖ (ll.6-7), a catalogue of strange images which function as a way of rethinking embodiment outside of the reductionist ―gene basket‖. The ―honeycomb‖ evokes the idea of a rich store, possibly of memories and life experiences. Furthermore, the hexagonal segmentation of the honeycomb provides an alternative way of thinking of how life is experienced and how memory is arranged. Rather than linear, it is a collection of unusually shaped parts that still fit together perfectly. The move away from the simplistic conceptualization of life as linear is also apparent in the image of the ―ammonite‖. Ammonites are an extinct species of invertebrates with a large, curled shell. This swirling shape of the shell and its interior segmentation means that it functions similarly to the image of the honeycomb, as well as suggesting that life is more usefully understood as a spiral rather than as a straight line. The use of the image of an ‗ammonite‘ also reworks the language traditionally used to describe older people. An ammonite is a fossil, ―fossil‖ being a word often used to describe someone elderly, who is outdated, old-fashioned, irrelevant. Thus, the use of this word both acknowledges this position, but also re-inscribes it with the beauty of the word ―ammonite‖. The idea of an ―anagram‖, a jumbled word, reveals life to be something that needs untangling in order to make sense of it. Meaning is unclear and has to be actively pursued. The ―knot‖ image also suggests the need for an active untangling of the life lived, as well as the way in which life after forty is an ―ant trap‖ in that one is trapped by the inevitability of death and considered to be as insignificant as an ―ant‖. The speaker‘s life is like a ―dot-to-dot puzzle on its way to being completed‖ (l.10) and, like ―meals on wheels, rolling downhill‖ (l.11), is only picking up momentum and gaining speed as it gets closer to the end. The image of ―meals on wheels‖, the delivery of pre-cooked meals to those who cannot cook for themselves, serves as a reference to the growing incompetency of older people, their loss of control over their own bodies and the resulting reduction of self to bodily functionality. The poem thus presents the complexity of a life lived next to the linear inevitability of life which ends in death. It acknowledges both the beauties and the indignities of old age. 62
The play with language and meaning suggested by the image of an anagram is also apparent in the ―limping iambic footprint, warning trochee cough‖ (l.9) of the speaker. Both ―iambic‖ and ―trochee‖ refer to metrical units of verse. An iamb, according to the Oxford Concise Dictionary of Literary Terms is ―one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable‖ (Baldick 2001: 120), while a trochee is the inverse, ―having one stressed syllable followed by one unstressed syllable‖ (2001: 263). The play between stressed and unstressed syllables suggests the irregularity of the walk and the cough of an older person. However, the use of these terms also refers to the regular structure of traditional verse, such as the use of iambic pentameter in William Shakespeare‘s sonnets, and highlights the ways in which lived experience, particularly of an older person, does not fit within such a strict ideal. Iambic verse might be an attempt to replicate the rhythms of human speech, but it has become a conventional restriction on the imperfect rhythms of other kinds of articulations. Furthermore, by using both iambic and trochee as descriptors in this stanza, De Kok seems to suggest that life is made of up multiple different and often contradictory patterns. Through referring to traditional metric units of verse, the poet highlights the tradition against which she is writing, highlighting its deficiencies but also celebrating the powerful potential of poetry to describe experience. She juxtaposes the regularity people attempt to impose upon their lives with, for example, an ―alarm clock set for the same time every morning‖ (l.8), with the ways in which life continually breaks the regularity, with bodily flaws and other ‗imperfections‘. Finally, this stanza, by reconceiving of the body in literary terms brings together the flesh and the word, refuses the binary opposition between body and mind. Rather, the body – the physical, the biological – impacts the mind and the mind, through language and imagery, conceives of the body and is thus capable of re-imagining it. The final stanza of the poem, leading on from the description of the speaker as ―meals on wheels, rolling downhill‖ (l.11), dismisses the promise of immortality with:
So much for the family photograph: the crisp child posed in front of her past like a fifties filmstar; a fledgling imperial eagle in front of her future. (ll.12-16)
Here, the photographic promise of immortality is revealed to be an illusion. Although a photograph can capture a moment and preserve it, it cannot halt the aging process. Furthermore, this representation of the body – of the self – ceases to be useful as time alters the lived experience of the subject of the photograph. Thus, the photograph in this stanza requires revision; to be read not as a way of holding onto youth but as evidence of the path of human experience. 63
The ―family photograph‖ (l.12) is relevant not only for its depiction of the speaker as a ―crisp child‖ (l.13) but for its juxtaposition of this child with the images of her parents. This photograph contains both the speaker‘s ―past‖ (l.14) and her ―future‖ (l.16) in the implied figures of her parents. They are her past, in that she originated from them, but they also reveal her future – that she, like them, will age. In this reading of the photograph there is the possibility of finding kinship and comfort, of recognising that aging is a shared human experience, built into the genes. This stanza can also be seen to deal with the issue of woman‘s reduction to sexual object through photography. The ―crisp child‖ is ―posed in front/ of her past like a fifties filmstar‖ (ll.13-14). The reference to her posing in this manner could recall the sexual objectification of filmstars like Marilyn Monroe and their appearance in movies simply as sexual spectacle rarely, as Mulvey argues in ―Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema‖, the driving agents of the narrative. Thus, in this family photograph, there resides the potential for the sexual objectification of the speaker. As a child, she mimics the poses of ―fifties filmstars‖ (l.14), suggesting the influence of the media on how she should present herself before the camera. However, the photograph is also seen to encapsulate other kinds of potential, as she is described as also being ―a fledgling imperial eagle/ in front of her future‖ (ll.15-16). This stands in contrast to the passive image of a fifties filmstar whose main appeal is physical attractiveness. Instead, she is recognised as potentially powerful and capable of action. The fifties filmstar image is also associated with the past, the image of the eagle with the future, suggesting the possibility of change for women. There is thus the suggestion that the way in which to negotiate the potentially limiting aspects of being captured on film as a woman is to open up the photograph to unpack the multiple meanings that reside there, rather than merely reading the frozen surface layer that offers only inactivity and reduction to appearance. The poem as a whole can also be seen to write against the sexual objectification of the female body. Not only does it critique the passive sexualised image of the filmstar, but it presents the flawed, aging female body. While obsessively rendered in all forms of representation, the female body is generally only made visible if it is young and sexualised and, more and more in the contemporary era, without any apparent flaws. As a result, the real female body, the body that ages, that has ―birth marks and slasto cellulite‖ (l.2) is rendered invisible and the bodily experiences of most women, possibly all women, are excluded. Thus, to write about the body and the life of a woman after forty is arguably a revolutionary act.
64
2.7. Re-Writing the “Aubade” De Kok‘s poem, ―Aubade‖ (2006: 77), from the collection Transfer, is made up of a single sentence which describes the moment of waking and lying in bed listening to the person who shares the bed as they prepare for the day ahead. The ordinariness of the moment is one way in which this brief poem re-imagines romantic relationships, but it is the title of the poem that most distinctly marks this poem‘s revisionist aim. By titling the poem ―Aubade‖ and going on describe the separation of lovers at dawn in the body of the poem, De Kok highlights the fact that she is writing back to, and revising, this poetic form, just as Baderoon does in ―The Dream in the Next Body‖. As with Baderoon‘s poem, Donne‘s ―The Sun Rising‖ (1978: 80-81) is a useful comparative reference, being a typical example of an aubade. It is employed in this section in order to examine the manner in which De Kok re-deploys the aubade in re-writing the experience of the moment of the separation of two lovers by the dawn. De Kok‘s ―Aubade‖ reveals that its subject is in line with the form she has chosen in the first three lines: ―When I wake/ and you have already/ left the bed‖ (ll.1-3 77). In these few brief lines, the stage is set. Dawn is implied, as the speaker is just waking, and the separation of the lovers has already occurred, as the speaker still lies in bed, while her lover does not. The intimacy of night and a shared bed has been lost due to the movement of time and the call of the public duties of the day. The nature of the relationship between the two subjects is revealed in the mundane details described in the next few lines, appearing in parentheses: ―I hear you swirling/ water in your mouth,/ plugging the kettle in,/ opening the side door/ to the mountain‖ (ll.4-8). Thus, a domestic scene is set. The speaker appears to be familiar with these sounds, as she can easily identify them, especially the relatively specific sound of the opening of the ―side door/ to the mountain‖ (ll.7-8). Thus, the poem details the separation of lovers who appear to be in an already established relationship, which implies that their parting is temporary. Furthermore, the way in which the first line is phrased, ―When I wake‖ (l.1), can be read to suggest that this is a regular occurrence and that the scene which follows is a typical one because it is rendered in the continuous, regular present tense. The simple details that De Kok uses to describe this scene can be identified in similar terms to the ordinary, specific details that Gabeba Baderoon also often employs in her poetry. Dan Wylie, in a review of Baderoon‘s A Hundred Silences, uses the phrase ―intimate miniaturism‖ (2007:166), and it arguably also applies to ―Aubade‖. Firstly, the poem focuses on the miniature details of ordinary life, such as the three sounds mentioned in parentheses. Although seemingly mundane, they evoke two lives lived in hearing range of each another, which further suggests a deep sense of intimacy between these two people who share a bed. The 65 very fact that the poem opens with the lovers already parted, but yet still with one another, reveals a sense of intimacy that extends beyond the physical, tactile intimacy of sleeping together, with all that implies. Not only do the sounds that filter through the house still connect them, so does the ―imprint‖ (l.14) of the lover‘s head on his pillow on which the speaker lays her head and the speaker‘s knowledge that, ―downstairs‖ (l.15) her lover‘s ―head fills up/ with morning enterprise‖ (ll.15-16). Although their sharing a bed suggests that their relationship has a sexual component, it is not this kind of connection that is captured and celebrated here. Rather, there is a re-imagining of intimate relationships, one that does not deny the importance of sexual intimacy, but focuses on the ordinary, everyday moments of affection and their significance. The speaker stealing her lover‘s pillow and laying her head on his ―head‘s imprint‖ (l.14) is a particularly touching moment, as it reveals her affection for him and awareness of his absence beside her, but is also not done for show, as there is no audience. It is a moment unaffected by societal expectations of the forms affection should take or pressure to reveal her feelings to her lover. The ‗miniaturism‘ of the poem is not only apparent in the details used, but also in the brevity of the lines - the longest is six words, the shortest three – and the brief time span which the poem covers. While the various actions of the speaker‘s lover suggest that it is at least some minutes that pass, the use of the present tense and the fact that the poem consists of one long sentence, suggests that it is attempting to capture a single moment. That is, it attempts to capture, and re-imagine the moment of separation. This sparseness is echoed in the sparseness of the language that De Kok employs. Adjectives are used sparely and figurative language is kept to a minimum. Most of the poem is made up of descriptions of the everyday and the ordinary, the sounds of the lover‘s actions, and the description of the lover‘s pillow. There is only one metaphorical image used, when the speaker likens the ―morning enterprise,/ inventories, rehearsals, plans‖ (ll.16-17) filling up her lover‘s head to ―the day‘s new rustling feathers‖ (l.18). This metaphor advances the image of the lover‘s pillow, the central image that speaks to the connection between the lovers, which is described as being ―packed with duck feathers‖ (l.12). The speaker‘s knowledge about the pillow‘s filling is linked, through the image of the feathers, to the thoughts filling up her lover‘s head in the morning. The intimacy of their nights together is thus connected to another form of intimacy, that which plays out in the day. Finally, the image of the day as a bird, feathered with the plans the lover is making for it, undermines the ‗lament‘ part of a traditional aubade. Although there is a sense that the speaker longs for the physical presence of her lover next to her, the promise of the new day suggested in the final line acknowledges that the end of a certain kind of intimacy is also the beginning of other types of fulfilment. 66
The simple, spare and honest language of De Kok‘s ―Aubade‖ stands in stark contrast to the highly hyperbolic and rhetorical language of Donne‘s ―The Sun Rising‖. Donne‘s poem is built around the metaphysical conceit of the personification of the sun as a ―[b]usy old fool‖ (l.1 80) who will not leave the lovers be to enjoy their time in bed together. In contrast to the speaker in ―Aubade‖ who lets the particularity of her situation speak for itself, the speaker in ―The Sun Rising‖ appears eager to impress; to convince, through sophisticated argument, that the love found in his bed is the truest of all loves. Love, here, is of the grand kind: ―Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime,/ Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time‖ (ll.9-10). The erasure of particularity in a love that is ―all alike‖ (l.9) and is not impacted by time, is something De Kok writes in opposition to. Rather than attempting to delay the moment of separation, De Kok expands the definition of love to include that moment and for this moment to be just as precious as the hours spent together. Donne‘s speaker idealizes love, speaking about it grandly, describing its importance by referring to the wealth of ―th‘Indias‖ (l.17) and ―all states, and all princes‖ (l.21). This concern with public spheres of life reveals a masculinist perspective, where all things of value must be those which belong to the public sphere which is also man‘s sphere. In contrast, De Kok re-claims the private, domestic space – traditionally associated with women – in order to celebrate the love between two people. This issue of the private and the public, the personal and the political and its relation to the way in which history has traditionally been the domain of man, is also apparent in ―Aubade‖, as well as ―The Sun Rising‖. While Donne subverts the traditional distinction between the public and the private, by insisting that his lover and their bed are more important than those aspects which are generally associated with the political and the historical, his argument still employs a language which privileges abstraction and idealization of the female form. In order for his love and lover to be important, they must necessarily be central. The hierarchical structure of society remains, only now Love is at its apex. In contrast, De Kok‘s ―Aubade‖ takes up what Adrienne Rich, in ―Towards a Politics of Location‖ (1985) calls the ―struggle against lofty and privileged abstraction‖ (9). Unlike Donne, who is concerned with the idea of Love, what Rich calls the ―idolatry of pure ideas‖ (1985: 9), De Kok is concerned here with the particularities of the unique ways in which love and intimacy are enacted in the private space of the bedroom. She makes this space central through using the first person perspective, but this ‗centre‘ remains one of many, its centrality relative, unlike the bed in Donne‘s poem which must become the sun‘s ―centre‖ (l.30 81). Furthermore, De Kok employs the strategy, which Susan Friedman discusses in ―When a ‗Long‘ Poem‘ is a ‗Big Poem‘‖ (1997), of reclaiming history by breaking down the boundaries 67 between the public and the private and writing their own, personal ‗(her)stories‘. Firstly, the poem itself functions as a kind of ‗(her)story‘, in that it represents a moment that is not considered important enough to be Historical as it is not concerned with the overtly political or with the public domain. Secondly, De Kok employs a kind of historical discourse in the poem, but in relation to an object whose history would be considered negligible in the grand scheme of History. As the speaker steals her lover‘s pillow, she recounts its history. The pillow is ―the plump one/ your Yorkshire aunt19/ packed with duck feathers/ in 1961‖ (ll.10-13). The use of the date particularly marks this as historical discourse, but it is a personal history, not only of the pillow but of the speaker‘s lover as well. While this history might not seem important, it appears to have been important enough to the lover for him to pass on the story of the pillow‘s history to the speaker. This brief personal history, however, also speaks to history on a grander scale in that it identifies the lover as someone with British heritage. In a South African context, and the door opening onto the mountain suggests Cape Town specifically, with its colonial past, this personal history is deeply significant as it implies a certain privilege and complicity with the South African politics that legitimated the oppression of the majority of its population. Thus, the inclusion of this ‗historical‘ moment reveals that a clear division cannot be made between the public and the private. Even an intimate moment, in one‘s own house, ostensibly away from society and its influences, is marked by the history of the place in which one lives as well as one‘s personal histories which specifically locate one within an intersection of gender, race, class and so on. By recounting the (her)story of the pillow, De Kok re-claims a history that takes the personal into account. Finally, the condensation of this poem, from its spare language to its single-sentence structure can also be read as revolutionary. It is this sparseness, this condensation, which allows it to offer an alternative depiction of intimacy. The strategy of letting each image speak for itself, without much overt mediation, without grandiosity, asks the reader to interpret the significance of each image and of the moment captured in the poem. ―Aubade‖ can thus be seen to employ what Susan Friedman calls ―the strategy of writing very big poems inside very little ones: the volcanic compression of very big questions into a very tight space – poems that are big, but not long‖ (1997: 734). While it is only one sentence long, ―Aubade‖ compresess an entire relationship into it, hinted at through the particular, familiar details employed. It asks ‗big‘ questions about the nature of intimacy and romantic love, as well as suggesting possible answers and it even goes so far as to question the binary oppositions between public and private, personal
19 The history of the pillow is here revealed to be a particular women‘s history. 68 and political, History and histories. The poem‘s complexity is not so much belied by its brevity, as emphasised.
