Cover Art: Mary Wafer, 'Untitled IV 2015'
"Dié een", short fiction from 'geruisloos, ongemerk' (Deep South, 2022) by Henali Kuit
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Soon you will get more choosy, you’ll start seeing which writers are aping others and which ones have developed their own authentic writing voice. These writers will also become part of your literary community, even if you never meet them, or they live in other countries or died long ago.
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So look for writers whom you find interesting, speak to people who are interested in reading the kind of stuff that you like, start noticing what’s happening in the kind of literature you relate to.
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[...]
Some people think they can become writers without being readers, and up to a point this may be true. But you can’t go very far in any creative medium unless you benefit from the astonishingly rich ways in which others have used the medium.
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The exciting thing about writing is that sometimes we take a pen (or a keyboard) and out of that instrument comes something unexpected, something extraordinary, or moving. It all feels worth it when you read something you’ve written and think: Did I write that?
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That’s actually what keeps me doing it – the ongoing possibility that something I produce will take on a life of its own.
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It’s a way of making sense of things by mixing together what’s ‘out there’ with what’s ‘in here’. Then there’s the big hope: maybe something I write will speak back to me: and once or twice it has.
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If it’s such agony, why do it? The fact is I don’t really know. It’s a kind of restless compulsion to dredge something out of myself and distil it in a way that communicates to at least one other person.
Rosamund Stanford 2015
Cover Art: Willem Boshoff, 'Tree'
Excerpt from the article by Rosamund (Mindy) Stanford: "Getting Started as a Writer", for the Centre for the Book Pamphlet Series, 2006
For the full article, see Rosamund (Mindy) Stanford's 'Hurricurrent' book page on the Deep South website:
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"Our little tropical scars" by Ari Sitas, from 'Rough Music: Selected Poems 1989-2013' (Deep South, 2013)
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Berold’s more expansive belief that “writers who can bring the different fragments of reality together will have an important healing function.”
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the young poet Kabomo’s belief that he could “let the bullshit out on paper … (and) be more honest on paper than with my mother, my girlfriend, my best friend and even myself” to
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It is little wonder, therefore, that after liberation the poetry’s potential for exploring and processing psychological anguish has manifested itself, in terms that vary from
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“fragments of psyches … together presenting a picture of a traumatised disturbed society. … I began to realise that in a society like ours it is extremely difficult to distinguish between psychological and social manifestations.”
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In the early years of his editorship, Robert Berold (editor of the poetry journal New Coin between 1989-1999) speaks of receiving poems demonstrating
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From this perspective, the duty of poetry is, according to Bila, “to ask embarrassing questions”; an attitude increasingly removed from the poets of the ruling order.
[...]
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Any perusal of the poetry of Mbongeni Khumalo, Press, Motsapi, Bila, Rampolokeng, and many others shows a radical, critical spirit of enquiry at work.
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These poems highlight the degree to which a country awash with nationalist rhetoric has accepted old habits that do not challenge people’s preconceptions of, or responses to, structures of power.
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In others — such as Karen Press’ “Tiresias in the City of Heroes” and Bila’s “Mandela, Have You Ever Wondered?” — heroes are shown to have feet of clay.
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In some cases, such as Chris Mann’s poem “Where is the Freedom For Which They Died?” the names of heroes and martyrs of the anti-apartheid struggle are used as a comparative counterpoint to shame other South Africans involved in internecine conflict, family abuse and violence.
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In the face of a media obsessed with icons and role-models, the trope of the “hero” has been subjected to scrutiny.
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Since liberation a chorus of poems have emerged critical, at times harshly so, of the new generation of politicians, and the corruption and nepotism that has attended them.
Kelwyn Sole 2017 © Poetry Africa
Cover Art: Mongezi Ncaphayi, 'Come on, now - 2013'
From the article by Kelwyn Sole: "Licking the Stage Clean or Hauling Down the Sky?: The Profile of the Poet and the Politics of Poetry in Contemporary South Africa” for 'Mediations', 2009
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Cover Art: Colbert Mashile, 'Leru Leso'
"A burning sea" and "Songs from the earth" by Mxolisi Nyezwa from 'Malikhanye' (Deep South, 2011)
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consumption by the dominant-culture audience, meeting their often stereotypical expectations of this ‘Other’ — instead of allowing scope for the same range of diverse experiences that are allowed to authors from the dominating cultures, those at the top of Schimel’s pyramid.
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— a representation that is often exaggerated further in translation. In this frame, every book by an author from any of these backgrounds carries the weight of having to represent the experience of ‘the Other’, packaged in predetermined ways for
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Books from ‘Other’ cultures are selected for publication because they fetishise or exoticise the suffering of the ‘Other’; foreground a fictionalised and reductive representation of ‘the Other’ that serves the interests, economically and ideologically, of the dominant culture
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This is at the root of what Glastonbury, in an interview with writer and translator Anton Hur, has called the “trauma porn industrial complex”:
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What do differences in these thresholds tell us about power dynamics?
[...]
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And then the ethical question: Should translators attempt to represent experiences distant to their own embodied experience in the world? And if so, what degree of knowledge is seen as necessary in order to be able to translate, for different translation contexts and directions?
