The Dutch poet Joop Bersee, has been gifted confidante to me, selfless mentor, and I’ve have come to the beliefs, the norms, the value of the principles of an Africana-poet, who serves as patriot, comrade, and compatriot to the African Diaspora, and the African Commonwealth countries as a poet who self-edits, who doesn’t accept censorship for the sake of censorship, who works at publishing, and self-publishing (I no longer view it from the perspective of the curse of vanity publishing), who works at editing the art, the work, the vision, the craft, the poetry, proofreading, accepting that as poets, as renaissance poets that the voices of this generation, and the artists who are millennials have a responsibility and accountability to the greats who came before, alive and dead, and that we have a cause towards the broader society.
What the poetic life means to an African Renaissance (termed coined by ex-President of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki) poet means survival, levelling out the pressures of controversy, moods, an almost disquieting revolutionary-determination to write to an audience, or to no audience at all. To be poet, to have poetic fervour is to have no equal footing with Western and Eastern counterparts. To be poet in South Africa, means that you are an intellectual, a philosopher, educated if you have a degree in African literature, and we all know that there’s no money in the poetry-game of life, simply sacrifice above popularity, and the complexities of the personal space in which these apprentice, emerging, and established renaissance-poets create.
These renaissance-poets create, and live within emerging race relations, the policies of integration, the digital divide, affirmative action in the workplaces, the corporate sector’s managerial positions, in their friendships, their interracial relationships, and marriage, and children, and wifedom, and chiefdom, and elder in the community, deacon in the church, teacher, educator, scholar, academic, publisher, and inter-faith competition, the redemptive powers of salvation, rapturous adulation. As a poet, poetry is my church, and I am a mallrat in a mall when it comes to poetry, feeding, nurturing, caretaking, and protecting my art, my craft, my vision, my self-worth, identity, and abandonment issues, and the helplessness that is sometimes fed into the “artist-neglect” from all walks of our society.
And as artists we live without, we lack financial security, emotional security, we call our country the world, we’re viewed as having a Aaronic-dispensation, an assignment that is tangible, relevant, holy, and pure, angelic, messianic, missionary, visionary, our input, and feedback, nothing subjugated about it, when the poet is subversive, the poet is subversive, when the poet is controversial, he is controversial as artist. Karma and destiny, the primordial soup of the mudslinging-bondage that the renaissance-poets find themselves in, carrying the promotion of government leaders with them, their physical body shielding their emotional strife, their malaise that comes with their intrinsic, and external environment, poetic, and intellectual dispensation.
You read about them, these renaissance-poets, they’re interviewed in the local or national papers, they have an online presence, they launch books, conduct workshops, attend functions where they recite their poetry, take photographs, are lauded, praised, adored for their remarkable acquisition of imagination, and the oral traditions of their creativity, they certainly don’t waste their talent, their immutable gift of the gab, their intellect, their religious affiliation, and their pain. It is that great abyss of pain that weighs heaviest on the mind, and the voices of these renaissance-poets whatever gender they are. There is depression but it is not spoken about as is intellectual-pain, mental, emotional, physical abuse. As part of a living library initiative, a satellite project, my father and I discussed at length how to go inspiring the next generation of renaissance-poets.
I, (well, we, with my father’s blessing) recently donated books from my private library to the Gelvandale library, school prizes for English, private libraries of Professor Shaheed Hendricks, who now lectures at the Nelson Mandela University in Port Elizabeth, in the Eastern Cape of South Africa, (he is also the co-author of the South
End: As We Knew It, South End: The Aftermath, and South End: The Workbook which was introduced into school, as well as university curriculums a few decades ago. I donated books to the South End Museum’s Curio Shop as well. Poets need to be read, especially renaissance poets who don’t “communicate” (see write, see compose) in their mother tongue.