2.8. An Impression of Intimacy in “Brush stroke” While ―Aubade‖ takes as its subject matter the moment of separation after a night together, De Kok‘s ―Brush stroke‖ (2006: 76), appearing directly before ―Aubade‖ in Transfer, describes the interactions of two people in bed at night as they sleep, dream and wake. De Kok seems particularly interested in the way lovers share a bed, as she also deals with it in ―Night Space‖ (2006: 74), which appears in Transfer, exploring the tension between wanting to share one‘s space with a lover and desiring ―the neat-sheeted tomb/ of a bed in a room/ shuttered, uncluttered,/ monadic, immune‖ (ll.9-12 74). ―Brush stroke‖, however, is more concerned with the erotic experience of sharing a bed with another, describing the inadvertent caresses of movement in the night. Similarly to ―Aubade‖, the title of ―Brush stroke‖ is integral to how the poem is read. While it most obviously refers to the medium of painting, it is also a reference to the sensations described in the poem. The words ―brush‖ and ―stroke‖ in the title are the first descriptions of the physical interactions between the two lovers. These moments of physical contact are described later, in the body of the poem, as the lover ‗creasing‘ up against the speaker, ‗brushing‘ beside her and ‗caressing‘ her back. These descriptions function erotically, but they also write against graphic depictions of sex and particularly the tendency to idealize violent sexual acts. Andrea Dworkin‘s polemical essay, ―Pornography: Men Possessing Women‖ (1989), reveas a tendency within mainstream depictions of the sexual and supposedly ‗erotic‘ to equate sexual pleasure with violence. This is apparent in her definition of pornography ―as the graphic, sexually explicit subordination of women in pictures and/or words that also include women presented dehumanized as sexual objects who enjoy pain or humiliation‖ (1989: 11). De Kok can thus be seen to write against this tendency by celebrating the most gentle of erotic touch – the brush of skin against skin, the stroking of someone else‘s body. The title‘s allusion to painting is also important. As is apparent in the subject of other of her poems discussed in this chapter, De Kok is clearly concerned with the issue of representation and the various forms it takes. She examines the use of language in ―Words of love‖, photography in ―Woman, leaning away‖ and even the traditional poetical form of the ―Aubade‖. In all these poems she is concerned with re-working these modes of representation through her poetry, employing their strengths while re-writing those aspects of them which are troubling. By referring painting, De Kok positions the poem in relation to this particular history of 69 representation. This is a history marked by the tradition of painting the female nude, where the woman‘s body is generally the idealized object of the male gaze. ―Brush stroke‖, however, is a different form of representation, one in which the nude body of the woman is not the subject. Furthermore, De Kok‘s particular reference to the brushstroke itself suggests an allusion to the re-visionist project of a certain movement of painters: the Impressionists. Although painters before the Impressionists used brushstrokes, as a general rule they attempted to hide the individual brushstrokes to create the illusion of a single swathe of colour. In contrast, the impressionists ―deconstructed the artifice of painting, with visible brushstrokes… so as to make the viewer aware of the materiality of the medium‖ (Gallup, Gruitrooy & Weisberg 1998: 453). De Kok‘s reference to a brushstroke functions similarly, in that it draws attention to the building blocks of representation and asks that her poem be read with an awareness of each word and its placement and how they work together to form an image. The poem is dense with beautiful and unusual imagery, which is used to suggest erotic contact. The use of suggestion to evoke the erotic rather than explicitly describing the literal, physical act of sex is also reminiscent of the Impressionists who had been ―freed from a dedication to a finished illusionism by the popularization of the camera, which captured ‗reality‘ with unquestioned accuracy‖ (1998: 453). Similarly, De Kok is not concerned with a ‗finished illusionism‘, but rather with evoking the ‗impression‘ of this moment as experienced by the speaker herself on the border between sleeping and waking, between dream and reality. The Impressionists are noted for being extremely radical in their ―attempts to reproduce exactly the effects of light on the retina at different times of day and in different seasons, rather than to produce an ideal, timeless representation‖ (1998: 453). Through the use of the imagery in the poem, De Kok arguably attempts something similar. She attempts to capture an experience as framed by the particular state of mind of the person experiencing it. Since the mind, especially in the suggestible state of half-sleep, does not experience events ‗empirically‘, or rationally, and since physical events take on symbolic and other kinds of meaning for those experiencing them, they require a language that is more than factual to accurately capture the; a language that is semiotic rather than symbolic. ―Brush stroke‖ can thus also be read as impressionist in the literary sense, which the Oxford Concise Dictionary of Literary Terms notes is borrowed ―from French painting‖ and is ―a rather vague term applied to works or passages that concentrate on the description of transitory mental impressions as felt by an observer rather than on the explanation of their external causes‖ (2001: 123). Specifically, in this poem, De Kok is concerned with capturing the ―transitory mental‖ impression of the body of a lover as felt by the speaker. 70
The imagery used in the first stanza emphasises the transitory nature of the sensations described. The first stanza reads:
In the night a dream creases you against me momentarily, unfolding origami bird in suspended rain, on a bending tree. (ll.1-4)
The transitory nature of the experience is made clear with the word ―momentarily‖ (l.2). This is reinforced through the image of the ―origami bird‖ (l.3), which, being made of folded paper suggests the fragility of the moment as well as its impermanence. However, by likening the movement of the lover to an ―origami bird/ in suspended rain‖ (ll.3-4; my emphasis), De Kok suggests that the moment expands, like a paper bird might in the rain. While, in the grand scheme of things, this moment might be brief, in the speaker‘s experience it appears to be more significant, as is apparent in the complexity of the image used to describe it. In this stanza, De Kok also describes the body and its movements through imagery that is alternative to the blatant, literal imagery of graphic depictions of sex. In the first line, the poet uses the word ―creases‖ (l.1) to describe the bending of the lover‘s body. This unusual use of this verb in relation to the body suggests the creases in the skin at the joints, the wrinkling of flesh. Thus, in this single word there is a refusal to idealize the body – to depict only the youthful, ‗Photoshopped‘ body without traces of aging. The image of the origami bird links back to this verb, as the folding of paper results in creases. Thus, the various images in this stanza are unified through the connotations of the images. The movement of the lover‘s body is likened to the ―unfolding‖ (l.3) of this origami bird. The fact that it is ―unfolding‖ rather than being folded suggests an opening up, or a loss of control, no doubt due to the lover‘s dreaming state. This arguably alludes to the vulnerability and, thus, intimacy, of sharing a bed with someone. Thus the eroticism that is more apparent in the following two stanzas is couched in terms of the intimacy shared between two people. An origami bird is a form of art work – another allusion to forms of representation on De Kok‘s part – and, by likening it to the body, De Kok affords the body the same respect as a beautiful work of art. Finally, the curve of the ―bending tree‖ (l.4) might echo the curvature of the body as it lies in bed, curved around another body. All these images are deliberately desexualised, but at the same time very intimate. De Kok‘s selection of images provides an alternative to the reliance in standard representation on overtly orgasmic sexual encounters. The second stanza picks upon the image of the origami bird in its description of how when the lover brushes against her, the speaker experiences ―the caress‖ (l.5) as ―guinea-fowl 71 feathering [her] back‖ (l.6). Again there is the implication of gentleness, of the lightest touch. This touch can be read as erotic due to its description as a ―caress‖. Although the lover‘s movements occur in his sleep and are not highly sexualised, the speaker experiences this contact as erotic. However, the imagery the De Kok employs, such as: ―Your dreaming leaves a ladder/ leaning against a house of thatch‖ (ll.7-8), is not a typical image used to evoke the erotic. Generally, erotic imagery works within the realm of the visual. In the image of the ladder, De Kok evokes the visual – the ladder, the house can both be visualised – but it is not a visual description of bodies and their interactions. Instead, the interaction is between the ladder and the house. While the upright image of the ladder can be seen to suggest something overtly sexual, such as an erection, the image of ladder and house also suggests the intimacy and belonging of home, the construction of something and the precarity of the moment between the lovers. The imagery used to describe these touches is natural. That is not to say some of them are not man-made, but they are generally made of organic materials, such as paper, wood, thatch. This stands in contrast to the imagery in ―To a would-be lover‖ where the actions of a lover are described as machine-like. That notion of ideal, deliberate and precise love-making is overtly rejected in ―To a would-be lover‖ and the natural, gentle and spontaneous imagery in ―Brush stroke‖ offers a description of an alternative kind of erotic contact. The same can also be seen in the poem which precedes it in Transfer, ―Inner note‖ (2006: 75). This poem also uses alternative imagery in order to suggest the act of sex without ever explicitly stating that this is what the poem is about. Again, De Kok makes use of natural imagery:
Like a wishbone or the instep of your foot
this parabolic love curves, wings stirring
in the neck nerves of a crane at marsh‘s edge (ll.1-6 75)
Similarly to ―Brush stroke‖ she evokes curving shapes and the image a bird. Once again, she describes sexual intimacy that is delicate and all-encompassing rather than overt and graphic. She moves away from the crude functionalism of sex and rather suggests its sensations, its movements, through connotations of shapes and movements in natural images. Furthermore, in a manner similar to Gabeba Baderoon‘s ―The Dream in the Next Body‖ (2005: 33), which also uses images of birds and flowing, curving motions to describe sexual contact, De Kok employs the notion of a dream. In ―The Dream in the Next Body‖ it is never 72 clear whether the encounter between the two lovers was real or whether it was a dream. This ambiguity suggests that such an experience, whether ‗real‘ or dreamt, is still significant – that its ‗realness‘ is not as important as the way it is experienced. In ―Brush stroke‖ it is clearer that the lover is dreaming as he brushes against the speaker. However, the poem still blurs the lines between sleeping and waking, dream and reality:
You turn half in, half out of sleep to lipread my dark silent mouth. In our waking‘s slow ascent I am the dream‘s aftertaste, its scent. (ll.9-12 76)
The first line of this stanza evokes the twilight zone between sleeping and waking where the human brain is more suggestible. The fact that the third line of this stanza describes ―our waking‘s slow ascent‖ (l.11; my emphasis), reveals that both the lovers have been sleeping, which means that the experience described in the preceding stanzas could have also been a dream. The final line, describing the speaker as ―the dream‘s aftertaste, its scent‖ (l.12), mingles physical reality with the dreamworld. This suggests the influence that the physical world has on the world of the dream, and vice versa. The evocation of taste and smell also works to suggest the sensations of sexual intimacy. Rather than using visual descriptors, De Kok mentions two of the less prominent senses, suggesting a more fully rounded experience of another person‘s body. Finally, there is the description of the lover turning to ―lipread‖ the speaker‘s ―dark silent mouth‖ (l.10). In a poem that I have argued is about alternative and revolutionary means of representation, this image can be read as a call for alternative means of communication. Although the speaker‘s mouth is ―dark‖ and ―silent‖ – that is, it cannot be read visually or audibly – the lover is able to employ touch, to ―lipread‖ her mouth. The image of ―lipread‖ refers to the ability to read a speaking person‘s mouth visually even if they cannot be heard and so directly speaks of an alternative method of understanding another. However, here ―lipread‖ cleverly evokes the image of a kiss and suggests that this kind of physical contact is not merely for titillation, it is also a form of communication. Thus, the poem not only offers an alternative catalogue of images for describing the erotic, but also a new sense of what the erotic might mean. It is not only a sensation, the poem suggests, but an essential means of communicating, of understanding and of experiencing intimacy.
2.9. Conclusion In this chapter I have argued that De Kok has, in her poems that deal with the subjects of romantic love and sexual intimacy, interrogated the violence and clichés of patriarchal 73 heteronormative representations of love and sex, and called for a rewriting of these notions. Her critique of the sexual exploitation of women in ―Woman in the glass‖ reveals the necessity for a revision of the patriarchal script that silences women and includes them only as props for the fulfilment of male desire. This revisionist project is apparent in ―To a would-be lover‖ and ―Words of love‖ where idealized notions of sexual intimacy are critiqued and there is a call for representations of ‗ordinary love‘ and sexual intimacy rather than pornographic depictions of sex. ―Woman, leaning away‖ explores woman‘s reduction to image and subverts this by employing a female speaker, rather than a male speaker, to gaze upon the photograph of a woman and engage with it imaginatively in order to better understand her lover. ―After forty‖ also writes against the sexual objectification and idealization of women through its depiction of the aging female body. The ways in which De Kok utilises imagery and references to poetic techniques in order to describe life after forty are also examined, as they arguably reveal an attempt to find alternative ways of representing women. The examination of ―Aubade‖, a revision of the traditional poetic form described in the title, reveals a focus on the private, ordinary moments of an intimate relationship. This poem arguably reveals what Kylie Thomas identifies as De Kok‘s overall project: using ―poetry to move us towards imagining ourselves anew, fusing the public and the private, forging and claiming a space for poetic-political intervention‖ (2011), by suggesting that the history of the most mundane and apparently unimportant of objects has greater implications. Finally, ―Brush stroke‖, with its suggestive depiction of the sensual contact of two dreaming lovers, offers an alternative way of describing the erotic and, similarly, a new definition of the erotic that is not pornographic. De Kok uses her poetry to move the reader towards imagining themselves, and their loves, anew and to recognise how the private sphere of love and sex is intimately connected to ‗political‘ concerns with power relations. Thus, by rewriting the most intimate of relations with others, De Kok offers alternative ways of being in the world and of writing about it.
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Chapter 3: Makhosazana Xaba - „Revolution in Poetic Language‟ 3.1. Introduction When asked, in an unpublished interview with V.M. Maqagi, ―Who is Khosi Xaba?‖, Makhosazana Xaba replies:
I am Nonkosi, Shwabade, Malobusohlanga, Nombobozinde, Nonxa siyakhathala, wena owahlephula isinkwa sebandla, wena othemba ukuphana kunokuncishana, Mazalakubusa. UNnonkosi omuhle ngisho nonyawo lwakhe, olufana nezihlabathi zolwandle.20 I think I am more interested in who I want to be. I am becoming because my identity cannot be solely based on my past. I am a political activist, an ex- Umkhonto we Sizwe21 member, a feminist, a women‘s health activist and a writer. (2009)
In this reply, Xaba situates herself firmly within Zulu culture, acknowledging her ancestry and its importance to her own sense of identity. However, she also acknowledges the fluidity of identity and how it changes over time – indeed, how it should be constantly developing. This conception of identity ties in with the next part of her answer, which lists her identifications as an activist in various spheres – as someone engaged in trying to change society for the better. The fact that she includes ‗writer‘ at the end of this list suggests that she sees writing as a form of activism, rather than as merely an aesthetic, non-political act. This dissertation is concerned with Makhosazana Xaba as feminist poet, but the other aspects of identity revealed in this quote clearly inform her poetry, as well as my reading of it. Her overtly political poems about race in South Africa, such as ―So‖ (2005: 42), which critiques the idea of the rainbow nation, and ―And the game plays on‖ (2005: 43-44), which decries the racially motivated violence in the ‗new‘ South Africa, are charged with the same anger that underpins her poems about the ‗undeclared‘ war against women, such as ―Dignity spills‖ (2005: 49-50). It is here that I begin my analysis of Xaba‘s work, with her powerful critique of the abuse and exploitation of women in South Africa. In the first section of this chapter, ―The silence of a lifetime‖ (2005: 18-20) and its uncompromising examination of the rape of women across all ages, classes and geographical locations is examined. ―The silence of a lifetime‖ eschews symbolic language in favour of simple, factual language in order to bring across the horror of the lived experience of rape by
20 Clan praise names are difficult to translate, but Makhosazana Xaba provided a rough translation via email. Part of the function of clan praise names is to describe the historical significance and value of the clan and individuals within that clan. The Xabas‘ outstanding qualities that these praise names speak about are: their generosity of spirit and their deep-seated beauty that extends to their very feet, which resemble sea sands.
21 The military wing of the ANC during apartheid (Miller 2009). 75 letting the incidents she recounts speak for themselves. In order to more fully comprehend the nature of rape, Hannah Arendt‘s concept of the ‗banality of evil‘, identified in her work on the holocaust, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil (2006), is employed. Specifically, her argument that it is a lack of imagination that allows ‗ordinary‘ people to commit heinous acts is used in an analysis of the poem. Thus, it will be argued, this poem clearly reveals the necessity for re-imagining the discourse surrounding sexual acts and the availability of women‘s bodies. An example of the reclamation of women‘s subjectivity revealed to be so necessary in ―The silence of a lifetime‖ is apparent in ―Your eyes‖ (2005: 24-25). This section examines how Xaba plays with the gaze in its relation to desire in order to subvert the patriarchal use of the gaze to reduce women to fetishized sexual objects. Laura Mulvey‘s work on the nature of the gaze in ―Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema‖ (1975) is essential to this reading of the poem. By avoiding gendering the subjects within the poem and representing the gaze in numerous locales and in numerous ways, Xaba complicates both the notion of the gaze, and who has the custody of the gaze, as well as expanding the definition of the erotic. ―Solitary cloud‖ (2005: 28), which is examined in the next section, also reworks a trope traditionally associated with the oppression of women. Here, she gives the metaphor of land as the body of woman, often employed to justify the colonial imperative, as discussed by Grace Musila and Alison Blunt, back to the female speaker of the poem. She also uses the metaphor of water to re-imagine female desire and sexual intimacy outside of the patriarchal imagination. Water-related imagery and female desire also appears in ―The brown pelican‖ (2005: 22- 23). The use of the unusual image of the brown pelican is examined in its relation to lesbian desire and this section suggests that the fantasies of intimacy that appear in both ―The brown pelican‖ and ―Solitary cloud‖ are a powerful re-imagining of the notion of intimacy itself. Furthermore, the notion of what can be termed ‗erotic fantasy‘, as it is imagined in these poems, is used by Xaba to avoid graphic representations of sexual intimacy. In order to re-conceptualize what ‗erotic fantasy‘ might mean outside of the patriarchal imagination, Audre Lorde‘s definition of the erotic in ―Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power‖ (1984) and Judith Butler‘s definition of fantasy in her essay, ―Beside Oneself: On the Limits of Sexual Autonomy‖, found in Undoing Gender (2004), are employed. The reworking of the language and imagery with which we depict love, desire and sex, a concern apparent in all of the poems discussed here, is foregrounded in ―Soul-mating‖ (2005: 37). This section examines how Xaba interrogates and rewrites the clichés of the soul mate and of capturing someone‘s soul. Furthermore, it is concerned with alternative metaphor, that of 76 building an abode, which Xaba presents as an alternative way of imagining a romantic relationship. Xaba‘s use of the manual labour of building as a way of constructively imagining a romantic relationship is read in relation to Lorde‘s argument that the erotic should not be separated from the aspects of life other than sex, but should rather be recognised in all these aspects, especially in work. The next section analyses ―Love poem for my writing group‖ (2005: 27) and its subversion of the traditional, male-centric love poem. It examines how a writing group comprised of women can be seen as revolutionary and how the poem itself, through its use of poetic techniques such as alliteration and its reference to voiceless sound, invokes what Julia Kristeva terms the semiotic; that which undermines the patriarchal symbolic order. Finally, the representation of the development of a woman‘s sexual identity in ―Waking up‖ (2005: 39) is examined. Once again, Xaba employs a familiar metaphor – a day as a lifetime – for subversive purposes. Here, Xaba is not only concerned with depicting a life that, over time, moved beyond the boundaries of heteronormativity, but is also concerned with the symbolic and the binary nature of the symbolic order, which Helene Cixous identifies and critiques in ―Sorties‖ (1986). Through her play with the symbol of the sun and the binary of light and dark, she destabilises the problematic binary opposition of male/female and its various associations. Taken together, these poems suggest an attempt to rework the language that is available to describe romantic love and desire and, indeed, all life experiences. Of all the poets whose work is examined in this dissertation, Xaba‘s representation of romantic love and sexual intimacy is the most overt and unapologetic. She writes of rape as unequivocally horrific, presents the body in all its abject detail, and describes the joys, agonies and uncertainties of love convincingly. Through her use of poetry that pushes against the boundaries of the patriarchal symbolic order, I will argue that Xaba stages what Kristeva calls a ―Revolution in Poetic Language‖. It is in this way that she stands in opposition to the silencing of women; providing a woman‘s voice that unapologetically speaks out and so claims a new language for writing about sexuality, sex, desire and romantic love.
