That night we met the band we’d be performing with. Guitarist Ray Piri was the leader; he is also the Director of the Cultural Commission of Upumalanga, a walking legend whose albums are big-sellers, and a true character with a great sense of humor and a penchant for crashing personal opinions into government policy. This mix I found to some degree in practically everyone I met in South Africa. From the workers at the hotels to the South African poets, young and old, from the students at the Indian all-girls’ high schools to the drivers who took us there – everyone was passionately and personally involved in the political process.
Don Mattera, one of the elder South African statesmen at the festival, would spend more time talking wisdom than reading poems –- his youth as a gangleader in Soweto, his imprisonment, political conversions. He generally makes his living as an inspirational speaker now, and raises all kinds of questions about poetry aesthetics, politics, sociology. His reading at NorthWest University was a guided tour of the Harlem Renaissance, with his reciting poems by Countee Cullen, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes. He concluded his set with three poems by Emily Dickinson.
The reading at NorthWest was also a high point for Dennis Brutus, one of the founding poets of the anti-apartheid movement, who was also in the festival. Brutus, who was a track star as a youth and broke rocks at Robben Island with Mandela, Sisulu and others, reminds me of Auden in the dense lyricism of his work, but with a political core that evokes the pain, sorrow, disaster that was South Africa for the long, ugly rule of apartheid. Dennis has lived in the United States for the last 25 years, teaching at Temple and currently at Pittsburgh. He had also taught at NorthWest and was thrilled to see the banners that greeted him as we entered: “Globalization is the New Apartheid.” His reading here was a talk: an extraordinarily youthful 79 (!), he let the students in on how to be a radical and a student, considering how much time it would take, suggesting that for many, being politically engaged actually helped their grades. It was a brilliant, passionate talk (not a speech, check it!), pitched right at the students.
The other poets from South Africa framed the culture. Robert Berold, until recently the editor of the seminal po-zine New Coin, has realized his dream – a life of poetry and poverty on his own farm near Grahamstown. Berold has done essential work in opening up the trails of South African poetry, and sees the connects between these poetries and the dominating US modernism of Beats, NYSchool/St Mark’s, Slams. (Read Berold’s full report on Poetry Africa in Donga.)
Evelyn Creswell was making her first public appearances at age 69. A keeper of the underground flame during apartheid, her elegant work was a benchmark of the festival. Kgafela oa Magogodi manages to synthesize hip hop performance and the academy, theater and love poetry in a single breath – he’s The Ambassador. Then Rorvik brought on two 24-year-olds: Keith Kunene, known simultaneously as Hola Seven and George Bush, Thug Rapper, King of SA Hiphop Poetry. And Lebogang Mashile, born South African, raised in Providence, Rhode Island, returned after the fall of apartheid, Def Jam-ready, wowing the crowds with her mix of hip hop, Sepedi, feminism, and sweet red black energy.
Peter Rorvik and the drum beat of Poetry Africa, the voices of the peoples of South Africa: the examplar of how change happens one poem at a time....
