Grahamstown Opera <\/b><\/p>\n
(For Jamie)<\/i><\/p>\n
I<\/b><\/p>\n
How could I say all I wanted to say,
\nwhen you snatched the questions in my throat,
\nbleeding my thoughts?<\/p>\n
On the road from Grahamstown,
\nyour serenity was a ferocity at the steering.
\nYes, the steering, on the bumpy roads,
\nthose bumpy roads that you commanded
\nand steered, like a colonel in the colonial army,
\nwith steel, with fervor.
\nThat we were not accidented
\nwas because you were not an accident,
\nyou were only waiting to happen!<\/p>\n
Do you remember those roads?
\nYes, those roads?
\nDoes the Prussian gene running through your Anglo arteries,
\nproduce that Mona Lisa smile, that puzzles
\nand pierces in concurrent cadences?
\nWe are coming from Grahamstown,
\nand we are heading for Grahamstown;
\na merry-go-round that was merry,
\nbut redolent of missed goals.<\/p>\n
\nII<\/b><\/p>\n
How could I say how I was going to dance,
\nwhen you said that the dance hall was closed tonight
\n– like yesterday?<\/p>\n
Zimbabwean farmer’s daughter,
\nseeming the tide of history;
\nthe history that shooed your progeny from the templates to the tropics,
\nhiStory that seized the land but could not steal History,
\ncould not seize the people;
\nhiStory that farmed on appropriated lands
\nthat the future could not re-appropriate.<\/p>\n
By the time Mugabe’s men came,
\nalas, history was gone, but geography stood still,
\nunmoved by the pace of time.
\nThough time stole space,
\nspace couldn’t steal temporality,
\nas history bolted through the door left ajar by His-trionics<\/i>,
\nMugabe’s theatre of the absurd.
\nAsk the dotard of Harare,
\nthe recycled autocrat in the land of expired Rhodesians,
\nif they came back for the land,
\nwhy were they thirsting for blood, seeking erasure?
\nCouldn’t they see that your beauty was part of the land,
\na tract of history?<\/p>\n
Yes, the race is not for the weak; but the weak is not a race!
\nRacing to the finishing line, as the lines were vanishing,
\nwasn’t that the Boer’s claim?
\nEver heard of Camus’ muse,
\nthat a government has no conscience, even if it has a policy?
\nBut no one asked the conscientious French,
\nbefore perishing on the roads, if that was true of a race,
\nof the degrading and exterminating logic of sterile pigmentation.
\nNo one asks if that is true of the present seeking to rape the past,
\nwhile assassinating the future.
\nNo one asked in Algeria, in Rhodesia, not in Auschwitz.
\nNo one asked from the AmerIndians, from the Jim Crow heirs,
\nor from the Australian Aborigines, and the Armenians.
\nIf the sky does not color the rainbow in Jerusalem or in the new Pretoria,
\nwho will color the land?<\/p>\n
In the landscapes of hate, transformed into a m\u00e9lange of colors,
\ndissipated in black,
\nwhat does the old Boer say to the new baas<\/i>?<\/p>\n
\nIII<\/b><\/p>\n
How can I say all I wanted to say,
\nwhen the lightning flashed,
\nwhile the thunder tore my question into halves?<\/p>\n
Thinking of history in the present,
\nof beauty as a present….
\nRoaming the botanical garden, with you in mind,
\nnot in tow,
\nbeside those rocks cast in millions of years afore,
\nlike irrevocable natural justice in the entrails of time,
\nbroken into patterns in stunning beauty,
\nlike the rectitude that is nature’s beauty.<\/p>\n
Beyond the garden,
\nstill on the road, remember the pub,
\nyes, the whitened pub, the one that English-fies<\/i> the countryside?
\nYour driving, despite its ferocity,
\nreminded me of your silence and calm,
\nand the cool efficiency of the Zim-ed<\/i>!
\nThe cheering serenity of your inner self,
\nmixed in a m\u00e9lange with the full efficacy symbolized by
\nthe black eagle with its white background
\nvalorized by your Teutonic ancestors.<\/p>\n
You are like a riddle that remains unraveled,
\neven unwrapped
\nlike a Christmas gift, with a note:
\n“To be opened at Christ’s return!”
\nBut the returning, like the repeating, is in terminal excess,
\nobjectifying, yet annotating, every gesture
\nas if processed by a forensic machine,
\na Prussian invention.<\/p>\n
Racing through townships that mock the mortality of race;
\nand the morbidity of colors;
\ntownships that shift the advancement of the age,
\nmocking the tenure of change.
\nTownships that charge into the conscience,
\nbreaking into the heart, like a practiced Western Cape burglar.<\/p>\n
If I could burglarize your mind and steal its secrets,
\nI would return in the morning,
\ntemporarily penitent like the Pentecostalist, until the next sin.<\/p>\n
I am bewitched, seized by the elements
\ncomposing African sorcery, which long tantalized
\ndiseased Western ethnographers,
\nthe product of their ethno-science.