3.2. The Stark Reality of Rape in “The silence of a lifetime” Makhosazana Xaba‘s poem, ―Dignity spills‖ (2005: 49-50) found in These Hands, requires that readers recognise the ―undeclared‖ war22 ―of sons on daughters,/ brothers on sisters,/ uncles on aunts,/ fathers on mothers,/ grandfathers on grandmothers‖ (ll.5-9 49) in South Africa. ―The
22 Susan Faludi‘s seminal work about how society claims feminism has achieved its goals while gross inequalities are still apparent between genders is, interestingly, titled Backlash: The undeclared war against women (1992). Whether or not Xaba is referencing the work, she can still be seen to be continuing Faludi‘s project of pointing out the work that feminism still needs to do, though in a somewhat different location. 77 silence of a lifetime‖ (2005: 18), found earlier in the collection, also explicitly critiques violence visited upon women in its litany of rapes. With its repetitive structure and depiction of woman/women who can be read both as individuals and everywoman, it functions similarly to De Kok‘s ―Woman in the glass‖. As in ―The silence of a lifetime‖, this poem uses a number of stanzas, each containing the brief description of a woman experiencing some kind of sexual exploitation. This use of repetition in variation has a cumulative effect in both poems, revealing the extensiveness of women‘s exploitation. However, where De Kok‘s poem explores the complexity of women‘s fraught relationship with sexuality and desire and the insidious forms of exploitation these elicit, Xaba‘s poem is a blatant condemnation of the most brutal form of sexual violence. Pumla Gqola describes the poem as a comment on the ―cumulative rapes of a single woman‖ but notes that the ―poem is equally open‖ to being read as ―describing different women‖ (2009: 16). The poem‘s ambiguity about whether it is a single woman or multiple women in the poem allows for both readings simultaneously, presenting a scathing indictment of a patriarchal South African society that results in such violence against women of every age and in multiple, everyday situations. The repetition used in the poem complements the factual tone which is employed. Poetry is generally associated with the use of symbolic and descriptive language, of metaphor and images dense with connotations, but Xaba eschews both in this poem. The horror of the act of rape in each stanza is conveyed, not through the use of adjectives, but rather through the repetitive listing of the facts of the rape. Here, it seems that metaphor is inadequate in the face of the reality of rape. Xaba hammers the reader with the realities of rape, accumulating incidents, allowing the facts to speak for themselves. The lines of the stanzas are short and each one acts as a violent thrust, forcing the facts at the reader just as the woman being raped is forced into submission. This pared down language is more characteristic of drama than poetry and each stanza can be seen to function as an ‗act‘, emphasising the act of rape. Each stanza, or ‗act‘, provides the characters, the setting, the action and the dialogue. Each is set out formulaically. Just as an act in a script is expected to follow a certain structure, each act of rape is described as following a specific pattern and the characters are typecast, either as ‗rapist‘ or ‗victim‘. The repetition of the formula in each stanza serves to emphasize the sameness of every act of rape, while at the same time revealing its pervasiveness by noting multiple locations, times and perpetrators. Rape is not something that merely happens once. For one thing, the trauma of rape means that the woman might relive the violation again and again and, furthermore, women are raped multiple times and continue to be raped in South Africa every day. The act of rape is repeated over and over again, the setting different, the violence the same. Rape is thus 78 represented in the poem as an ongoing and unresolved crisis in South African society which requires continual recognition. In each stanza the rapist is identified and, every time, the man, or men, are no stranger to the woman. He is uncle, classmate, boyfriend, husband, colleague or neighbour, just as in ―Dignity Spills‖ women‘s ―grandfathers, fathers, uncles, brothers and sons/ are none other than soldiers of war‖ (ll.24-25). Thus, patriarchy is shown to be at its most potent in intimate relationships. The poem respectively describes: the rape of a seven year old girl by her uncle, a schoolgirl raped by her peers, a young woman raped by her first boyfriend, a woman raped in marriage by her husband, a businesswoman raped by her colleagues and an old woman in a village raped by her neighbour. From family contexts to work affiliations, women are dehumanized and exploited. These poems demonstrate that the perpetrators of rape are most often intimately known by the women.23 Indeed, there is the suggestion that intimacy and love are not deterrents for sexual violence, but are strongly linked to it in complex and disturbing ways. For example, in the poem, Xaba reveals rape to be linked to ideas about romantic love. In the third stanza, an eighteen year old girl is ―date-raped/ by her first boyfriend‖ (ll.28-29 18). Here, the term ‗date-rape‘ takes on an uncomfortably personal dimension. Once again, Xaba dispels the notion that rape is perpetrated only by strangers. Date-rape is normally seen as entirely impersonal – a stranger drugs a woman‘s drink, which is often implied to be her fault for not being careful enough, and then rapes her – but here the girl is raped on a date with her first boyfriend. Even amongst adolescents it seems as though the male conquest over female sexuality is built into the script of a potential romantic liaison. This girl‘s first experience of sexual intimacy reveals the patriarchal violence programmed into the script of romantic love. The boyfriend‘s words, ―Prove that you love me‖ (l.42 19), are all too familiar. They are themselves scripted, clichéd, and they reveal a masculine entitlement to sexual gratification, one built into the notion of romantic relationships. These words also reveal a model of romantic love in which the woman is expected to submit. It is the woman who has to prove her love – the man has nothing to prove, he is entitled to fulfil his desires. This is also apparent in the stanza where the woman is raped by her husband, who
23 In a 2009 Medical Research Council policy brief, entitled ―Understanding Men‘s Health and Use of Violence: Interface of Rape and HIV in South Africa‖, in which 1738 men were interviewed, the following was reported: ―Rape of a current or ex-girlfriend was disclosed by 14.3% of men. Since many men had raped more than once, rape of a woman or girl who was not a partner was actually more often reported than rape of partners. In all, only 4.6% of men had raped a partner and not raped a woman who was not a partner (i.e. an acquaintance or stranger). 11.7% of men had raped an acquaintance or stranger (but not a partner) and 9.7% had raped both‖ (2009: 1). Since 26.7% of the men interviewed had raped a woman or girl, more than half of those who perpetrated rape had raped someone with whom they were intimate.
79 justifies his entitlement to her body by invoking the conjugal rights of marriage: ―You are my wife, aren‘t you?‖ (l.55). He thus reduces her to her roles as wife and mother, as she is breastfeeding their child while he rapes her. This reveals and critiques the inherited concepts of love and marriage where there is always a power imbalance and where woman functions as exchange value rather than being recognised as a human being. The self-sacrificing connotations of love are reserved entirely for women, who are expected to make their bodies available to fulfil the desires of men. Furthermore, the notion of love is utilised to manipulate women. Women are threatened with its loss if they do not fulfil their role as girlfriend, wife, even mother. Patriarchal discourse tells women that they are nothing without the love of a man and then ascribes certain conditions to that love. It is this patriarchal script inherent in notions of romantic love, and apparent in the all too familiar line, ―Prove that you love me‖ (l.42), that needs to be rewritten. The pervasiveness of the violence of patriarchy suggested by the accumulated citations of rape, is further emphasised by the description of the various ‗settings‘ of the rapes in each ‗act‘. Firstly, the time of the rape, ranging from ―the middle of the night‖ (l.3 18) to ―broad daylight‖ (l.17), is noted. Once again, rape is shown to be inescapable, even every moment of the day contains the potential for sexual violence. The lines following this, describe the place in which the rape occurs. Each space is familiar, and often it is in the home, which is supposed to be a place of safety and security. Thus, the poem debunks the myth that only women who move around at night in unsafe environments get raped. Rape can, and most often is, be perpetrated by the most familiar of people, at any time and in even the most ‗safe‘ of places. The descriptions of the places where the women are raped each note that this space is inhabited by others. This regularity of the occurrence of rape in busy places where other people are likely to witness the rape, but never do anything about it, suggests how rape has become normalized in society. The poem reveals a kind of bystander apathy, where the community is too oblivious or too desensitised to act. In the very first stanza, it is the family itself, ―asleep/ on every available floor space‖ (ll.9-10), which is oblivious to the rape of their seven-year-old daughter/niece in the family home. The image of a crowded family home suggests a certain socioeconomic background. A small house suggests poverty and that it is probably a township home. There is the suggestion here that poverty exacerbates gender violence,24 but the poem does go on to describe rapes happening against the backdrop of other socioeconomic conditions. The rape of a well-off businesswoman stands in the starkest contrast to the rape of the seven-year-old girl in this regard. Thus, while the poem acknowledges the condition of poverty and its link to
24 ―Men who had raped were significantly more likely to have earnings of over R500 per month, although they were not more likely to be in the top income bracket, over R10 000. Men who raped were more likely to have occasional work and less likely to have never worked at all‖ (2009: 1). 80 gender violence, this violence is revealed as permeating society across socioeconomic boundaries. Similarly, while the proximity of the family to the rape in stanza one is particularly disturbing, the lack of awareness shown by the ―thousand‖ (l.21) scholars in stanza two and the ―millions of city dwellers‖ (l.34 19) in stanza three, too concerned with ―their own important mission‖ (l.35) to notice the date-rape of a young woman, is equally frightening. All these moments expose a society that is too self-involved to prevent the violence against its most vulnerable members. In the poem, one of the aspects portrayed as being essential to the act of rape is the silencing of women in order to allow for the continuation of the repetitive violence of rape. In the final lines of the first stanza, the seven year old muffles her own cries. This suggests that, even at this young age, she has already learnt to act as the passive recipient of male sexual desire. Furthermore, the man imposes silence upon her to protect himself from retribution, ―whispering to her,/ ‗Don‘t ever tell anyone‘‖ (ll.13-14 18). In addition to the violation of her body and the forceful removal of her agency is the imposition of silence – the choking off of her voice.25 The girl‘s cries are muffled ―as his penis suffocated her‖ (l.12), which suggests that the man is forcing her into fellatio. This image challenges the stereotypical idea of rape as intercourse, revealing that the violation of the female body comes in many forms. Furthermore, this image acts as a graphic illustration of the silencing of women, where a woman, or girl‘s, mouth is only valuable as an orifice to accept and pleasure the phallus. This kind of discourse is apparent throughout the poem, as each woman is silenced in one way or another. In the poem, language is the prerogative of the rapists who use it to justify, legitimate or otherwise protect themselves from the consequences of their acts. In the first three stanzas, the rapists‘ words are commands: ―Don‘t ever tell anyone‖ (l.14), ―Stop thinking you‘re so smart‖ (l.27), and ―Prove that you love me‖ (l.42 19). Firstly, this is indicative of the way women are often expected to submit to male authority without question. Secondly, these commands represent the various things that women are often told by society: be silent, be stupid (or at least not smarter than any man) and acquiesce to the notions of romantic love that place woman in the subordinate position to man. The rapists‘ words in the last three stanzas are phrased as interrogatory questions: ―You are my wife, aren‘t you?‖ (l.55), ―So, who‘s the boss now?‖ (l.71 20), and ―When last did you get it, old woman?‖ (l.91). These questions are not meant to be
25 A consideration of other representations of rape reveals that this kind of silencing is often integral to the act. For example, in the opening letter of Alice Walker‘s The Colour Purple, Celie‘s stepfather, having raped her, says: ―You’d better not never tell nobody but God” (1983: 3), literally choking off her cries and telling her to ―shut up‖ (1983: 3). The fact that Celie‘s ‗father‘s‘ acts and words are so uncannily mirrored in the actions of the uncle in this poem reinforces the repetitiveness of the act of rape; rape as a mindless perpetuation of patriarchal values, a learnt behaviour.
81 answered by the women being raped, which reinforces the fact that they are so forcibly silenced. This interrogatory mode of questioning is thus not to gain information, but rather to threaten the woman for her perceived disobedience or possible resistance. The correct answer is silence, acquiescence. Through her employment of these various aspects of language, Xaba arguably reveals how language, working within the symbolic order, functions to maintain oppressive patriarchal discourse. In other words, how the language we use is made up of words that justify violence against women. The words of the rapists in the last three stanzas also label the women they rape: ―wife‖ (l.55 19), ―Sweetie‖ (l.73 20), and ―old woman‖ (l.91). The women in all the stanzas remain nameless and are respectively reduced to a role, a condescending endearment and, finally, age and gender. It is clear that the rapists do not see the women they are violating as people with voices, names and roles or identities that are not defined by their gender, such as friend, writer, dreamer, artist, student or storyteller. Xaba‘s project in her poetry, as I discuss in the sections that follow, is arguably to reinvent herself and to reclaim all these aspects of being that have been denied to women. The failure of the men in the poem to recognise the women they rape as more than objects suggests a lack of imagination. This failure of the imagination is also apparent in the fact that the words they use and the acts of the rapes themselves are all plagiarised. I spoke earlier of the repetition of the structure of each stanza and of the familiarity of lines like ―Don‘t ever tell anyone‖ (l.14 18), ―Prove that you love me‖ (l.42 19) and ―So, who‘s the boss, now?‖ (l.71 20). The poem reveals the sameness of the act of rape through a relentless accumulation of evidence, presenting women of different ages, in different places and their individual experiences of rape. The ubiquitous phenomenon of rape can be understood in relation to the concept of the ‗banality of evil‘. This concept was identified by Hannah Arendt in her writing about one of the main orchestrators of the holocaust, Adolf Eichmann. She suggested that this man, who had ordered the death of so many, was not ―diabolical or demonic‖ (2006: 285) in any way, but was, rather, ‗thoughtless‘. He ―never realised what he was doing‖ (2006: 285) because he lacked the imagination to think through his actions or to think of an alternative course of action other than the one prescribed by his superiors. I do not wish to suggest that rape is the same as genocide or that it functions in the same manner. Most obviously, in the context of the poem, the men are not being told to rape these women by their superiors. However, their actions are being informed by a certain kind of authority that provides the words and actions that they employ. Their actions are informed by an inherited patriarchal discourse that suffuses their society and provides them with the script that 82 informs the enactment of this violence upon women and the discourse of power that is used to justify it. The poem reveals, I would argue, a lack of imagination: a failure to imagine an alternative way of being man, a failure to imagine an alternative way of interacting with woman or to imagine woman as human, and a failure to imagine the effects of their violation of woman. In her book, Arendt considers Eichmann‘s culpability and comes to the conclusion that he, the individual, has to be found guilty. For him to claim that he was merely a cog in the bureaucratic Nazi government is the same, Arendt argues, as a criminal citing crime statistics and declaring that ―he only did what was statistically expected, that it was mere accident that he did it and not somebody else, since after all somebody had to do it‖ (2006: 287). This analogy reveals the lack of imagination, and agency, of such a person; the assumption that nothing can be altered by the act of an individual, even when it is individuals who make up the statistics. Xaba‘s poem, in its factual staging of acts of rape, functions similarly to rape statistics by revealing the pervasiveness of rape, but also serves to humanise the statistics – to point to the individuals who rape and are raped. Furthermore, she highlights the complicity of the community, who‘s apathy could be seen to stem partly from a selfish concern with their individual lives, they are always ―minding their own business‖ (20), but also from an assumption that rape statistics reveal a reality that cannot be changed. In this poem there is a call, not only for men to stop raping women, but also for people to become responsible for, and active in, their communities in acknowledging the enormity and banality of the evil of rape. Xaba demands that people be held accountable, and hold themselves accountable; but how to go about making this change? I argue that Adrienne Rich has an answer when she writes about ―the subversive function of the imagination‖ (9) in her article ―When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-vision‖. If it is ―lack of imagination‖ (2006: 285) that enables great evil, then it is arguably the exercise of imagination that can engender change for the better. Thus, Xaba‘s use of imagination in crafting this poem not only serves to break ―The silence of a lifetime‖, but can also be seen as a revolutionary act, an imaginative intervention into the lives of those around her.