Poets need to be fostered in the communities they find themselves in, in primary, and high school, in poverty, and prosperity, poets need access to a wealth of knowledge, and the process of spiritual change, progress, and transformation. Are writers’ posers, actors, researchers first, and historians second, and educationalists, scholars, and academics a paltry third? Truth be told, because artists come from trauma, incidents of trauma dominate broadly speaking in the wide scope, childhood, adolescent, young adult, and adult. They’re known abroad, but not in their mother-tongue, not in their South African hometown, and they’re certainly not celebrated across Africa, as they most certainly should be. South Africans, Nigerians, Malawians, Abigail George, Athol Williams, Ayanda Billie, Beaton Galafa, Brian Walter, at the end of the day we are all African poets. We are all a part of the African Renaissance. We are all renaissance-poets.
The Nigerian-American Chika Onyenezi, the South Africans Douglas Reid Skinner, Genna Gardini, Joan Hambidge, the Zimbabwean John Eppel, Mishka Hoosen-Lewis, Mzi Mahola, Mxolisi Nyezwa, Nick Mulgrew, the Zimbabweans Tendai Rinos Mwanaka, and rising star Mikateko Mbambo who is on the brink of publishing her first poetry collection, must all see their literary work as a Jurassic World of sorts, a fallen kingdom, that will once again become dynamic. If I have advice to give to the renaissance-poets it is this. Let the breath come to you, let the hunger speak, put your work in a time capsule, and think of this capsule as a time machine. Your mutual admiration club unfortunately is not going to arrive in your lifetime, renaissance-poets, but for the generations to come.
You will feel lonely, and isolated, and rejected, and interlope, you will feel pathetic, and limiting frustration, and anxiety, and fear in the work that you do, but this is what happens to artists who make no money from their art, and artists who make money from their art. It’s good to be modern, to venerate your peers, your contemporaries, but most renaissance poets work will never see the light of day. It is important to question that continually, and we are all children of Africa, and we’ve all lived Alan Paton’s “Cry, the beloved country”, and we’ve all had our hearts resonate with Nelson Mandela’s “Long walk to freedom”. Is the male writer/poet-figure under threat, under fire sinister, or otherwise, and who is judging anyway, who is judging committee politics, the kingpins of the literary establishment ruled by the liberals, and the hypothetical-picture, the self-portrait of the class and justice system.
And where is the modern-day dashing Mr Darcy figure of Richard Rive?
Where is Mongane Serote, Mzi Mahola, Mxolisi Nyezwa, Ayanda Billie, Monde Ngoyama now, and why is the female voice is not as beloved as her male counterpart, uplifted, and empowered, and as positively-inspired as I would like her to be. If you are a poet, you’re educator, and philosopher. Don’t, don’t, don’t waste your pain, instead empty out of all your negativity, and the sorrow that you think that people don’t see. The poetic life is the life of an emergency continued, harsh trauma, all-powerful and a collective.
Poetry is tribal, and ancestral, and poets should be venerated, and uplifted, but they’re not. Reflection, introspection of the renaissance poets should be more than the image of gravitas, more than illusion, more than a mapping out of freshly grounded utopia.
The female renaissance-poet is more mouse-intellectual, than thunder, and the physical chemistry of lightning. She makes take up her place, her mantle now in her-story as visionary-thinker, more than radical feminist she-devil. The renaissance-poets is far from near-decay, instead they are saint, and gloriously in bloom. Cultural, and qualitative intellectual sensibilities, probabilities stem from, are rooted in fear, nausea, consciousness, the superego, identity, and issues of inter-faith that must stand counterpoint to democracy.
And take the suffering nature of humanity that you think that people around you, people in your environment don’t take cognizance of, and be the artist that you were meant to be. And know that you are writer/poet-friend to the world, to millions.
Know that you know how to deal with hundreds of years of trauma if you’re an artist, that as an artist you are a dominant figure in society, in the art-world, and that you are a symbol of both hope, and triumph, equality, democracy, solidarity, if you’re a born free, or millennial, or living in self-imposed exile, or in exile basically.
Poets, talking about the poets of the African Renaissance here, we’re a cosmopolitan bunch in it to win it at all cost to our intrinsic-humanity, the inter-faith of different races also comes into play here, and the realization that we are ancients really, alongside the apparitions, the voices in our heads, threading words, and creating tapestries with our phantom threads. Our African Renaissance is just beginning. Watch this space bloom anthologies in arrows, guardians, smoke, flesh, and bone.
