Launch of Kelwyn Sole's Absent Tongues (26 April 2012)
– Rustum Kozain
It is a great pleasure and honour to introduce Kelwyn Sole’s new and sixth volume of poetry,
Absent Tongues
, published by Modjaji’s Hands-On Books.I’d like to keep my introduction short so that Kelwyn can spend the time reading poetry andshowcasing the book.I think it was only in 1991 that someone recommended Kelwyn’s poetry to me. I was fresh into myMaster’s degree (with Kelwyn as supervisor), and had previously done an honours course with him("Contemporary Black South African Literature") and attended his famous (or infamous, dependingon your politics) lectures on Milton’s
Paradise Lost.
Kelwyn’s debut,
The Blood of Our Silence
(1987), was then already 4 years old, and his second,
Projections in the Past Tense
, was forthcomingin 1992. I read that first book with growing astonishment and I am still astonished when I re-read poems from it, and also poems from
Projections in the Past Tense
, as well as poems from his other books:
Love that is night
(1998),
Mirror and Water Gazing
(2001), and his previous to latest,
Land Dreaming
(2006).Several things then astonished me about his poetry, and keep on astonishing me, including the poetryin his new book,
Absent Tongues
. In the main, though, in his poetry there is a quiet, and quietlyinsistent, voice that continually asks the difficult questions of South African life in an art that from thestart put paid to any easy caricaturing of political art as one-dimensional or any sense that SouthAfrican literature of the 1980s and early 1990s was one-dimensional. Many of us will remember South Africa’s own sort of ‘culture wars’ of the late 1980s, with the Marxists and formalists at eachother, the one camp insisting on politics as a necessary, even the only valid, topic of SA art, the other side dismissing as propaganda any text that had a hint of politics as theme. Both Kelwyn’s thematicrange and his treatment of politics as theme undercut arguments on both sides. And, as these issuesmake their cyclical return, I would recommend readers to look at all his books, from his new one being launched tonight, right back to
The Blood of Our Silence
. (I’m hoping that sooner rather thanlater, someone will publish a nice, big fat Selected Poetry?)As both poet and a critic of South African culture, Kelwyn has for many years been ahead of thecurve. While contemporary writers and reviewers are now getting pop-eyed over erotic fiction bySouth African authors, sex and erotics have been recurrent themes in his poetry (and nothing that hislectures on Milton had prepared me for.) I tell you, read his love poetry and be forever changed.But it’s not all sex and politics. For me, one of his most evocative poems is “Mankuku”, a short poemin celebration of the Cape Town saxophonist, Winston Ngozi Mankinku (d. 2009), and which keys into SA progressive culture and which itself spurred me, green horn that I was then, to find music byMankunku:“Mankunku”Dark golden boaton a seafar away, rock with merock with me:deep-throated birdgentle me home past the mud-lined street
where thoughts stick fastand children pick rubbishhungrilythe night flakes notesfrom the scalp of my sorrow -hide in my pillowand cry for me(from
The Blood of Our Silence
, 1987)As a critic, too, Kelwyn was ahead. In the early 1980s, in a seminal long essay, “Culture, Politics andthe Black Writer: A Critical Look at Prevailing Assumptions” (
English in Africa
10.1), he warnedagainst the critical dangers of considering black SA culture and literature through the singular lens of race, cautioning that writers and critics wrote as if all South Africa’s problems would disappear at thedemise of apartheid. It is an essay that present-day critics and culture journalists would be well-advised to read or re-visit as commentators now seem dumbfounded and surprised to ‘discover’ that black South Africa does not constitute one unified social or economic class.It is this kind of critical intelligence – a constant consideration of the complexities of life, whether it be in sex, in our relationship with the natural landscape or with urban spaces, or in how weunderstand our various political moments – that makes Kelwyn’s poetry always refreshing and alwaysrenewed; it is a critical intelligence which refuses to fall back on easy assumptions, the latter of course the worst form of cognitive and poetic cliché.Many years ago, I remember, Denis Hirson remarked to me that no one looks at a dog like Kelwyndoes. The dog in question appears in “Poem from Botswana”, also from
The Blood of Our Silence
:The dogs here are a miserable crowd:Lean, incapable, bones pointing like fingersthrough the yellow grass of their skin, turning over hundreds of dustbins in search of a face.They scream when kicked and cringeand beg for food but do nothing ever useful. No person in my village otherwise notices them,which is what the dogs want most of all.I have watched them die in ditches.Three hundred yards from my houseone decays day after day, quietly.His fur is a grey stain on the changing season:the children grimace and hold their noses going past, but that does not stop him being death.They know, much better than we, how muchtheir flesh lives in a world of murder.I listen at night to their anxious calling,how they will not let the righteous sleep.Their bodies turn in the volcano sky bright as the stars to which they lift their heads.
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