3.3. Reclaiming the Gaze in “Your eyes” In ―The silence of a lifetime‖, Xaba exposes a society where women are often considered to be little more the sexual objects, to be exploited for various purposes and stripped of any kind of power. This poem clearly establishes the need for a re-vision of the discourses surrounding gender relations and the act of sex. These discourses are predominantly characterised by a power imbalance – men have it or take it at the expense of women – which manifests itself in a number of ways. For example, the foreword to a 2011 South African gender report, although the country 83 has a ―strong legal framework in respect of gender equality and women‘s rights (…). on the ground discriminatory practices, social norms and persistent stereotypes often shape inequitable access to opportunities, resources and power for women and girls‖ (2011: vi). The report goes on to note the ―unacceptable levels of gender-based violence‖ (2011: vi) that Xaba critiques in ―The silence of a lifetime‖ as well as other forms of inequality, such as unequal pay for the same amount of work, higher unemployment rates among women and so on. Another, less overt way in which women are disempowered is through their portrayal in various forms of representation. As well as using the poetic form to reveal inequality, Xaba can also be seen to employ various subversive tactics in order to combat the various ways women have been disenfranchised. One of the most prominent ways she does this is by re-appropriating a familiar trope and employing it in unfamiliar and revolutionary ways. In her poem, ―Your eyes‖ (2005: 24-25), she takes on the gaze. As the title suggests, ―Your eyes‖ is centred on the gaze, specifically the erotic potential of the gaze. The poem details the development of a love affair by focusing on the role of the eyes of the speaker‘s lover in each moment. The poem details various scenes in which the lover gazes upon the speaker while she speaks behind a mic, while they spend a night in a hotel room or share a meal in a restaurant. The poem employs a kind of synecdoche, which is a figure of speech ―in which the name of a part is substituted for that of a whole‖ (Baldick 2001: 154). In this case, the eyes, as well as functioning as eyes, serve to represent the speaker‘s lover. This brings the role of the gaze in its relation to desire to the fore. Desire and the gaze have a complex relationship, and one which is linked to gender power relations. Various theorists have noted that the act of looking or watching can be pleasurable and this innate love of watching apparent in human beings is known as scopophilia. Laura Mulvey‘s ideas about the gaze, presented in her seminal work, ―Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema‖ (1975), based upon Sigmund Freud‘s work on the gaze, are useful in unpacking the ways in which the gaze has been employed to objectify women. Although her theorising deals specifically with the issue of the gaze in film, it can be adapted to examine issues of the gaze more generally and applied to other forms of representation. ―Your eyes‖ is an erotic poem, one which employs the gaze of the lover in order to explore the erotic pleasures of the visual. While the term, scopophilia suggests that it is watching that is pleasurable, to be gazed upon and desired is also pleasurable. However, while there is pleasure to be found in looking as well as being looked upon, 84
[i]n a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female.26 The determining male gaze projects its phantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their visual appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness (Mulvey 1975: 4). Thus, within the patriarchal system of representation, woman becomes the object to be gazed upon, to be the source of erotic pleasure, always different, ‗othered‘, and never to be identified with as the same, as also human. Furthermore, she is denied the erotic pleasure of the gaze, is always looked-upon, never looking. In ―Your eyes‖, Xaba re-deploys the erotic gaze in a manner that undermines the problematic binary distinction between the active, presumed male, subject of the gaze and the passive, presumed female, object of the gaze. Firstly, the I in ―Your eyes‖, the driving creative force behind the form of representation, is the woman who is being looked upon. This subverts what Mulvey calls the ―active/passive heterosexual division of labor‖ (1975: 5) which she argues controls narrative structure in film. In conventional narrative cinema, the woman functions as erotic spectacle while ―the man‘s role [is] the active one of forwarding the story, [of] making things happen‖ (1975: 5). The man‘s point of view is often conflated with both that of the film viewer and of the director, the creator of the story. Thus, man bears the agency. Of course, poetry is a very different medium to film, but, historically, women‘s appearance in poetry has functioned in a similar manner as is apparent in Rich‘s observations in ―When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-vision‖ (1971) about how women have appeared as beautiful objects to be gazed upon by the male poets, treated as luxuries or reproached for refusing to be. In ―Your eyes‖, however, the woman poet/speaker is both eroticized spectacle, whose form draws the gaze of an ‗other‘, and active agent shaping the narrative of desire. The poem thus presents a play of desire more complicated than the traditional binary formulation of the active male desiring subject and the passive female desired object. The active subject, the I in the poem, is also the ostensibly passive object of the gaze; while the object of the poem, the ‗other‘ to the speaker‘s I, is the active possessor of the gaze. That the gaze belongs to this desired and desiring ‗other‘ is highlighted by the title and the opening line of the poem, which emphasizes ―[y]our eyes‖ (l.1 24; my emphasis). The use of the possessive pronoun clearly identifies the gaze as belonging to this ‗other‘ and not belonging to the speaker.
26 The active/passive binary that Mulvey recognises in film is noted by other theorists more generally. For example, Helene Cixous, in her essay, ―Sorties‖ (1986), writes: ―A male privilege which can be seen in the opposition by which it sustains itself, between activity and passivity. Traditionally, the question of sexual difference is coupled with the same opposition: activity/passivity‖ (360). 85
However, not only does ―Your eyes‖, present the subject of the gaze as the active creative force behind the poem itself, it also undermines the active/male, passive/female dichotomy by never indicating the gender of the lovers. Thus, it cannot be assumed that the speaker is female and the lover, the one to whom the gaze in the poem belongs, is male. Furthermore, many of Xaba‘s poems, such as ―The brown pelican‖, ―Solitary cloud‖ and ―Waking up‖ describe lesbian relationships and so it could very reasonably be argued that this poem does too. If this is the case then both the person employing the desiring gaze and the person being looked upon are women and the traditional dichotomy associated with the gaze is undermined. The poem also refuses to display the speaker in the manner that Mulvey discusses, where the female form becomes coded for the erotic. Even if it is a woman who is gazing upon another woman, the fact that the poem does not fulfil patriarchal conventions of representation is still important. The nature of the speaker‘s position in the content of the poem refutes her reduction to a mere object of visual pleasure. Although she is described as being on stage in the poem, it is not in a spectacular manner. The first stanza distinguishes the lover‘s gaze from the multiple gazes of ―the crowds of colleagues in the hall‖ (l.2). The lover looks up at the speaker who is standing on stage behind a mic, most likely addressing the crowd below, most likely in her capacity as a public figure. In other places in the poem the speaker attempts to guide a group ―to picture/ a vision far beyond the present‖ (ll.20-21) and also ―attempt[s] to reach consensus/ with a mini crowd from varying African hills‖ (ll.28-29). The speaker is thus not only speaker of the poem but also a speaker within the poem. The nature of her occupation is active, not decorative, and in these three places her lover‘s gaze is drawn to her not as object of display but as speaker, visionary, facilitator. Thus, while the speaker‘s visual presence is implied by the focus on her lover‘s gaze, the content and form of the poem highlights her vocal presence. Similarly to De Kok, Xaba counters the reduction of women to image with an emphasis on the voice of women. Furthermore, the distinction between the gaze and the voice is blurred within the poem, most blatantly when the lover, her eyes lingering with tears, speaks ―with them/ into the dawning of the next day‖ (ll.2-8). In this moment, Xaba employs the poetic technique of synaesthesia, that ― blending or confusion of different kinds of sense-impression, in which one type of sensation is referred to in terms more appropriate to another‖ (2001: 254). Here, visual stimulus is described in terms more befitting the sound of a voice. In this way, the two main forms of agency depicted in the poem, the gaze and the voice, are intermingled, suggesting that they are equally powerful. The lovers within the poem are presented as equals. Thus, the dichotomy between active subject and passive object is also dissolved, just as the sensory distinction between sound and sight is blurred through the use of synaesthesia. 86
Not only does the poem refuse the active/passive dichotomy traditionally associated with the gaze, it also undermines the dichotomy between erotic and narcissistic scopophilia, which Mulvey identified in Freud‘s work. Mulvey explains that erotic scopophilia ―arises from pleasure in using another person as an object of sexual stimulation through sight‖ and that the second ―comes from identification with the image seen‖ (1975: 4). Thus, erotic scopophilia, the appreciation of woman‘s form, is evident in the way the lover‘s eyes, in the first stanza, ―shoot across [the speaker‘s] chest‖ (l.1) and are, in stanza five, ―nailed on [the speaker‘s] torso‖ (l.18). The use of the words ―screw‖ (l.9) and ―nailed‖ (l.18), with their connotations of sexual intercourse, highlight the link between the gaze and sexual desire, while their connotations of penetration suggest the potential of the gaze to look, to know and, thus, to control. The use of these highly sexualised and somewhat violent terms can be seen to point to the violent history of the gaze, thus highlighting the power relations which the poem then goes on to subvert, firstly by not identifying the genders of the lovers in the poems. This is most obviously apparent in the use of the word ‗breed‘ in relation to the gaze. Since the lovers are not necessarily involved in a heterosexual relationship, the ‗natural‘ association of reproduction and sexual intimacy becomes unsettled, which means that the word has to be rethought. It needs to be considered in relation to an alternative kind of generativity – one that is not heteronormative. Furthermore, the poem also describes the gaze within the poem in alternative ways. The lover uses her eyes to ―speak with them‖ (l.7) and to ―marvel‖ (l.25) at the speaker and, even when the eyes are ‗screwing‘ and ‗piercing‘, they are interacting with the speaker‘s eyes, thus recognising her ability to gaze back. In the final stanza, the speaker writes that the eyes of her lover have been ―greeting‖ (l.33 25) and ―meeting‖ (l.33) her eyes, even ―breeding‖ (l.33) with them. This is not the gaze of objectification, but rather the gaze of mutual recognition.27 To gaze into the eyes of another is to recognise their sameness, their humanity. It is to recognise that they, like you, can gaze back. This can be seen to allude to narcissistic scopophilia – to the pleasure of the recognition of the other as the same, as equal. It also suggests that the intimacy between the two lovers is more than merely physical – more than sexual objectification based on appearance. This is perhaps most clearly apparent in the final lines of the poem where the speaker notes that, despite having been gazing into her lover‘s eyes ―for over a year now‖ (l.32) and still doesn‘t ―know what colour they are‖ (l.36). Thus, while the physical aspect of their relationship is not to be discounted, the use of the scientific terms ―schlera‖ (l.34) and ―retina‖ (l.35) in the same stanza emphasise the physical form of the gaze, the intimacy between them is not based on
27 The gaze as a means of recognition also appears in ―Tear Essence‖ (2005: 41). Here the gaze is a means of communication, as the speaker‘s lover, whenever she touches her thighs, shoots her ―special familiar smile into [the speaker‘s] eyes‖ (41). 87 superficial physical aspects, such as eye colour. Eye colour is often linked to idealized standards of physical beauty, the Aryan ideal of blue eyes most obviously, and so for Xaba to disregard it in ―Your eyes‖ can be read as a refusal to understand intimacy in purely physical terms. However, while the gaze can be recognised as both erotic and narcissistic in the poem, the cumulative effect of the verbs, with their various connotations, is to break down the binary opposition of erotic/narcissistic. The gaze that interacts with the gaze of the speaker, the attempt at connection and identification rather than simply the search for visual pleasure, is couched in terms of the erotic. The use of a variety of verbs suggests that the gaze has a multiplicity of functions and that there are multiple ways of desiring. While the gaze is clearly sexual, it also relates to emotion, respect and intimacy. It is not only couched in terms of the spectacular, but is associated with both public spaces, like the restaurant in stanza five, and private spaces, such as the hotel room in stanza two. In this way, through staging various encounters all centred around the gaze, Xaba associates the erotic gaze with a plurality of visual encounters, not just the stereotypical encounter of the body in the bedroom. Stanza two, which is set in a hotel room at night, presents the closest to this kind of encounter, but here the lover‘s eyes ―linger with tears‖ (l.5 24), revealing vulnerability and offering emotional intimacy rather than the intimacy usually associated with the erotic. Here, Audre Lorde‘s definition of pornography in ―Uses of the Erotic‖ (1984) is helpful as she argues that ―[p]ornography emphasizes sensation without feeling‖ (1984: 54) and that the erotic is ―true feeling‖ (1984: 54). Thus, the conflation of sexuality and emotion, of sexual intimacy and feeling, in this poem reclaims the erotic by to refusing to separate the erotic from the recognition of the Other as subject.
3.4. Metaphors of Land and Water in “Solitary cloud” The preceding analysis of ―Your eyes‖ examines Xaba‘s subversive use of a trope traditionally associated with the sexual objectification and disempowerment of women. Her use of synecdoche as well as descriptive, metaphorical language and sexual innuendo stands in contrast to the factual language of ―The silence of a lifetime‖. It is thus apparent that Xaba tailors the style and structure of each poem to fit the content and that she is experimenting with various types of language in order to find the most effective way of conveying her meaning. Her experimentation with metaphor in rewriting the language of love and desire is particularly apparent in her poems ―Solitary cloud‖ and ―The brown pelican‖ where she utilises almost- familiar images in new ways in order to depict erotic love and its loss outside of dominant heterosexual romantic script. 88
―Solitary cloud‖ (2005: 28), speaks about the loss of love and its possible reclamation. The poem begins with the speaker describing the devastating effects of the loss of her lover, likening her body to the soil of a desert when no rains have fallen, soil that is ―cracking, itching, aching‖ (l.3 28). She longs ―for raindrops to nourish, heal,/ fill the gaps, soothe the pain‖ (ll.5-6). In the second stanza she wonders if the relief she longs for, the return of her lover into her life, might be imminent and describes the process of them being intimately reunited through the metaphor of a passage through water, her body to eventually be washed up onto her lover‘s ―shore‖ (l.14). The poem ends with the evocation of a hope that the woman whom she loves, the ―desert maker‖ (l.20), who caused her this pain, might also be the one to ease this pain by moulding the ―solitary cloud in the sky‖ (l.21). In the poem, natural imagery of land and water is employed, as is apparent in the title itself. The metaphors of woman‘s body as land and water as love are common ones, and have often been used problematically. For example, the land as body metaphor is often employed in colonial and postcolonial texts. Grace Musila writes about the relationship between body and land in the postcolonial Zimbabwean novel Butterfly Burning by Yvonne Vera, but her insights provide useful context to Xaba‘s subversive use of this metaphor. Musila explains that ―nationalist discourses constituted the African nation as the feminine victim of an aggressive colonial master‖ (2007: 51), being ‗raped‘ for her valuable resources. In this moment, the female body as geography places women in the position of victim and territory. Furthermore, Musila argues that the ―use of the body-as-metaphor creates a gap between the level of discourse in which the body is a linguistic object on the one hand and lived experience on the other‖ (2007: 51). Thus, the female body becomes abstracted, becomes the body, the land. Woman‘s body, in this conceptualization, is no longer her own. Rather, it is appropriated for rhetorical purposes, these purposes being patriarchal and colonial in nature. The use of natural imagery and metaphors in relation to the female body and to sexuality are also problematic in other ways. Angela Carter, in her criticism of pornography, talks about how ―[a] whole range of images poeticises, kitschifies, particularises intercourse‖ and specifically identifies images ―such as wind beating down corn, rain driving against bending trees‖ (2000: 8) and so on. This has an effect similar to the one Musila argues the colonial and postcolonial depiction of land as woman has – it appears to be a positive connotation but is, in fact, damaging. In these images, Carter writes, the soil is presented as the woman‘s self and that, in the face of this powerful image ―any woman may manage… to feel herself for a little while one with great, creating nature‖ but that, in doing so, ―she loses herself completely and loses her partner also‖ (2000: 8). Here, the spectacular metaphors employed to describe sexual intercourse 89 are revealed to be pornographic, in that they remove the individual from the act, reducing sexual intimacy to a grand narrative that is repetitive, unimaginative and the same for everyone. Sex comes to be represented as universal and, thus, impersonal. In ―Solitary cloud‖, the speaker‘s body is clearly identified with the land. The damage the loss of her lover causes is represented by her ―cracked body‖ (l.10), clearly the desert in the first stanza, the ―soil cracking, itching, aching‖ (l.3). The water imagery within the poem functions in concert with this metaphor – the body is ―[d]eadened‖ (l.9) due to lack of love, conceptualized here as water in various forms. However, Xaba counters the abstraction, the impersonalisation, which both Musila and Carter note in relation to the use of such metaphors. Firstly, the speaker‘s loss is not abstract, but specific, relating to a specific lover and relationship. This is highlighted by the second line, where the exact moment of the creation of this ‗desert‘ is identified: ―Friday, 13 July‖ (l.2). As well as establishing specificity, this date can also be read to have symbolic meaning. Friday the thirteenth is generally known as an unlucky date, as a day when damage will be done. Secondly, and more importantly, the poem places the possession of the female body back in women‘s hands. It is the female speaker herself who employs the metaphor of her body as land. Xaba avoids abstracting the woman‘s body by writing ―my cracked body‖ (1.10; my emphasis). While the speaker‘s body might be damaged, it is still hers and is rendered as such by the simple use of a possessive pronoun. Adrienne Rich, in ―Towards a Politics of Location‖ (1985), writes powerfully of the importance of claiming one‘s own body in all its specificity. She writes that ―it‘s... possible to abstract ‗the‘ body‖ (1985: 10), but ―[t]o write ‗my body‘ plunges me into lived experience‖ (1985: 10). Rich has also explored the relationship between body and land, reworking this metaphor for women‘s empowerment. She considers the body as location, calling for women to begin their process of self-identification with ―the geography closest in – the body‖ (Rich 1985: 8-9). Xaba does this in ―Solitary cloud‖, examining the emotional and abstract effects of the loss of love through the physical body of the speaker.28 In a way, through the use of the metaphor of land as body, she returns woman to her body, rather than advocating a separation between self and body. Thus, it is clear that the fact that the female speaker herself employs the metaphor is an essential factor in the subversion of the colonial implications of the imagery. Alison Blunt, in Writing Women and Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies (1994), deals with the ways
28 Xaba often refers explicitly to the body. In ―While I wait‖ (2005: 48), a poem about waiting for someone to decide whether they are willing to commit to you, she likens the integration of two lives in a relationship with physical symptoms of disease – ―Are you afraid to let me into your heart,/ through your arteries and veins,/ for I might clog them up,/ causing a stroke?‖ (48). Here, as in ―Solitary cloud‖, she acknowledges the bodily in romantic love, as well as employing familiar metaphors in unusual ways. 90 in which women have been conflated with landscape within the Irish imagination. The situation in Ireland has many similarities to those of South African and Blunt‘s discussion provides useful insight into how landscape and women are perceived. Both the colonial and postcolonial conceptions of landscape, she argues, reveal an ―adoption of a masculinist position or a fixed, natural, or inherent identity, or a restrictive notion of space‖ (1994: 239). This masculinist position is contingent on what Blunt calls a ―feminization of the field of vision‖ (1994: 239), where women are aligned with landscape and are excluded from knowledge production. Therefore, the fact that the poet herself is a woman and that, by implication, the speaker is too, means that woman becomes a producer of knowledge, conceptualizing her own body, and looking-upon herself rather than taking up the passive position of ―the looked-upon‖ (1994: 239). Xaba plays with the landscape metaphor for her own purposes, utilising it as what Blunt calls ―a shifting strategic source of identification‖ (1994: 239). Instead of her body being appropriated by the white male gaze through association with the image of the landscape, she recognises her own body as land, but reads it outside of the colonial tenets of land. That is, outside of the territorial imperative to conquer and own both land and its peoples and thus outside of the colonial discourse that doubly oppressed black women. Furthermore, while Xaba utilises the agency of the I speaker for subversive purposes, she also positions the desired ‗other‘ in the poem as having agency. This ‗other‘ is engaged in knowledge production in the very first line: ―The desert you created‖ (l.1; my emphasis). The choice of the word ‗created‘ is a powerful one, as it suggests agency and productivity, even in the context of the loss of a relationship. The possible alternative, ―The desert you caused‖, reveals how this first sentence could have been phrased in an accusatory manner, suggesting a kind of cruel ignorance on the part of the ‗other‘. This would have been a poem, despite being written by a woman, which would have maintained certain patriarchal notions of love represented in the poetry of the past. Adrienne Rich writes about the tendencies of traditional poetry in ―When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision‖ (1971), which is discussed in more detail later. One thing she notes is that, in this poetry, the woman who stopped loving, or did not love, the male poet was represented as ―cruel or disastrously mistaken‖ and thus, in the poem, must be ―reproached… because she had refused to become a luxury for the poet‖ (1971: 5). In the tradition Rich speaks of, the desired ‗other‘ was objectified as a ‗luxury‘, their own desires not taken into account. By acknowledging the humanity of the ‗other‘, by giving her agency and not condemning her, Xaba problematizes the notion of the possession of the female body, even if it is by another woman. 91
In ―Solitary cloud‖, the image of water functions as a counterpoint to the image of land. Most obviously, it is the soothing balm that can bring life to the desert. However, it contrasts with the dryness and solidity of the land due to its fluid, ever-changing nature. The land, and body, of the speaker is static – she is trapped by the pain of her loss – but the water in the poem promises change, rebirth. The water arguably depicts love, and both the fluid nature of water and its depiction in the poem in various forms, from ―clouds‖ (l.8), to ―raindrops‖ (l.9), to ―river‖ (l.10) and ―ocean‖ (l.14), suggests that these concepts are most usefully conceptualised as similarly fluid. Water and the concept of fluidity has also been used extensively by feminist writers, specifically within the lesbian feminist imagination, to productively describe women‘s sexuality as something that cannot be contained or owned and which defies notions of territoriality. For example, feminist theorist, Helene Cixous in her essay ―The Laugh of the Medusa‖ (2004), argues, through the use of ocean imagery, against patriarchy‘s attempt to contain women,29 and Jeanette Winterson in her novel, Written on the Body (2001), describes the vagina as smelling of the sea, opening and shutting ―like a sea anemone‖ (2001: 73).30 The powerful potential of water imagery is even apparent in mythology, where women associated with water, such as mermaids or the sirens, were depicted as dangerous. Since patriarchy imposes rigidity and relies extensively on binary oppositions, the fluidity of water is particularly subversive to its order. In ―Solitary cloud‖, the raindrops that the speaker yearns for to ―soothe the pain‖ (l.6) of her cracked body, the river she longs to ―swallow‖ (l.10) her, and the waves she hopes will ―carry [her] through the ocean to [her lover‘s] shore‖ (l.14) can be read as sexually charged. Water, here, suggests erotic, sensual love. In fact, the progressive increase in the intensity of the water bodies described, suggests a build towards sexual bliss. The description ―waves will lift me‖ (l.13) suggests orgasm. However, the progressive movement from the moistness in the air to the river, to the sea, does not end with the waves, but with them carrying the speaker to her lover‘s ―shore‖ (l.14). Erotic fulfilment thus becomes implicated in a connection between the two lovers rather than merely empty sexual bliss.
