Black Looks

HARARE – A memorial concert for the late Zimbabwe-born South African poet, academic and social activist, Dennis Brutus, turned into a howl of protest against President Robert Mugabe’s social policies.

The event on January 29 was organised by Zimcodd, Magamba Cultural Activist Network and SAPSN at the Book Cafe included screening of a documentary on Brutus entitled ‘I am a rebel’, speakers, poets and musicians ‘to celebrate the life of a great global social justice activist’. Brutus died on December 26, 2009 in South Africa, marking the end of nearly half a decade of protest against various forms of oppression, from apartheid in South Africa to Mugabe’s tyranny in Zimbabwe, among other causes.

One of the speakers at the function, Jonah Gokova, attacked what he called the ‘pillars of capitalism’, including the World Bank and the IMF, traditional targets of Brutus in his later years.
“These institutions are creating increasing numbers of poor people in the world,” said Gokova, who met Brutus at several anti-capitalism protests around the world. “Capitalism is not an option.” Added Gokova, “Brutus shared those ideals that one day we would live in a just world in which profit should not determine how we should live.”

Readings from Brutus’s massive collection of poetry were followed by tributes and a performance by the ever-popular Comrade Fatso and Chabvondoka, whose protest song MaStreets got people on their feet. Brutus was born in Harare in 1924 but soon moved to Port Elizabeth with his family. He was shot and jailed by apartheid authorities for his activism, which resulted in South Africa being banned from the Olympics in 1972.

Brutus published more than a dozen volumes of poetry. Among his most evocative works are ‘Sirens Knuckles and Boots’ and ‘Letters to Martha’, an epic protest note which was smuggled out of prison disguised as a love letter.
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The Weapon
for Nelson Mandela

As you took up arms, ntate,
we stood by and admired your guns
and your uniform, while you prepared
to mount the country to kill railways
and post-offices, we nodded agreement,
we acknowledged how the continent
was a pistol facing earthward, with the trigger
right at Nigeria’s oily wars of religion between
once-peaceful regions, the left hand now hacking
and being hacked by the right.
From out in the cold you made sense
of lives the way a bullet never can,
our poetry on the shore, washed up on the rocks;
doves came and sat on the eaves.
We thought it was a mistake – I am prepared to die,
but it was in your voice, carried to our door
by the choice of words, joined by others
from village to village, where cold and hot
scuffle for the light of dawn, east and west,
the chill of night when the wind is still
and stars are out. Somalia’s hammer
is just now falling into place on land and sea
where ghosts whimper your name, on the island
where no one is, save webbed gulls and dolphins
that know your tribe, and seek us among
painful rocks. From then on the smell
of gun-powder covered the world. Yes, and
we rubbed the struggle into our hair,
our jeans, our black mining boots, walked
to the freedom of our lives, leaving a thin curl
of smoke rising from South-Africa’s
steel muzzle, into the crisp, morning air.
© Rethabile Masilo

A beautiful and moving poem by Jamaican writer and poet, Geoffrey Philp.

Nothing makes sense anymore, my sister.

Nothing makes sense anymore, my sister.
The dead words in my mouth can’t say how I feel
And forgive me, Lord, but it hurts when I kneel.
For they say the age of miracles is over,
But when will the horrors end so that we can heal?

Nothing makes sense anymore, my sister.
Mountains of cement and rebar have buried your lover,
His smile greeted you at five every day when you shared a meal,
But breath left your body when you saw the Citadel reel.
Nothing makes sense anymore, my sister.

The African Center for Cities together with Chimurenga Magazine call for submissions for the 2010 African Cities Reader II:Mobilities & Fixtures. The Reader which will include a range of genres including “text, image, sound and performance” will

become a forum where Africans tell their own stories, draw their own maps and represent their own spatial topographies as it continuous to evolve and adapt at the interstice of difference, complexity, opportunism, and irony.

Read the 2009 Reader here - Submissionsfor 2010 will be accepted until Wednesday, 31st March 2010.