\nIn the throes of the bewitched and the bewitching,
\nI recall the slashes of the Indian Ocean at Port Alfred,
\nthat rush into a combination, rising
\nas if in a choreographed salute to Providence,
\ncoming to attention in a multitude of crests.
\nA rush of waves crashing against the barricades,
\nerect like Botha’s Security Branch.<\/p>\n
But I couldn\u2019t ask the question that
\nCoetzee\u2019s Michael K. asked from the nurse
\nwhile she was stripping him and washing his bare body:
\n\u201cAnd who is Prince Alfred?\u201d<\/p>\n
Beyond the sea-side cottages raised by privilege,
\nand sustained by fetishized capital,
\ndo you remember the poser to the fishers by the ocean
\nwhen they confessed no catch in all evening:
\n“Come, I will make you fishers of men!”?
\nAnd your gentle reminder that the pretense catechism eluded them?<\/p>\n
\nIV<\/b><\/p>\n
How can I tell if I would waltz again,
\nwhen you sat my lieutenant outside the dance floor?<\/p>\n
Yesterday, it rained in Grahamstown.
\nYes, it did,
\nwith the showers falling on the roof of my suite
\nat the High Corner like the beginning of a torrent.
\nI heard the rain beating on the roof,
\non the glass window and on the grass
\nand on stone floors outside the semi-secluded suite
\nlike a scolding, first gently, then in staccato,
\nbut later, it struck insistently.<\/p>\n
The music the rain composed was like Bernstein’s Second Symphony,
\n“The Age of Anxiety”; the lines
\nwould take a while to form themselves
\nin the mind of the master-composer, and then
\nqueue out of the genius’s mind like orderly and obedient progeny.<\/p>\n
The rain conducted “The Masque” too, riding, no, rising
\nand falling like symphonic melodies.
\nIt soon stops, though,
\npetering out in cadences and seemingly holding its breath
\nfor an applause.<\/p>\n
Pity, there was no audience,
\nso the silent interval could only beckon the rain to beat again,
\nas if in the beginning of yet another symphony,
\nbut one derived from a Miltonian sonnet.<\/p>\n
You wouldn’t sway to the rain, would you?
\nEven if your Prussian blood calmly appropriates the symphony,
\ngently still, still gently, like an heritage lost in war, but reclaimed in dignity?<\/p>\n
Whose dignity, my dear? Whose war?
\nWhat were you avoiding with your cool and comely rebuff,
\nwhen the rebuff dissolved into gentle nods,
\nnods in nods, nods for nods,
\nnods calmly delivered, in succession,
\nbut mildly disconfirming?<\/p>\n
The forgotten war, or the approaching battles,
\nrising in crescendos or descending in decrescendos?
\nAn octave raised like the spear of the Zulu
\nagainst the bayonets of the invading army?
\nA clarinet slapped in the back of the opposite-formation
\nlike the playful lusts of hopeful lovers,
\ncollapsing into merrily trysts?
\nThrusting deep, trusting deed, trusting still.
\nDidn’t the singer croon that “guilty feeling’s got no rhythm”?
\nWhere then is the rhythmic in innocent feelings?<\/p>\n
You took my errant sonnets
\nand mixed them with stabilizing symphonies,
\nmatched my itinerant dirges with a stable concerto,
\nconstantly repeating, like a playlist with only one song.<\/p>\n
\nV<\/b><\/p>\n
How could I tell if I was going to wriggle my body
\nto the sounds of hip hop,
\nwhen your hips declined twisting to Tupac’s “Ghetto Gospel”….<\/p>\n
We are back on the road beyond Alexandria\u2019s turning
\nwhen we find the road sign, “God says …” in Afrikaans,
\nas if the Xhosa God speaks in Afrikaans.
\nExiting Charles Dickens’ Bleak House,<\/i>
\nyou remind me of the unity and complimentarily
\nof the races and our common humanity;
\nin the unity of flesh, not in the crushing of bones,
\nin the meeting of minds, where reason is owned by all,
\nand rationality does not steal the other’s ration.<\/p>\n
The hands open for the embrace of a multiple heritage,
\ndo not grab the bow legs of a rainbow nation.
\nThe orifices of history remind us of the
\nmorticians of the nation, who are beckoned to carry their throne,
\nthrone of the nation,
\nbeyond the pale of colors.<\/p>\n
Beyond the sheer futility of the
\ncacophony of the new ecclesiastics of color,
\nthe foaming waves at Port Alfred and the white-bellies of the
\nclouds at Grahamstown all remind me of what I wanted to buy
\nfor you,
\nbut I could not ask for your sizes….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Grahamstown Opera (For Jamie) I How could I say all I wanted to say, when you snatched the questions in my throat, bleeding my thoughts? On the road from Grahamstown, your serenity was a ferocity at the steering. Yes, the steering, on the bumpy roads, those bumpy roads that you […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1353,"parent":229,"menu_order":3,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-651","page","type-page","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/651","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=651"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/651\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1456,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/651\/revisions\/1456"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/229"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1353"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=651"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}