29 Cixous‘s counter-image, in ―The Laugh of Medusa‖, to the patriarchal attempt to control women is the metaphor of woman as water: ―But look, our seas are what we make of them, full of fish or not, opaque or transparent, red or black, high and smooth, narrow or bankless; and we ourselves sea, sand, coral, seaweed, beaches, tides, swimmers, children, waves… More or less wavily sea, earthy, sky – what matter would rebuff us?‖ (2004: 358).
30 Other examples of fiction writers who use water imagery are Sarah Waters who, in her novel about lesbian love, Tipping the Velvet (1998), employs the oyster as a metaphor for female genitalia, and Lidia Yuknavitch who, in The Chronology of Water, uses images of water within the text as a means of escape from various prescriptive modes of living. Virginia Woolf, in her novel, The Waves (2004), also uses water imagery to evoke lesbian eroticism. One character, Rhoda, is described as ―rocking petals to and fro in her brown basin‖ (2004: 9). The wavelike motion of the petals moving to and fro on the surface of the water in her basin, Patricia Cramer argues, ―suggests an auto- and homoeroticism‖ (2005: 451) and this ―masturbatory rhythm liberates lesbian desire as a counter-magic against the seduction of patriarchal loyalties‖ (2005: 451). 92
Furthermore, the use of water imagery in relation to the erotic implies a sexuality that is plural, as Irigaray argues in her essay ―The Sex Which is Not One‖. She writes that ―the geography of [woman‘s] pleasure is far more diversified, more multiple in its differences, more complex, more subtle, than is commonly imagined – in an imaginary rather too narrowly focused on sameness‖ (1981: 366). In this description, Irigaray re-imagines the image of woman as land – as geographical space – for subversive purposes. She invokes multiplicity, suggesting that women‘s sexuality defies the conventional ‗mapping‘ of the patriarchal imagination. Xaba re- imagines female sexuality similarly, as the speaker wants to ―flow through myriad landscapes‖ (l.11), like water, rather than remain still, static and bound to a single space or a single conception of female sexuality. Furthermore, if this image is linked to erotic experience, it suggests an exploration of the multiplicity of female pleasures. Irigaray notes that ―woman has sex organs more or less everywhere‖ and thus ―finds pleasure almost anywhere‖ (1981: 366) and so a fulfilling erotic experience would arguably be one that experiences the pleasure of all these sites, just as Xaba‘s speaker wishes to. Finally, although, in ―Solitary Cloud‖, desire and eroticism are conceived of through grand, familiar metaphors of water, dryness and land, they are utilized in a highly personal manner. While the extended metaphor is central to the poem, in the third stanza the poet moves from metaphor to the concrete, the practical:
Come and fetch me with two flasks, one with coffee, the other butternut soup. Your car is warm, I know, but a pair of gloves, warm and ready, will help my hands thaw faster (28).
This stanza comes after the speaker expresses a desire to be carried ―through the ocean to [her lover‘s] shore‖ (l.14). This metaphor for reconnection, a renewal of their love, continues in the stanza I have quoted above, but in a rather different manner. It brings the specific to the abstract, just as the date in the first stanza, ―Friday, 13 July‖ (l.2), makes the desertification of the speaker‘s body personal. It takes the rather romantic images of flowing through seas to its more practical conclusion. If the speaker really were washed up on the shore, she would be cold and wet. If she was on a strange shore, washed up from another land, she would need to be picked up, warmed up, fed. Thus, love might be transcendental and grand, natural metaphors might be necessary to conceive of it, but love is also practical actions, the mundane, the sensible, the personal. Love is not only rushing seas and soothing raindrops, but also ―coffee‖ (l.16), ―butternut soup‖ (l.16) and warm ―gloves‖ (l.18). 93
3.5. Imagery and Imagination in “The brown pelican” In ―Solitary cloud‖, rain, rivers and sea function metaphorically as a depiction of female desire. The poem, ―The brown pelican‖, also utilises water, specifically the ocean, as the backdrop for the speaker‘s imaginative encounter with her lover. In the poem, it is clear that the speaker has been separated from her lover. The setting of the poem is ―Key West‖ (l.6 22), an Island in the Straits of Florida, which suggests that the lovers are separated by distance, with the speaker being in America, her lover possibly still in South Africa. It is only when taking ―the harbour walk, four days later‖ (l.1) that she stops ―wishing‖ (l.2) her lover were there. On this walk, she encounters a brown pelican, a bird indigenous to North America, catching fish and it is this image which acts as the catalyst for the erotic fantasy she has about her lover. The image of the brown pelican as it is described in the poem invokes certain sexual connotations, particularly when the speaker links the wetness of the pelican to the wetness that is a result of sexual arousal in a woman. Through the use of this rather unusual image, Xaba explores alternative ways of depicting sexual desire and modes of intimacy. The choice of the image of the brown pelican is powerfully subversive. Women are often likened to birds, normally for their ‗admirable‘ qualities of fragility, grace and beauty. The contemporary colloquial use of the word ‗chick‘ when referring to women is one example, and many can be found in poetry as well. Maud Gonne, for example, the muse of William Butler Yeats, one of the foremost poets of the 20th century, ―came to be associated in Yeats‘s mind with the consummately beautiful image of the swan‖ (Levine 1981: 411). Pelicans, however, are not much known for their grace and beauty. Rather, they are awkward looking with their oddly disproportionate beaks. Xaba‘s description of the pelican in her poem highlights this:
I watched the big brown bird below, the belly of its military beak ballooning, sideways and downwards, looming loose, pale pink. (ll.8-11)
This description of the pelican, which reminds the speaker of her lover, is not one of fragility, grace or beauty. Rather, it suggests power and agency. Its beak is described as ―military‖ (l.9). Moreover, it is described as ―the hunting pelican‖ (l.3), which opposes the dainty image of women (and their beauty) that as Rich has argued, historically appears in much poetry by men. The pelican is catching food, revealing skill and agency. However, this description is also very erotic, with the pelican‘s beak suggesting female genitalia. This is no idealized image and it subverts the notion of the vagina as, to use Irigaray‘s term from ―The Sex which is Not One‖, a 94
―hole-envelope‖ (1981: 363). The beak of the pelican is not a passive receptacle for the penis, it is ―catching dinner, seemingly impatiently‖ (l.12). There is something rather threatening about this image of the pelican, hungry and impatient. It suggests a powerful female desire, which subverts the conceptualization of woman as the passive recipient of hungry male desire. The reclamation of woman‘s sexuality, as something powerful rather than shameful or as contributing to their oppression, can be seen as a means of empowering women. Lorde‘s essay, ―Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power‖, says as much in the title, and goes on to note that ―women so empowered [by knowledge of the erotic] are dangerous‖ (1984: 55). They are dangerous to a discourse that dismisses women as ‗chicks‘. A ‗chick‘ is little threat to an oppressive society, but a ―big brown bird‖ (l.8) with a ―military beak‖ (l.9) seems more than capable of fighting against prejudice and disempowerment. As in ―Solitary Cloud‖, in ―The brown pelican‖ the speaker is separated from her lover and to be with her again, in the most intimate sense. In ―The brown pelican‖, the longed-for meeting of the lovers does not take place in the poem, just as the ‗rains‘ – the reconnection that the speaker longs for in ―Solitary cloud‖ – do not fall in that poem. Rather, ―The brown pelican‖ plays out a kind of ‗fantasy‘ where the speaker experiences an erotic encounter with her lover in her lover‘s absence. The phrase ‗erotic fantasy‘ has problematic connotations of men ogling strippers in naughty nurse costumes or paying prostitutes to enact their sexual fantasies.31 This phrase can thus be read as symptomatic of a patriarchal system that Lorde argues has ―misnamed‖ the erotic and ―used [it] against women‖ (1984: 54). In a similar manner, fantasy has been appropriated by the patriarchal imagination, rendering, in various media, sexual fantasies which present women as submissive and the sexual act, as Adrea Dworkin argues, as violent. Judith Butler‘s definition of fantasy in Undoing Gender (2004), re-works this kind of appropriation and provides a basis for understanding how Xaba uses erotic fantasy for subversive purposes. Butler writes:
Fantasy is not the opposite of reality; it is what reality forecloses… The critical promise of fantasy… is to challenge the contingent limits of what will and will not be called reality. Fantasy is what allows us to imagine ourselves and others otherwise; it establishes the possible in excess of the real; it points elsewhere, and when it is embodied, it brings the elsewhere home (2004: 29). In ―The brown pelican‖, the physical, geographical reality denies the speaker an encounter with the lover for whom she longs. However, through an imaginative interaction with the brown
31 Andrea Dworkin, in her critique of pornography, ―Pornography: Men Possessing Women‖ (1989) writes: ―Men characterize pornography as something mental because their mind, their thoughts, their dreams, their fantasies, are more real to them than women‘s bodies or lives; in fact, mean have used their social power to characterize a $10- billion-a-year trade in women as fantasy‖ (15). 95 pelican, she is able to fantasise about her lover. In this fantasy, she blurs the ontological lines between the lived and the imagined. Her lover is ―suddenly‖ (l.14) there, something which is obviously impossible, but which seems to have as much importance to the speaker as if she were actually there.32 Rather than feeling that this fantasy is inadequate because it is not ‗real‘, the speaker ―savour[s] the moments/ and thank[s] the brown pelican‖ (ll.31-32) for delivering her lover to her. In this way she challenges ―the contingent limits of what will and will not be called reality‖ (2004: 29). That is, she challenges the notion that the physical experience is more important than the imagined. Thus, in both ―The brown pelican‖ and ―Solitary cloud‖, Xaba represents women who are capable and willing to fantasise about sex, and to fantasise about it in a way that is empowering. Lorde, in ―Uses of the Erotic‖, discusses how the erotic has been conceptualized in a culture which both degrades women for their sexuality and ignores its existence. As Lorde puts it: ―[o]n the one hand, the superficially erotic has been encouraged as a sign of female inferiority; on the other hand, women have been made to suffer and to feel contemptible and suspect by virtue of its existence‖ (2006: 53). ―Uses of the Erotic‖ is useful in that it reveals how the pornographic – the reduction of sex to the mere physical act – has been used against what she calls the power of the erotic. She claims that the erotic ―has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation‖, and has been confused ―with its opposite, the pornographic‖ which ―emphasizes sensation without feeling‖ (1984: 54). Thus, the notion of erotic fantasy has become entangled with the objectification and fetishization of the female body, with women being used to play out male sexual fantasies with little regard for their own fantasies and their own sexuality. What Lorde calls for is a reclamation of the erotic as ―a well of replenishing and provocative force to the women who does not fear its revelation, not succumb to the belief that sensation is enough‖ (1984: 54). Xaba is arguably engaged in a similar project, as she presents the erotic – and women‘s erotic fantasies – as productive and nourishing. In ―The brown pelican‖, through the fantasy of the erotic, Xaba avoids literalising the sexualised encounter and thus avoids a graphic or pornographic depiction of the erotic. Furthermore, Xaba uses the power of the imagination to broaden our understanding of what a sexual encounter might mean. That is, it questions the assumption that sexual intimacy has to be physical in order to be real; to be considered an experience of love. In this way, Xaba rewrites the romantic script in order to include the imagined as equally important to the physical experience of love.
32 Xaba‘s ―Tear essence‖ (2005: 41) also examines the loss of an erotic relationship and, as in ―The brown pelican‖, blurs the line between the real and the imagined, presence and absence. Having lunch on her own, the speaker feels ―the absence of [her lover‘s] thighs‖ (l.6 41) and mourns the loss of communication between them. 96
The sexual encounter in the poem, being imagined, is one that does not foreclose possibility. The speaker ‗wonders‘, just as De Kok‘s speaker in ―Woman, leaning away‖ speculates about the woman in the photograph and Baderoon‘s speaker in ―Old photographs‖ muses on her lover‘s ex. She does not dictate the terms of the experience, but rather engages with her lover by ‗wondering‘. She begins by wondering whether the pelican is ―getting enough‖ (l.13) as it feeds. This moment of wondering – trying to imagine the pelican‘s state of being, an attempt to empathise – ends the second stanza and the third begins with her lover suddenly present to her. This moment of wondering – of reaching out – thus allows for a connection with her absent lover. Even once she feels her lover there, the speaker still wonders ―where [her] left arm was‖ (l.18) and ―what expression was on [her] face‖ (l.19). This kind ‗wondering‘ acts against the way that women‘s bodies have often been conceived of as always been physically, sexually available. While the poem can be read as an erotic fantasy, it is fantasised by a woman, not in order to reduce her lover to a sexualised object, but as part of an attempt to connect. Divided by geography, the speaker is attempting to reach out, to imaginatively cross that boundary, but there is also the suggestion that this imaginative process is necessary for connection even when her lover is physically near, as she imagines she is. When she wonders if her lover is ―wet‖ (l.23), she not only acknowledges her lover‘s sexual desires, but also acknowledges that she is not necessarily always sexually available. The fact that she ‗wonders‘ rather than assumes subverts the patriarchal entitlement to the female body so evident in ―The silence of a lifetime‖. The speaker‘s fantasy about her lover not only plays with the potential of the imagination, but also plays with the potential of the senses in experiencing a moment: ―I smelt you, felt your breasts against my back,/ your broad right arm over my right shoulder,/ your fingers playful on my collar bone‖ (ll.14-16). The speaker experiences her lover‘s body and not in an abstract manner. She feels it and smells it. She does not see or hear her lover – the more abstract of the senses perhaps – but experiences her lover in a tactile manner.33 Once again, it is apparent that Xaba is attempting to discover new ways in which to imagine sexual intimacy and romantic love. In ―Your eyes‖, she re-appropriated the gaze, undermining the predominant visual mode of the sexual exploitation of women by reworking the way in which women themselves employ the gaze. Here, the visual aspect is the pelican, the image of which she reworks in order to evoke the erotic. Then, the intimate encounter between her and her lover is purely imaginative and, even within this fantasy, the erotic experience relies on senses other than sight, the sense with which the male objectification of women usually begins.