Via Bookaholic

What word can encompass stretch its arms and wrap them around
A day when the world returns to the dust it was
Before we fashioned orderly chaos and became free
The First Negro Republic raises weakened arms to wipe
The Ash
From its eyes water and ash to mould human tragedy
What word can encompass… we have asked before
Encompass passion itself when it screams whimpers
Haiti mwen
Haiti nou
Nou la épi zot

The word that encompasses has not yet been created
Bondyé ki pa bon
The word cannot be found
Under the rubble of ash and water edifices
Buildings made from tears and dust that crumble into a void of screaming and loss
A hellish void of independence and burnt out communication lines sparking revolting revolutionary pain
And yet is Haiti so epic that
Hurricane-proofed we sink into the earth from which
Yo di
We came
The dead in the streets and the word cannot be found the dust will not settle for the word to be found
She hides in the folds of warm pervasive stench heavy and loud as shattered eardrums
She cavorts with criminals buried under police stations and wives caressing newborns to deep deep sleep

Reveal yourself, word!

One hundred French citizens buried beneath a thousand Haitian bodies
Ki té ké soucouri corps mwen
And they keep coming
The hits
The hits
Les coups n’arrêtent pas
What more do we ask but to find the word that can
That will
Reach long arms around the day when God gripped us in His loving hands
And shook and shook
Finality
He set us down gently like lambs beautiful black sheep and
Poured ashes onto our heads?

Today I know we’re going to unbury
the dead to just get this over with
before it engulfs us. We’ll wake Motuba up,
Fischer, rouse Biko and Lumumba, Hani,
put their hands on a stack of bibles and
make the questioning begin. To hell, then,
if we can’t bring the child to the tree
on which their bodies were hanged,
arcs stopped dead, like broken pendulums,
the mechanism smashed, time strangled.

Here is my body to light the night;
as the flame goes higher and higher,
take please my name off your certificates,
you can lock my culture in glass cases,
libraries, to learn how to build a pyramid;
through the Springs of our discontent
our children have always faced their history,
as all children must, one day or another,
nineteen sixty and nineteen seventy-six.

We’ll take our kids to the prophet’s tomb
whose engravings and marks scar our face
like hieroglyphs are necessarily Egyptian,
and we’ll sprout roots, shoots, stronger limbs,
standing here on this path to the minster,
swinging fists at the heavens to question
their political stance in the face of all this,
like Dennis Brutus before death stopped him, too,
ready to get at last to the bottom of it. We
are gonna have to see this thing through.
© Rethabile Masilo

For those fairly new to Black Looks, Annie Quarcoopome was a regular contributor to Black Looks in 2006/7 mostly writing on African literature and publishing her poems and prose. I have missed her writings so I am hoping that this post will be the first of many more to come over the next few months.

The Crossing
I write with my bare hands on the bland concrete
Colourful words that describe realities worlds away
I retrace steps imprinted for eternity on an ageless desert
Beautiful danger dancing dunes before my eyes
Let the sand wipe away my tears for
There at least I am represented though ephemeral
The unbroken desert knows my footfalls
Remembers my body that nourished its jackals remains
Haunted by this wandering spirit that comes to you to find
A better place pieds sales

I write with stiff fingers on the hard concrete floor
Friendly ground after the horror of no ground
I remember wild breast strokes and miles and miles of
Blue green deep
Deep river deep deeeeep Jonah-in-the-belly-of-the-monster deep
Adventurous seas carried you there
Forgiving seas carried me to your waiting arms
Waiting choppers to cut me down coastguards and border patrols ready to receive me prepare for me
A better place pieds mouillés

Read more…

We are in serious difficulty all over the planet. We are going to say to the world: There’s too much of profit, too much of greed, too much of suffering by the poor… The people of the planet must be in action.” …Dennis Brutus

One of Africa’s most celebrated poets and political activists, Dennis Brutus, died early this morning in Cape Town. Throughout his life Dennis spoke against injustice in South Africa and beyond.

Below Dennis speaks on reparations from corporations that benefited from Apartheid. In very typical Brutus fashion, he makes the links between reparations in South Africa with reparations for slavery in the US.

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• “S Africa Backs Action in US on Firms Linked to Apartheid” (indigenist.blogspot.com)

He crosses the
faux marbling
adapted to the
silence of such
rooms, thumbs
her eyelids shut,

turns to look at us,
the kids whose mother
is a primary-school
teacher, and whose
life of chalk and
blackboard says

good morning on it
in scribbly writing.
Often, when the dream
comes back,
my mouth dry
completely with
the light, my heart

a tight drum,
the hymnal singer
sprinkles powder
on our souls,
before leaving by
the secondary door.