33 This is similar to Baderoon‘s use of synaethesia in ―Cinnamon‖, as it foregrounds senses that are usually considered less important than the sense of sight and the aspect of the visual. 97
Through her poetry, Xaba engages in a kind of ‗fantasy‘ as conceived by writers such as Judith Butler. She writes of women‘s erotic, and other, fantasies, and her poems themselves enact a kind of fantasy in that they imagine ways of being which have historically been excluded from poetry and other forms of representation. In other words, she rewrites the romantic script by writing of women‘s loves and of lesbian love – writing blatantly and beautifully about women in ways that were only possibilities in the past. Xaba does not have to hide her desires; she can wonder whether her lover is wet. Thus, Xaba‘s poems are no ―silent and melancholic writing in which there have been no lives, no losses‖ (Butler 2004: 25). Rather, the lives, loves and losses of women are all potently rendered in her poetry.
3.6. Rewriting Romantic Clichés in “Soul-mating” With regard to romantic love and sexual intimacy, Xaba can be seen, through her exploration and alternative depictions of these concepts, to attempt to revolutionise the way in which they are represented. This is evident in poems such as ―Solitary cloud‖ where she reworks the metaphor of land as the female body and ―The brown pelican‖ where she uses the unusual image of the brown pelican as a catalyst for an imaginative erotic encounter. In contrast to the theme of loss found in ―The brown pelican‖ and ―Solitary cloud‖, ―Soul-mating‖ (2005: 37) is a poem about hope, about building a relationship together and creating an alternative ‗happily ever after‘, but it also uses metaphor in subversive ways. The poem is about the work to be done in order to build a relationship and likens this kind of building to the building of an abode. This metaphor is complicated by using images of multiple different shelters and it works against the romantic cliché of ‗capturing‘ another‘s soul.34 The fact that the poem is about a new relationship is apparent in that the speaker talks about putting down the ―foundation‖ (l.8 37) – building the relationship is yet to come. At the approximate centre of the poem, the end of the first stanza, the speaker asks of her lover: ―What did you mean when you said I‘ve captured your soul?‖ (l.7). It becomes clear, here, that the beginning of this stanza has been questioning this phrase. All the lines in this first stanza end with a question mark and these questions are addressed to the speaker‘s lover. Thus, the speaker appears to be attempting to communicate with her lover in order to better understand what her lover meant when she claimed the speaker had captured her soul. The speaker‘s lack of clarity on the meaning of this statement reveals how clichéd phrases and notions about love can erase the particularity of the love between two people. Furthermore, it can mask expectations as well as
34 Xaba often constructs poems around clichéd images in order to rework them. In ―Flowering rot‖ (2005: 51), she takes the metaphor of flowers as love to its logical conclusion – flowers, though beautiful, eventually decay – and utilises this to describe the painful dissolution of a relationship. 98 misconceptions about love or the other person‘s feelings. Their lack of specificity makes them unhelpful in negotiating the complexities of a new (or old) relationship. The cliché that the poem centres on, ‗capturing one‘s soul‘, a well-known English idiom used to describe the process of falling in love, is perhaps particularly problematic. The word ‗capture‘ suggests being taken by force and imprisoned; a rather disturbing image when linked to a loving relationship. This capturing is also a one-sided affair – one person has the power and the other person is the captive, no matter how willing. The implication is that the power balance in the relationship is unequal. The speaker in the poem immediately seems uncomfortable with the idea of capturing another‘s soul. Instead of imagining a cage for her lover‘s soul, which would seem like the most obvious image to align with the notion of capture, the speaker imagines some kind of abode. She begins with the image of a tent, then ―a mud house with a grass roof‖ (l.2) and, finally, ―a brick house, with an asbestos roof‖ (l.6). Firstly, the idea of an abode contradicts the notion of capture. Although they enclose something, tents and houses are meant to shelter and protect. Through virtue of their exits and entrances, they are permeable – one has a choice to stay or leave. There is also the idea of ‗home‘, suggested by the mud hut and the brick house. That is, the idea of belonging. Even the tent, which suggests sojourning rather than belonging, at least represents a respite from one‘s travels, a momentary space of belonging. Furthermore, the speaker never imagines herself building these houses, but rather places the agency within her lover‘s hands. Rather, she questions her lover‘s statement that her soul has been captured as well as re-imagining the statement as something more useful, creative and fulfilling. The poem also reveals a deep awareness of the importance of representation. That is, what words are used to describe a sensation, a relationship, love itself, have connotations which shape how these affects35 are imagined and lived out. The specificity of these images is thus important. It is not enough for the speaker to imagine her lover‘s soul enclosed by a house, she wishes to know specifically what kind of abode it might be. Each kind of abode imagined by the speaker in the first stanza has different connotations. If it is a tent that has been erected around her lover‘s soul, there is a sense of impermanence, perhaps suggesting that this love might be, or begin as, a brief, fleeting affair. The mud house that the speaker suggests next carries a sense of tradition about it, if one looks at it as a traditional African abode. The fact that the speaker wonders whether her lover‘s sisters helped her to build the hut, suggests community and family, placing the love of these two people within a supportive context. The image of the mud house, built ―mud ball by mud ball/ grass stalk by grass stalk‖ (ll.2-4) also suggests that great care and effort has been put into constructing this abode. The emphasis on the physical act of building the
35 The term ‗affect‘ is used to recognise the force of emotionality in the lives of human beings and to counter the denigration of emotionality due to the elevation of rationality and logic. 99 house reinforces the notion of building a relationship, in contrast to the image of snapping a cage shut around another‘s soul. Finally, the brick house suggests permanence and security in the relationship. By questioning which of the three abodes the lover might have constructed, the speaker can be seen to try and ascertain what kind of relationship her lover envisages for them, although it also suggests how love can be imagined in multiple ways. The progression in the poem, from least permanent tent to the most permanent brick house, suggests that the speaker years for reassurance that the relationship is going to develop into something stable. However, the use of questions in the first stanza present a tentative exploration of the best mode of being together rather than a demand of commitment. There is thus the suggestion that relationships are often marked by uncertainty and, though we may long for the ‗happily-ever-after‘ of the brick house, the relationship might only ever be the tent. The structure of the poem, the first stanza asking questions and the second providing the speaker‘s take on the situation, echoes that of the Petrarchan sonnet. Like ―Soul-mating‖, this kind of sonnet is divided into two stanzas, the first presenting a problem or situation and the second providing a comment on, or solution for, the situation outlined in the first stanza. The question/answer structure Xaba uses has a similar function and the length of the poem, at fifteen lines, almost fits into the traditional Petrarchan sonnet. Thus, while Xaba does not quite appropriate the Petrarchan sonnet structure (she also employs no kind of rhyme scheme), the structure of ―Soul-mating‖ does echo this traditional form of love poetry. The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Literary Terms notes that the Petrarchan sonnet is ―marked by the increasingly conventional presentation of courtly love, in which the despairing poet speaks in fanciful and paradoxical terms of his torments as the worshipper of a disdainful mistress‖ (191). It is this kind of love poetry that Xaba is possibly writing against. The fact that the poem echoes this form reinforces how the content differs from that of a traditional Petrarchan sonnet, where women are reduced to idealized images. The tentative exploration of the possible relationship in ―Soul- mating‖ is inclusive of the ‗object‘ of the speaker‘s desire and takes into account the lover‘s ―choice‖ (l.15) and ―labour‖ (l.15). The speaker does not see their love as something that has already been established; all there is so far is ―the foundation/ rock upon hard, solid rock‖ (ll.8-9). The foundation is essential if the building upon it is to last and so the fact that the speaker feels she has established such a foundation suggests that she desires a long and stable relationship with her lover. The establishment of a firm foundation suggests the promise of commitment. However, while the speaker feels that she has established such a foundation, is willing to commit, the house – or love – to be built upon this foundation is not just the responsibility of the speaker or her lover, but 100 both of theirs together. The foundation is ―awaiting [the lover‘s] arrival/ so [they] can build the walls together‖ (37). Love, and a loving relationship, is thus presented, not as one person‘s ownership of another‘s soul, but as a mutual collaboration to create a home for both their souls. The final lines of this stanza emphasise the notion of love being an active choice, not something that is imposed upon one: ―the house, infused with my being/ is your choice, your labour‖ (37). Both partners, in this imagining of love, are equally committed to and involved in the relationship, and both have had an equal part in creating it. This idea of love as a process is further emphasised by the title of the poem, a play on the clichéd idea of a soul mate. By turning this static noun into a verb in the continuous tense in ―Soul-mating‖, Xaba reworks the notion that there is someone out there who is ―ideally suited to another‖ (Sykes 1976: 1095). Instead, being in a relationship with another person is couched in the terms of continuous creative, and fulfilling, work. Instead of passively being someone‘s soul mate, one has to engage in ―Soul- mating‖, in building a way to be together. The speaker wishes that this metaphorical house, in which the lovers will be together, be sealed to her ―solar plexus‖ (l.13) so that her lover ―never [has] to leave‖ (l.13). Xaba‘s choice of the solar plexus as the site for this joining is unusual. The solar plexus is the ―complex of radiating nerves at pit of the stomach‖ (1976: 1089). Solar is to do with the sun, and its use here is thought to do with the centrality of this nerve centre in the body, and plexus refers to a ―network‖ or ―complication‖ (196: 847). Xaba often uses unusual parts of the body in her poetry, possibly due to her medical background. As a site for love, the solar plexus is surprisingly apt. Its centrality suggests the importance of the relationship for the speaker, while the fact that is it is a bundle of nerves perhaps refers to the intense emotions and sensations that a romantic relationship often entails. The vulnerability of this place on the body also reveals the willingness of the speaker to open herself up to the possibilities of love, even if they might result in pain. Finally, the use of the solar plexus also plays with two other romantic clichés. Firstly, it can allude to the phrase ―you took my breath away‖, since a blow to the solar plexus results in a breathless sensation due to its proximity to the diaphragm. Secondly, it serves an alternative to the clichéd association of the heart with love.36 By offering a new part of the body as site for the experience of love and intimacy, Xaba challenges simplistic and singular conceptualizations of such intimacy.
36 In her poem ―Heart surgery‖ (2005: 13-14), Xaba overtly plays on the clichés relating to romantic love and the human heart. She juxtaposes the cliché of the pounding heart, with a heart going ―haywire‖ (14) with the biological reality if anyone‘s heart behaved so erratically they would undoubtedly need to see a surgeon. The poem comments on the ridiculousness of clichés, while at the same time juxtaposing the extraordinary experience of love with the everyday.
101
While the intimacy suggested in the poem is not overtly sexual, the poem can still be read as erotic. Firstly, the use of the word ―mating‖ in the title suggests a sexual relationship and, secondly, the intimacy and togetherness of the description of building a house has erotic connotations. The idea of joining and of concerted mutual effort speaks to the intimacy of lovemaking. However, as Lorde argues in ―The Uses of the Erotic‖, the erotic should not be limited to the sexual act. Lorde attempts to reclaim the erotic by returning to the Greek root of the word, ―eros, the personification of love in all its aspect… personifying creative power and harmony‖ (1984: 55). She thus suggests that the erotic, and love in general, should take more than the sex act and romantic love into account. Xaba‘s poem reclaims this kind of understanding of the erotic. The power of the sensual is bound up within the words of the poem – ―erect‖ (l.1), ―inside‖ (l.1), ―unison‖ (l.12), ―infused‖ (l.14) – and the tactile descriptions of the process of building a house. However, this eroticism is linked to something much more than the sex act; it is linked to the construction of a home. Here, the ―creative energy empowered‖ (1984: 55) that Lorde identifies as the erotic, is present in the creative exercise of building a house. The physical creation of the house serves as a metaphor for the creation of an intimate relationship and foregrounds the agency of the two women involved. The speaker empowers both herself and her lover through the poem, giving them both agency in the relationship rather than accepting the capturer/captive power relationship inherent in the cliché of the captured soul. Thus, Xaba arguably partakes in Lorde‘s project of reclaiming the erotic ―in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives‖ (1984: 55). Furthermore, by linking what might be considered the menial, physical labour of building a house with the elevated notion of love, Xaba can also be seen to reclaim the erotic in other aspects of life.37 Lorde notes that ―we are taught to separate the erotic demand from most vital areas of our lives other than sex. And the lack of concern for the erotic root and satisfaction of our work is felt in our disaffection from much of what we do‖ (1984: 55). In ―Soul-mating‖ the notion of building a house becomes imbued with a sense of the erotic through Xaba‘s use of sensual language and the linking of house building with love. Therefore, the poem functions not only as a reimagining of love, but also as a re-imagining of labour as something to be celebrated rather than denigrated. The speaker highlights that the house she and her lover will build together will be valuable because it is a result of her lover‘s ―labour‖ (l.15). Thus, work – both of a physical and spiritual kind – becomes a valuable endeavour rather than merely something that
37 The linking of the erotic and other facets of life often thought to be separate from the erotic is apparent in the poem ―these hands‖ (2005: 10-12). The hands described in the poem are described as having known ―putrid puss‖ (10), ―the metallic feel/ of numerous guns‖ (10) and many other sensations, along with having ―made love,/ producing vibrations/ from receiving lovers‖ (11).
102 has to be done in order to survive. Lorde writes: ―With the celebration of the erotic in all our endeavours, my work becomes a conscious decision – a longed-for bed which I enter gratefully and from which I rise up empowered‖ (1984: 55). In this poem, Xaba celebrates the erotic in the building of a relationship and in the building of a home. Thus, I argue that when Lorde speaks of finding ―more and more women-identified women brave enough to risk sharing the erotic‘s electrical charge without having to look away, and without distorting the enormously powerful and creative nature of that exchange‖ (1984: 59), she could very well be speaking of Makhosazana Xaba.
3.7. The Semiotic in “Love poem for my writing group” The previous sub-section argued that Xaba attempts to heal the division between the erotic and the everyday which Lorde identifies as symptomatic of an oppressive, patriarchal society. ―Love poem for my writing group‖ (2005: 27) is similarly subversive in that it invokes the genre of love poetry in order to write about non-sexual, non-romantic love. The poem describes the joys and sorrows that the speaker and her writing group experience at readings, as well as what this activity means to them, both in terms of the personal and the political. While poems like ―Your eyes‖ and ―Solitary cloud‖ work to rewrite the romantic script, here Xaba talks about a woman- centric community and the love between them in the form of a love poem. She thus elevates women‘s friendship and solidarity to the place normally reserved for heteronormative romantic love, which is generally idealised as the ultimate expression of love. Poetry has long been the genre of man38 and ‗love poetry‘ has long been man‘s ode to idealized (and passive) images of women, or laments about her failure to yield to him.39 Adrienne Rich, in ―When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision‖ (1971), writes about her own struggle with the male dominion in the poetry she read and her struggle to write herself into her own poetry. Her description of the male-dominated poetry of the past provides clear evidence for the necessity of re-writing the conventions of the love poem:
[T]here were all these poems about women, written by man: it seemed to be a given that men wrote poems and women frequently inhabited them. These women were almost always beautiful but threatened by the loss of beauty, the loss of youth – the fate worse than death. Or, they were beautiful and died young (…). Or… cruel and disastrously mistaken, and the poem reproached her because she had refused to become a luxury for the poet. (1971: 5)
38 William Shakespeare‘s sonnets are arguably the most widely recognised form of love poetry.
39 John Donne is famous for poems like ―The Flea‖ (1978: 58-59) and ―The Bait‖ (1978: 43-44), which rebuke women for resisting his advances and employing the form of poetry in an attempt to persuade them to realise their foolishness and submit. 103
Makhosazana Xaba‘s ―Love poem for my writing group‖ is thus a subversive act on multiple levels. Firstly, it is a self-proclaimed ‗love poem‘ by a woman. More than that, it is for women. This is not only subversive in that it breaks with the traditional heterosexual romantic love most often found in love poetry, but also in that it is for women, not merely about them. They are not the incidental inhabitants of the poem. Nor is their beauty central to the poem. In fact, any concern with these women‘s aesthetic appearance is completely absent. This is not to say that they are disembodied minds; their bodies are clearly present in the poem, their ―muscles sore‖ (l.2 27) from laughter. In this poem their bodies are not fetishized objects of desire, but active means of experiencing joy, sorrow, and connection. Finally, and most powerfully, all the women in this poem are writers. They are, after all, a ‗writing group‘. All these women are thus agents and subjects, rather than passive objects. Therefore, the poem arguably reinforces Helene Cixous‘ sentiment, expressed in ―The Laugh of Medusa‖ (2004), of ―[w]oman for women‖, that there ―always remains in woman that force which produces/is produced by the other – in particular, the other woman‖ (2004: 352). In the poem, the women are there for each other, to encourage one another to write, to engender agency in others. There is a preconception or, perhaps, a danger, that feminism, in attempting to free women from reliance on men (reliance on men as the sole breadwinners, reliance on the love of men for self-fulfilment, reliance on a patriarchal worldview and so on), becomes the expectation of complete self-reliance and self-containment. Indeed, contemporary Western society often touts the self-contained individual as the pinnacle of human achievement. Need of others is couched in the terms of weakness and, if the objective is power, it is something that must be done away with. However, Cixous, as well as Butler, and many other feminist theorists such as Lorde, highlight the importance of community, both women-centred and otherwise. While feminism might be the struggle to combat the disempowerment of women, it is not the struggle to place women in positions of power, the kind where power does not come with attendant responsibility. Butler writes that we have a ―collective responsibility for the physical lives of one another‖ (2004: 23) and that ―becoming gendered (which is always, to a certain extent, becoming gendered for others) establishes a field of ethical enmeshment with others‖ (2004: 25). For Butler and for Cixous, women, and men, are inextricably involved with society; their lives entwined with the lives of others, and we should all thus recognise an ethical responsibility for these lives. The writing group in Xaba‘s poem can thus be seen to enact a specific kind of political project, in that it is a group of people taking responsibility for one another, recognising each other as subjects and encouraging in each an active and creative use of their own agencies. This women-centric group, made up of the ―women of [Xaba‘s] heart‖ (2005), as she refers to them in 104 her acknowledgements in These Hands, defies the historical phallocentrism that has so marked the genre of poetry. The writing group in Xaba‘s poem is arguably political in the sense that it is actively engaged in altering the relationship between women and writing and, in this way, altering the power relationships inherent in the act of representation. I identify this as political based on Carol Hanisch‘s description of the term, in her seminal essay ―The Personal is Political‖ (2006), as ―having to do with power relationships‖ (2006:1). Xaba, and her writing group, can thus be seen to do what Cixous argues they must. She argues that ―[w]oman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing‖ (2004: 347).This writing group is engaged in bringing women to writing and the women within the group are engaged in writing, and thus writing themselves. Furthermore, Xaba herself writes about women and writes about women who write. She can thus be seen to ―put herself into the text – as into the world and into history – by her own movement‖ (2004: 347), as Cixous has called women to do. Her activism in other spheres, as mentioned in the introduction, reveals that she not only writes her self into text, but also engages with the world, the community, and has inserted herself into the history of her country. Both Cixous‘ work and Xaba‘s life and work can thus be seen to suggest how to oppose the erasure of women from the text and from history by their ―own movement‖. As well as writing herself in the poem, Xaba can also be seen to draw the reader into the poem. Each of the three stanzas of the poem begin with ―It‘s‖: ―It’s the uncontrollable laughter‖ (l.1; my emphasis), ―It’s the sudden silence that descends‖ (l.4; my emphasis) and ―It’s breaking down barriers‖ (l.11; my emphasis). In the body of the poem, the ‗it‘ is never identified, thus requiring the reader to actively interpret the subject of the poem. The most obvious interpretation is that the ‗it‘ refers to the experience of being in the writing group. By describing this experience in the present tense, Xaba creates a sense of immediacy, which reinforces the inclusion of the reader in the experience. The description of the women within the group as each being a ―writer- reader‖ (l.7), further emphasises a sense of inclusion. This compound noun also serves to destabilise the inherited assumption of a hierarchy in which the writer is elevated as active, genius creator and the reader is merely the passive recipient of the writer‘s work. In the writing group, and in the poem, both roles are represented as equally important in the productive experience of the writing group. The poem begins with ―uncontrollable laughter‖ (l.1). In ―The Laugh of Medusa‖, Cixous notes the subversive power of laughter. I would like to note two reasons that this could be so. Firstly, to laugh at something, to find the humour in it, is to dispel its supposed value, it‘s ‗seriousness‘. It is a reminder that a certain discourse might not be infallible, that a King is still a man and that the Man is merely man. Furthermore, real laughter is an outpouring of joy, a loss of 105 control and so destructive to carefully constructed barriers meant to keep people under control. It is arguably a sign of what Cixous calls jouissance, ―that intense, rapturous pleasure which women know and which men fear‖ (Cixous 1986: 365). This rapturous joy has, traditionally, been repressed by a Western society influenced by a Victorian tradition of corsets and the ideal of the quiet, pale ‗lady‘. The ―uncontrollable laughter‖ (l.1) described in Xaba‘s poem would not have been ‗proper‘, precisely because of its uncontrollable nature. If patriarchy is structured around the repression of women, for women to express themselves through something uncontainable like laughter is dangerous to the symbolic order. Similarly, for women to write poetry, and to discuss it in a writing group, is to actively break down the ―threatening boundaries‖ (1997: 722) against women that Friedman notes have been constructed around the genre of poetry. Cixous argues that ―[a] feminine text cannot fail to be more than subversive (…). If she‘s a her-she it‘s in order to… shatter the framework of institutions… to break up the ‗truth‘ with laughter‖ (2004: 357). To write, as a woman, or as anyone repressed by the supposed ‗truth‘ – that patriarchal, racist, classist construct – is to laugh in the face of that repressive discourse, to explode it, to cause it to collapse in on itself, even if only briefly, momentarily. Poetry, here, is not merely aesthetic, although it is made for enjoyment; it is functional in a political sense. The idea that poetry can function in a politically revolutionary sense has been suggested by a number of feminist theorists, perhaps most notably by Julia Kristeva. In ―Revolution in Poetic Language‖ (1999) she argues that ―‘incomprehensible‘ poetry‖ can serve to ―underscore the limits of socially useful discourse and attest to what it represses: the process that exceeds the subject and his communicative structures‖ (452). This argument is based upon the Freudian and Lacanian theories about the development of the infant. At the point of what Lacan terms the mirror-stage, the infant‘s undisrupted connection to the mother is severed and the infant is introduced into the symbolic order, into language, which is the realm of the father. This type of language is thus predicated on the differentiation of the sexes and on the ability to recognise binary oppositions. Thus, if language itself is part of the patriarchal order, then in order to revolt against patriarchal oppression, one must also rethink language. The form of ―Love poem for my writing group‖ utilises the possibilities of poetry to underscore the revolutionary potential of its content. The poem makes a passing reference to a sonnet as it consists of fourteen lines. This only serves to underscore the traditional poetic rules that it breaks. It does, however, make extensive use of sound-based poetic techniques. There is internal rhyme in phrases such as ―beaming at the reading‖ (l.3) and ―permeating our beings‖ (l.6) as well as alliterative use of the ‗s‘ and ‗b‘ sounds. These techniques emphasise the musical aspect of poetry – the level at which is functions rhythmically and audibly. Kristeva often refers 106 to sound, or the semiotic, as a means of surpassing the limits of language and of rebelling against the patriarchal symbolic order. A particular example she gives in Intimate Revolt (2002) is of ―St. Ignatius of Loyola‘s loquela‖, a Christian form of meditation, which she describes as ―a speechless voice‖ in which we can ―encounter the register of a prerepresentation‖ (47). That is, in sound that is not words there is the possibility of circumventing the symbolic order but also of creating new forms of representation. As Kristeva notes, the loquela ―initiates representation… and, later, the signs of language‖ (2002: 47). ―Love poem for my writing group‖ is marked by depictions of sounds that are not language, most notably the ―uncontrollable laughter‖ (l.1) discussed in more detail earlier, but also ―silence‖ (l.4) and ―bellowing‖ (l.14). It is out of the final stanza that this bellowing emerges:
It‘s breaking down barriers, the bitter barricades begrudging our bellowing freedom. (ll.11-14)
The alliteration and the short sentences all create a strong rhythm out of which the ―bellowing freedom‖ (l.14) of the women emerges. This ‗freedom‘ is emphasised because of the fact that it starts with a different consonant. The poem seems to suggest, through the use of alliteration and of the adjective of ―bellowing‖ (l.14), that the success of their revolt, of ―breaking down barriers‖ (l.11), emerges out of the use of the music of poetry and its potential to subvert the symbolic order. Earlier, it was argued that the ‗it‘s‘ at the beginning of each stanza could refer to the experience of being in a writing group. However, the poem could also be read in another way. If ‗it‘ is substituted for ‗love‘, another layer of meaning is opened up within the poem. Thus, the poem can be read as: ―Love is the uncontrollable laughter‖, ―Love is the sudden silence that descends‖ and ―Love is breaking down barriers‖. This would then further interrogate the patriarchal heteronormative notion of love as romantic, a project that Xaba begins just by writing a ―love poem‖ for her woman-centric writing group. If she defines love as being in a writing group, as the joy and sorrows that can be elicited by the reading of poetry, and as the collective process of combating that which oppresses, then this is to define love outside of the confines of patriarchal heteronormative romantic love. It is to define love as less of a static ideal and more of a process, one which is inherently inclusive rather than possessive or selfish. To read the poem in this way breaks down the barriers set up by traditional concepts of Love and opens up a space in which love can be re-imagined through the word.
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3.8. Challenging the Symbolic Order in “Waking up” It has been argued that the use of water as a metaphor for female sexuality and desire in ―Solitary cloud‖ suggested that love, desire and sexuality are fluid rather than static. Xaba‘s ―Waking up‖ (2005: 39) also suggests the sexual identity is fluid as it makes use of a day as a metaphor for a lifetime to chart the development of the speaker‘s understanding of her sexual identity during the course of her life. This poem subverts the patriarchal, heteronormative discourse by depicting a woman‘s break away from such confines into a lesbian relationship. This development culminates in the final couplet of the poem, where the focus on sexual orientation and desire is made clear: ―You, the first woman I love/ in the afternoon of my life‖ (ll.23-24 39). Xaba thus appropriates a familiar metaphor, here the day as a lifetime, for the subversive purposes of charting a life not lived according to heteronormative specifications. The poem is dominated by the symbolic image of the sun and, by implication, the symbolic associations between light and dark, and men and women. In ―Sorties‖ (1986), Cixous explains how the symbolic order relies on binary opposition. The activity/passivity binary, and its relation to the male/female binary, has already been unpacked in the discussion of ―Your eyes‖. This hierarchical binary logic is apparent in the ―Sun/Moon‖ and the ―Day/Night‖ binaries, with Moon and Night equating to the female/passive side of the gender binary. In these binaries, man is associated with the light of reason, while woman is associated with irrationality and unenlightenment. In the poem, the sun becomes symbolic of patriarchy and the patriarchal symbolic order that maintains certain binary modes of thinking, as well as the heteronormative system so closely allied with it. The poem thus functions as a critique of the symbolic order which maintains patriarchal heteronormativity, by revealing the damage it can do, while also reworking the symbolic language in order to empower women. The first stanza, which deals with the ―early morning‖ (l.1) of the speaker‘s life, uses imagery associated with morning time to intimate that the speaker did not find herself attracted to men. She explains that she did not hear ―the cocks crowing‖ (l.2), did not ―wake up… with [her] peers‖ (l.3). Sexual desire is often described as being ‗awakened‘ in someone, so the image of ‗waking up‘ that appears both in the first stanza, the fourth stanza and the title all allude to sexuality and are congruent with the extended metaphor of the day. The image of the ―cocks crowing‖ (l.2) also functions similarly. The crowing of cocks is associated with morning and is the sound associated with waking people up. Furthermore, the cock is the male chicken and the word ‗cock‘ is used to refer to the penis, so the awakening of sexual desire alluded to in the first stanza is unmistakably heterosexual desire. This heterosexual desire – female desire for the male 108
– is clearly marked as normative, since the speaker‘s peers all experience this awakening desire, even though the speaker does not. In the ―mid morning‖ (l.4) of the speaker‘s life, which is dealt with in the second stanza, the speaker appears to conform to the heteronormative system. She ―watche[s] the shadows move‖ (l.5) and ―[w]ithout much thought… follow[s]‖ (l.6). The fact that the speaker sees shadows rather than people suggests a feeling of distance from the norms of society. Instead of seeing people living out individual choices, she perceives merely their shadows cast by the heteronormative sun – that all-encompassing system that bathes everyone in its light. The speaker‘s lack of thought on the matter also suggests that the shadows she watches can be related back to Plato‘s Allegory of the Cave. That is, people chained inside a cave, facing the cave wall, perceive only the shadows of people passing by and so do not perceive reality. In this stanza, and at this time of her life, the speaker does not perceive a particularly accurate representation of reality. She perceives ‗shadows‘, but does not see how they are created – does not see the ‗sun‘, or the symbolic order. In the next stanza, the speaker seems to become aware of the heteronormative and patriarchal system that influences who she loves as well as becoming aware of the violence inherent in this framework. This is the ―midday‖ (l.7) of the speaker‘s life and, being the time of day when the sun is at its highest point and thus at its most powerful, it is apt that it is the time when the speaker feels ―the scorching heat of the sun/ burn through [her] hair, right into [her] brain‖ (ll.8-9). Although this could refer to an abusive heterosexual relationship, the poem emphasises the damage that the symbolic inflicts, rather than the damage of physical violence. In contrast to ―The silence of a lifetime‖, ―Waking up‖ deliberately employs a vague extended metaphor. This is arguably because, unlike ―The silence of a lifetime‖ which was concerned with the concrete reality of rape, this poem is more concerned with the symbolic order and the damage that this can inflict. The fact that the sun burns into the speaker‘s brain suggests that the damage is done is psychological. That is has to do with identity and modes of thinking. It could, even, refer to the violence of binary modes of thinking which denigrate and exclude women. However, in the next stanza, in the ―afternoon of [the speaker‘s] life‖ (l.13), the sun begins to set. This can be read as the symbolic order losing its power over the speaker. Through her experiences in her life, through her discovery of the potential for violence inherent in the symbolic order, the speaker comes to find the space and the imagination to conceive of an alternative kind of love. As the heteronormative system sets, a woman rises ―ever so slowly behind its rays‖ (l.15) to be the speaker‘s ―sun in the night‖ (l.16). The use of the paradoxical image of the ―sun in the night‖ works against the simplistic linear and binary construction of the 109 symbolic order. Here, Xaba plays with the Sun/Moon, Night/Day binaries mentioned earlier. Rather than replacing the sun with the moon, the male with the female, which would merely invert the binary, Xaba takes it apart and reassembles it. She maintains the traditionally positive associations of the sun and reason and mingles them with the traditionally negative associations of darkness. This is an alternative kind of symbolic, one which refuses the simplistic binary categorisation and which opens up spaces of potentiality. Similarly to ―The brown pelican‖ and ―Solitary cloud‖, the imaginative process of fantasy, which ―points elsewhere, and when it is embodied, it brings the elsewhere home‖ (Butler 2004: 29), is essential to the speaker‘s ability to engage with an alternative kind of love. The speaker initially dreams her female lover. As in ―The brown pelican‖, there is a refusal to maintain the boundary between the real and the imagined and thus a refusal to ignore the power of the imaginary. Often night time and sleep are used as metaphors for death, as is the case in Dylan Thomas‘s ―Do not go gentle into that good night‖. However, in ―Waking up‖, night becomes an alternative space, one free of the imposition of the blinding, scorching heteronormative ‗sun‘, where alternative ways of being and of being with others can be dreamt up. Xaba can be seen to make use of the fact that sleep is a state where the brain is extremely productive – processing information from the day past and, through dreams, reconfiguring it – to represent the creative process of a woman coming to understand the heteronormative system that has inflicted violence upon her and configuring a new way of loving. Furthermore, instead of night-time and the setting of the sun symbolising the end, as it would in a traditional linear progression, its setting is the opportunity for a new beginning. This new beginning is characterised by the appearance of a person, with a ‗you‘. The presence of a person to love is notably absent in the first three stanzas. There is the sun and there are shadows, but there are no other human beings that the speaker addresses or interacts with. Thus, the setting of the damaging, scorching sun offers respite and the potential of intimacy and agency. In the previous stanzas, although the ‗I‘ appears regularly, this assertion of subjectivity is consistently undermined. In the first stanza, the ‗I‘ is rendered passive by the fact that it ―did not hear‖ (l.2) and ―did not wake up‖ (l.3). In the second stanza, the ‗I‘ passively watches and follows, without any critical engagement and, in the third stanza the ‗I‘ is unable to prevent ―the scorching heat of the sun/ burn through [her] hair‖ (ll.8-9). It is only here, at the end of this stanza that the speaker makes any kind of conscious decision, but it is still only a decision to refuse to ―let the sun burn [her]/ ever again‖ (ll.10-11). It is only with the appearance of the ‗you‘ in the final two stanzas that the ‗I‘ is associated with the active verbs of dreaming and loving. Thus, it is through her 110 alternative, imaginative, dream-like encounter with the other that the speaker becomes the active subject of the poem. The speaker then, finally, ―wake[s] up‖ (l.19) to sexual desire and to the specific woman for whom she feels this love. She also wakes up to the changes, previously unimaginable, that loving this woman will create. In the poem, the process of coming to love a woman – of coming to reimagine the norm – is linked to the aging of the body in the sense that it is only as time passes and the speaker ages that she comes to this new conception of love. Butler sees aging as an important part of the process of change, arguing that ―the body is not understood as a static and accomplished fact, but as an aging process, a mode of becoming that, in becoming otherwise, exceeds the norm, reworks the norm, and makes us see how realities to which we thought we were confined are not written in stone‖ (2004: 29). As the speaker in the poem ages, she does exactly this. This is emphasised by the structure of the poem and the use of the metaphor of a day for the speaker‘s life. The typical, linear progression employed traditionally at the beginning of the poem is subverted in the last stanzas, where what should be the end is instead the beginning. This subversion suggests that change and new beginnings are not only for the young, but that life is continually open to the possibilities of change and re-imagining. Through her employment, and subversion, of the symbolic images of the sun and the night and of the notion of ‗waking up‘, Xaba, like Baderoon and De Kok, re-writes the traditional poetic form of the aubade. However, Xaba‘s re-writing is much more radical. She maintains the idea of morning being a time for lament, although here it is not for the parting of two lovers, but for her inability to love as her peers do, and the idea of night as a time for love and intimacy. She also, like Donne in ―The Sun Rising‖, describes the sun in negative terms. Unlike Donne, however, Xaba re-imagines the image of the sun – an alternative love becomes an alternative sun – a ―sun in the night‖ (l.16) and ―Waking up‖ is employed for its positive connotations of beginnings rather than for its connotations of the separation of two lovers at dawn. Thus, although Xaba employs the imagery usually associated with the aubade, ―Waking up‖ is not a lament of the parting of lovers, but rather a celebration of love found ―in the afternoon‖ (l.24) of a life. Xaba‘s ―Waking up‖ can thus be seen to reconceptualise the notion of love or, at least, to explore less normative experiences of love. ―Waking up‖ undermines normative notions that love should be heterosexual and that the discovery of love and its wonders is solely the domain of the young. Thus, ―Waking up‖ exposes the forces of the heteronormative system as well as re- writing experiences of romantic love. 3.9. Conclusion 111
In this chapter, I have argued that Xaba opposes the idealization of romantic love in various ways. Firstly, she reveals how romantic love has been utilised by a misogynistic, patriarchal society to justify the rape of women. Here, her refusal to use euphemisms or to ‗pull her punches‘ in ―The silence of a lifetime‖ results in a poem that is unapologetic and unequivocal in its condemnation of rape. Secondly, she subverts the active/passive dichotomy of the gaze in ―Your eyes‖, allowing women to be both the subject and object of desire. In both ―Solitary cloud‖ and ―The brown pelican‖, Xaba plays with metaphors and imagery in relation to depictions of sexual desire and intimacy. In ―Solitary cloud‖ she reworks the metaphor of land as the body of woman while in ―The brown pelican‖ she utilises the titular image as a catalyst for an imaginative erotic encounter. While Xaba uses explicit, as well as metaphorical, references to sex and desire, her poems cannot read as pornographic. Instead, poems such as ―The brown pelican‖ are highly erotic, in the sense that Audre Lorde employs the term, and this eroticism is related not just to sex, but to life and to fantasy. Xaba also interrogates clichés in ―Soul-mating‖ and suggests alternative metaphors to use in writing about romantic relationships. Furthermore, she depicts love outside of heteronormativity by writing a ―Love poem for my writing group‖ and so celebrating love that is not sexual. Xaba writes woman-centric love poems of different kinds, all of which emphasise the subversive potential of women who write, as well as women who love other women. This is also apparent in ―Waking up‖, where Xaba writes about a woman coming to love another woman while also complicating the symbolic usage of the sun. Thus, Xaba appears to be aware of the way language structures representation, and how this controls, and often limits, they ways in which love and sex can be conceived of. Her poems, through the critique of clichés and the re-employed of clichéd metaphors for subversive purposes, threaten patriarchal structures embedded within language, and with explicit language describing women and their sexual desires, burst open the silences imposed upon women. 112
4. Conclusion
In this dissertation I have attempted to show that Gabeba Baderoon, Ingrid De Kok and Makhosazana Xaba are all involved in a radically new kind of poetic engagement. Theirs is poetry which writes back to a poetic tradition marked by misogynistic attitudes and the exclusion of women and, by appropriating, re-writing and otherwise subverting these traditions these poets find a woman‘s voice in poetic language. All three of these poets make liberal use of the female first-person speaker in their poetry, a device which marks the reclamation of woman‘s voice and agency in representing their experiences, both real and imagined. However, while all three poets are involved in a similar project and often employ similar techniques, each poet has a distinctive style. Baderoon‘s poetry is marked by silences, absences, fragmentation and memory. The language and imagery she employs are subtle and suggestive and her poems are characterized by their brevity. Her style is particularly effective in re- imagining sexual encounters without resorting to graphic visual imagery, as is apparent in ―The Dream in the Next Body‖ (2005: 33) and ―Cinnamon‖ (2005: 17). Furthermore, her employment of silences and absences in the structure and content of her poetry, particularly in ―Today she is not here‖, functions both as a powerful critique of the silencing of women‘s voices and erasure of their autonomy as well as calling for a reading of what is not there, what is hidden by euphemisms and clichés or ignored for its inconvenience to a patriarchal society that might have given women the vote but still expects them to conform to particular roles within romantic relationships. Finally, her focus on the ordinary moments of everyday life, depicted through beautiful, though often simple language, refuses the elevation of the grandiose rhetoric of Love and instead to celebrate the smallest moments of intimacy in all its many forms. De Kok‘s poetry also employs absence and silence, and, like Baderoon in ―The Dream in the Next Body‖ (2005: 33), she writes back to and subverts the poetic form of the ―Aubade‖ (2006: 77). However, her work is more overtly self-reflexive, more obviously literary. De Kok‘s ―Aubade‖ (2006: 77) is deliberately titled as such in order to draw attention to the poem‘s reworking of traditional poetic form. Another example of this overt self-consciousness about traditional poetic form and technique and the position of women, as poets and poetic subjects, in relation to them, is the use of reference to the iamb and the trochee, metric units of poetry, in describing the aging female body in ―After forty‖ (2006: 70). De Kok can thus be seen to theorise within her poetry; about language, gender politics, romantic love and sexual intimacy and poetry itself. The call for the ―delicious fiction, love‖ (l.15 34) to ―dangle its infinitives,/ forget to close its clauses,/ offer alternative endings‖ (ll.16-18) and to praise ―the inelegance of ordinary love‖ (l.22 35) in ―To a would-be lover‖ (2006: 34-35) could function as a manifesto for the project 113 which I argue all three of these poets engage in with regards to romantic love and sexual intimacy. Xaba, no less than Baderoon and De Kok, is clearly engaged in a similar re-writing of poetic form and technique. She evokes and subverts the traditional forms of the sonnet and the aubade, employs familiar metaphors, such as the body as land and women as birds, only to reclaim them for the purposes of women. However, she is the most forthright of the three poets, both about sexual violence in ―The silence of a lifetime‖ (2005: 18-20) and about women‘s sexual desires, as when the speaker tells her lover, in ―Your eyes‖ (2005: 24-25), ―you make me wet‖ (l.17 24). Furthermore, while all three poets, through their use of experimental poetic language and the use of sound, touch, taste and smell in order to evoke the sensual, make use of the revolutionary potential of the semiotic in poetic language, as identified by Kristeva, Xaba's use of the semiotic is the most noteworthy and clearly apparent in ―Love poem for my writing group‖, which is dominated by the use of alliteration – a technique which exploits the expressive sound of words rather than their signifying value – and references to alternative means of communication: laughter, silence and bellowing. Out of the writings of these women, and the sounds of the poem itself, bursts the freedom of women from the constraints of the patriarchal imaginary. Therefore, taken together, these three poets suggest the multiplicity of women‘s voices in South African women‘s poetry and the multiple, productive ways in which they are re-imagining what it means to love and to experience intimacy. This dissertation is an attempt to begin and advance a critical engagement with these voices, some of which have not received the attention they deserve, in order to discover what they have to offer in terms of re-vising a tradition of representational practices which have excluded women, reduced them to sexual objects or idealized them as models of purity. The poems analysed here are only a small sample of these poet‘s work and the three poets represented here only a small sample of South African women poets writing today, such as Antjie Krog, Myesha Jenkins and Lebogang Mashile, amongst others. Through this dissertation, I hope to add another critical voice to the discussion about South African women‘s poetry and to reveal the powerful ways in which these poets are contributing towards ‗a revolution in poetic language‘.
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Edgardh, N. 2009. Difference and Desire – a Queer Reading. Dialog: A Journal of Theology 48(1). Faludi, S. 1992. Backlash: The undeclared war against women. London: Vintage. Freud, S. 1991. The Interpretation of Dreams. In: Stratchey, J. (ed.). Penguin Freud Library Vol. 4. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Friedman, S.S. 1997. When a ‗Long‘ Poem is a ‗Big‘ Poem: Self-authorizing Strategies in Women‘s Twentieth-Century ‗Long Poems. In: Warhol, R.R. and D. Price Hernall. (eds.). Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism. Hampshire: Macmillan Press Limited. Gallup, A., G. Gruitrooy. & E.M. Weisburg. (eds.). 1998. Great Paintings of the Western World. Beaux Arts Editions. Garuba, H. 2005. Silence and the language of the body. Feminist Africa 4. Gilbert, S. and S. Gubar. 1999. The Madwoman in the Attic. In: J. Rivkin and M. Ryan. (eds.). Literary Theory: An Anthology. Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers. Gqola, P.M. 2009. "Pushing out from the centre‖: (Black) feminist imagination, redefined politics and emergent trends in South African poetry. XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics 21/22. Hanisch, C. 2006. The Personal is Political. (Online). http://www.Carolhanisch.org/CHwritings/PersonalisPol.pdf. Accessed 21 April 2013. Hurston, ZN. 2004. Their Eyes Were Watching God. HarperCollins e-books. Irigaray, L. 1981. The Sex which is Not One. In: Marks, E. and I. de Courtivron. (eds.). New French Feminisms. New York. — 1999. ―Women on the Market‖. In: J. Rivkin & M. Ryan. (eds.). Literary Theory: An Anthology. Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers Kristeva, J. 1980. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. New York: Columbia University Press. —1982. Powers of Horror: an essay on abjection. New York: Columbia University Press. —1999. Revolution in Poetic Language. In: J. Rivkin & M. Ryan. (eds.). Literary Theory: An Anthology. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Krog, A. 2006. Body Bereft. Roggebaai: Umuzi. Levine, H.J. 1981. ―Freeing the Swans‖: Yeats‘s Exorcism of Maude Gonne. ELH 48(2): 411- 426. Lewis, S. 2003. Review of de Kok, Ingrid, Terrestrial Things. H-AfrLitCine. http://www.h- net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=7207. Accessed 23 January 2013. Lorde, A. 1984. Age, Race, Class, and Sex. Sister Outsider. Crossing Press. —1984. The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power. Sister Outsider. The Crossing Feminist Press. —1984. Poetry is Not a Luxury. Sister Outsider. The Crossing Press Feminist Series. —2000. ―A Litany for Survival‖. The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde. New York: Norton. Maqagi, V.M. n.d. Interview with Makhosazana Xaba. Unpublished. McAfee, N. 1993. Abject Strangers: Towards an Ethics of Respect. In: Oliver, K. Ethics, Politics, and Difference in Julia Kristeva’s Writing. New York: Routledge. Miller, A. 2009. ―At Home in Your Skin‖: Interview with Makhosazana Xaba. Mail & Guardian Online. http://www.mg.co.za/article/2009-11-27-at-home-in-your-skin. Accessed 18 February 2013. Mnensa, M.T. 2010. Speaking Out: African Orality and Post-Colonial Preoccupations in Selected Examples of Contemporary Performance Poetry. MA dissertation. Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, Port Elizabeth. Molema, L. 2005. Review of Lisa Comrink‘s An Infinite Longing for Love: A Collection of Poetry and Makhosazana Xaba‘s These Hands. Feminist Africa 5. Morrison, T. 1999. The Bluest Eye. London: Vintage. —2006. Beloved. London: Random House 116
Mulvey, L. 1975. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Screen 16(3). —1989. Visual and Other Pleasures. London: Macmillan Press. —1999. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. In: J. Rivkin and M. Ryan. (eds.). Literary Theory: An Anthology. Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers Musila, G. 2007. Embodying Experience and Agency in Yvonne Vera‘s Without a Name and Butterfly Burning. Research in African Literatures 38(2): 49-63. Ndebele, N.S. 1991. The Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Some New Writings in South Africa. Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Essays on South African Literature and Culture. Johannesburg: Congress of South African Writers. Radithlalo, S. 2009. ―Truth in Translation‖: The TRC and the Translation of the Translators. Biography 32(1). Rich, A. n.d. When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-vision. (Online). http://www.nbu.bg/web/amb/america/5/rich.writing.htm. Accessed 27 March 2013. —1985. Towards a Politics of Location. In: Diaz-Diocaretz, M. and I.M. Zavala. Women, Feminist Identity, and Society in the 1980’s: Selected Papers. John Benjamin‘s Publishing Company. Ruiz, M.I.R. 2012. Introduction: Re-writing Our Bodies and Our Identities. In: M.I.R. Ruiz (ed.). Women’s Identities and Bodies in Colonial and Postcolonial History and Literature. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Shakespeare, W. 1975. The Sonnets of William Shakespeare. London: Shepheard-Walwyn. Spearey, S. 2008. ―May the unfixable broken bone/ […] give us new bearings: ethics affect and irresolution in Ingrid de Kok‘s ―A room full of questions‖. Postcolonial Text 4(1). Sykes, J.B. (ed). 1977. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Thomas, K. 2011. Speaking our Silences. Mail & Guardian. http://mg.co.za/article/2011-11-25- speaking-our-silences/. Accessed 23 January 2013. Vogelman, L. & S. Lewis. 1993. Gang Rape and the Culture of Violence in South Africa. Published in German under the title, Illusion der Starke: Jugenbanden, vergewaltigung und kultuur der gewalt in Sudafriak, in Der Uberblick, 2. CSVR. (Online.) http://www.csvr.org.za/index.php/publications/1631-gang-rape-and-the-culture-of- violence-in-south-africa.html. Accessed 16 November 2013. Vera, Y. 1999. ―Preface‖. In: Y. Vera. (ed.). Opening Spaces: An Anthology of African Women’s Writing. Oxford: Heinemann; Harare: Baobab Books. —2000. Butterfly Burning. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. Walker, A. 1983. The Colour Purple. London: The Women‘s Press. —1991. In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens. London: The Women‘s Press Limited. Water, S. 1998. Tipping the Velvet. London: Little, Brown. Woolf, V. 2004. The Waves. London: Vintage. Wylie, D. 2007. Dark Sepia Interiors. Scrutiny2: Issues in English Studies in Southern Africa. 12(1):163-179. Xaba, M. 2005. These Hands. Limpopo province: Timbala Poetry Project. —2008. Tongues of their Mothers. Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press. —2013. Email correspondence with Jenny Du Preez. 15 November. Yuknavitch, L. 2010. The Chronology of Water: A Memoir. Portland: Hawthorne Books.
i
6. Addendum 6.1. Gabeba Baderoon
Baderoon, G. 2005. The Dream in the Next Body. Cape Town: Kwela Books. Pg. 33.
ii
Baderoon, G. 2005. The Dream in the Next Body. Cape Town: Kwela Books. Pg. 26.
iii
Baderoon, G. 2005. The Dream in the Next Body. Cape Town: Kwela Books. Pg. 35.
iv
Baderoon, G. 2005. The Dream in the Next Body. Cape Town: Kwela Books. Pg. 9-10.
v
Baderoon, G. 2005. The Dream in the Next Body. Cape Town: Kwela Books. Pg. 17.
Baderoon, G. 2005. The Dream in the Next Body. Cape Town: Kwela Books. Pg. 55.
vi
Baderoon, G. 2005. The Dream in the Next Body. Cape Town: Kwela Books. Pg. 40.
vii
Baderoon, G. 2006. A Hundred Silences. Cape Town: Kwela Books. Pg. 13.
viii
Baderoon, G. 2006. A Hundred Silences. Cape Town: Kwela Books. Pg. 34-35.
ix
Baderoon, G. 2006. A Hundred Silences. Cape Town: Kwela Books. Pg. 48.
Baderoon, G. 2006. A Hundred Silences. Cape Town: Kwela Books. Pg. 19.
x
6.2. Ingrid de Kok
De Kok, I. 2006. Seasonal fires: New and Selected Poems. Roggebaai: Umuzi. Pg. 32-33.
xi
De Kok, I. 2006. Seasonal fires: New and Selected Poems. Roggebaai: Umuzi. Pg. 34-35.
xii
De Kok, I. 2006. Seasonal fires: New and Selected Poems. Roggebaai: Umuzi. Pg. 36-37.
xiii
De Kok, I. 2006. Seasonal fires: New and Selected Poems. Roggebaai: Umuzi. Pg. 28-29.
xiv
De Kok, I. 2006. Seasonal fires: New and Selected Poems. Roggebaai: Umuzi. Pg. 70.
De Kok, I. 2006. Seasonal fires: New and Selected Poems. Roggebaai: Umuzi. Pg. 77.
xv
De Kok, I. 2006. Seasonal fires: New and Selected Poems. Roggebaai: Umuzi. Pg. 76.
De Kok, I. 2006. Seasonal fires: New and Selected Poems. Roggebaai: Umuzi. Pg. 74. xvi
De Kok, I. 2006. Seasonal fires: New and Selected Poems. Roggebaai: Umuzi. Pg. 75.
xvii
6.3. John Donne
Donne, J. 1978. ―The Sun Rising‖. In: Smith, A.J. (ed.). John Donne: The Complete English Poems. Middlesex: Penguin Books. Pg. 80-81.
xviii
6.4. Antjie Krog
Krog, A. 2006. Body Bereft. Roggebaai: Umuzi. Pg. 28-29.
xix
6.5. Makhosazana Xaba
Xaba, M. 2005. These Hands. Limpopo province: Timbala Poetry Project. Pg. 42.
xx
Xaba, M. 2005. These Hands. Limpopo province: Timbala Poetry Project. Pg. 43-44.
xxi
PTO xxii
DIGNITY SPILLS continued
Xaba, M. 2005. These Hands. Limpopo province: Timbala Poetry Project. Pg. 49-50.
xxiii
PTO
xxiv
THE SILENCE OF A LIFETIME continued
PTO
xxv
THE SILENCE OF A LIFETIME continued
Xaba, M. 2005. These Hands. Limpopo province: Timbala Poetry Project. Pg. 18-20.
xxvi
Xaba, M. 2005. These Hands. Limpopo province: Timbala Poetry Project. Pg. 24-25.
xxvii
Xaba, M. 2005. These Hands. Limpopo province: Timbala Poetry Project. Pg. 28.
xxviii
Xaba, M. 2005. These Hands. Limpopo province: Timbala Poetry Project. Pg. 48.
xxix
Xaba, M. 2005. These Hands. Limpopo province: Timbala Poetry Project. Pg. 22-23.
xxx
Xaba, M. 2005. These Hands. Limpopo province: Timbala Poetry Project. Pg. 41.
Xaba, M. 2005. These Hands. Limpopo province: Timbala Poetry Project. Pg. 37.
xxxi
Xaba, M. 2005. These Hands. Limpopo province: Timbala Poetry Project. Pg. 37.
xxxii
Xaba, M. 2005. These Hands. Limpopo province: Timbala Poetry Project. Pg. 13-14.
xxxiii
v
Xaba, M. 2005. These Hands. Limpopo province: Timbala Poetry Project. Pg. 10-12.
Xaba, M. 2005. These Hands. Limpopo province: Timbala Poetry Project. Pg. 27. xxxiv
Xaba, M. 2005. These Hands. Limpopo province: Timbala Poetry Project. Pg. 39.