Capitalism is a pyramid-scheme. Albania, 1996
-- Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, 1605
Sorrow was there made fair,
And Passion wise, tears a delightful thing,
Silence beyond all speech a wisdom rare.
She made her sighs to sing
And Passion wise, tears a delightful thing,
Silence beyond all speech a wisdom rare.
She made her sighs to sing
-- John Dowland, I Saw My Lady Weepe, 1600
1.
-- Anonymous, At Daggers Drawn with the Existent, its Defenders and its False Critics, 1998
This is how we start to tear it down. Albania, 1997
Exhibit A
Flames spread delight
As the petrol-bombs fell.
Mama sang 'Mandela can go to hell!'
Joy banished fright,
Bruises started to swell.
Mama said 'Mandela can go to hell!'
Exhibit B
There is a place called The South African Department of Home Affairs where Africans born in other countries queue for days for the privilege to slave away within national borders lined by barbed wire and patrolled by armed guards. I, who was fortunate enough to be born in this country the year of Our Saviour's release from prison, have been there myself, for the following reason: 'South Africa has approximately 48 million citizens, and each one of them requires a government-issued, official identification booklet, as proof of identity. This document is not only needed for public services, but also everyday actions such as renting a DVD or opening a bank or store account. This document is based on the most secure form of identification, being the individual's fingerprint. The need is undeniable; the process is time consuming and paper-based systems resulted in government archives that contain over 45 million paper files. The Home Affairs National Identification System Project, known as HANIS, was implemented to move away from the paper system. Not only would HANIS replace the existing system with a world class digital database, but it will also ensure real time processing, verification and accessibility for every new and existing fingerprint. NEC's Automatic Fingerprint Identification System or AFIS was selected to offer the solution that the South African government needed. Their fingerprint recognition technologies host an accuracy rate of more than 99.9%. The system works fast and processes as many as 70,000 searches in one day. It allows HANIS to produce the largest citizen identification database in the world.' (Wikipedia, Biometrics use by the South African government)
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Better than marshmallows. Zandspruit, 2014
2.
You know, at times it was so nice for us to be chased about by the police, tear-gassed and the likes.
-- Lilli Mokganyetsi, describing her experiences of the 1976 Soweto uprising
Exhibit A
Dreams stalked the night
Both of good and of ill.
Mama screamed 'Mandela can go to hell!'
Poor brother died
As cruel cops crushed his skull;
Mama moaned 'Mandela can go to hell!'
Exhibit B
Exhibit A
Dear president
Served his rich patrons well.
Mama wailed 'Mandela can go to hell!'
Poor blacks waited
For their 'good life for all':
Mama sighed 'Mandela can go to hell.'
Exhibit B
4.
Conviction
And then they fought –
Since they all got gatvol –
Mama cursed 'Mandela can go to hell!'
Since life is short –
And all kings have to fall –
Mama spat 'Mandela can go to hell!'
Splattered across the silent faces of the city, the sloppy speech of cheap advertisements proclaims to the citizens of South Africa the consequences of living in a democracy whose miraculous birth and immaculate conception were assisted by midwives whose fantastic labours that could only have issued from the wands of divinely sanctioned sorcerers. In a world where, for the benefit of bosses and bureaucrats, human beings are kept subject to incomprehensible, hostile, and devastatingly destructive forces by an irrational and idiotic arrangement of social relations; it comes as no surprise that both politics and everyday life are dominated by magical thinking and religious superstition.
One of the participants in the radical agitation that rocked Mexico in 1968 described the thousands of graffiti squads who re-purposed the face of the city as a canvas for their revolutionary slogans -- revolutionary not merely in what they had to say but in the way they subverted an urban environment that censors all public communication other than advertisements and traffic signs, in the means through which they creatively destroyed a form of city that suppresses all public expression other than that of the capital and the state. Here and now, it is the publicity campaigns of a thousand petit-bourgeois charlatans who have re-purposed the face of the city, this time as poetry. In this its most absolutely modern of guises, poetry fulfils the demand of the young Rimbaud by returning to its original source in the prophecies, prayers, magical spells and incantations of primitive religion. Fittingly enough, the best verses of this thoroughly demotic art recall the terse cryptic pronouncements of the I-Ching and the Delphic Oracle. It is just as apt that these admirable results of human self-alienation should so intimately involve sex, race and class all at once: black female proletarians being the most powerless regarding the most basic aspects of their everyday life (such as, for example, control over the basic functions of their own bodies), they are naturally the biggest customers/victims of these street poets/witch doctors.
'The most dazzling displays of intelligence mean nothing to us. Political economy, love and urban planning are means that we must master in order to solve a problem that is first and foremost of an ethical kind. Nothing can release life from its obligation to be absolutely passionate. We know how to proceed. The world's hostility and trickery notwithstanding, the participants in an adventure that is altogether daunting are gathering, and making no concessions. We consider generally that there is no other honourable way of living apart from this participation.'
At the moment when theoretical critique can reappear in our epoch, and can only count on itself to be diffused in a new practice, some still believe they can oppose to us the exigencies of practice, when those who speak of them (at the level of methodological delirium) are on all occasions abundantly revealed to be incapable of success in the least practical action other than the one they do best: submission. As for me, I am inclined toward anger and revolt. But if I am for the moment required to accept the temporary role of theoretician specifically to subvert it and the conditions that require it, this is because I absolutely do not consider it practical to leave repetitive platitudes -- which skillful charlatans circulate as if they were new discoveries -- free to maintain a situation of general falsification. Theory is only the practical concentration of the revolutionary project, as practice is only theory to such a degree of concentration that it conquers its realization. Until now, so-called theory has only interpreted the world; it is now a question of transforming it. Until now, practice has only reinforced the existing world; it is now a question of overthrowing it.
WOMEN'S CLINIC
Thus, until now, no one in this country has dared to take sides in favour of total revolution. I will do so. The old world writhes in convulsions of rage whenever it discovers that radical critiques of the prevailing misery -- hitherto provided a privileged position in the sterile factories of the cultural and educational industries -- can have a real use value in concrete struggles, that they may appear in the streets, and that the real scope of the conflict that they announce is global. Everywhere that this conflict appears, it has only elicited democratic litanies that, interpreting the thought of the "nation," deplore irresponsibility and disorder, thus deploring the new customs that inaugurate the beginning of an era. While the rock-stars of world-peace confess their terror in this Holy Alliance, it is not only necessary for any useful critical theory to recognize the reason of revolutionary proletarians, but also to contribute by giving them their reasons, by enriching theoretically the search for practical truth expressed historically and socially by their actions.
I need nothing more for a resume than this.
Siddiq lives in Cape Town, where he was born
The ingenuities in the management of production lie in the transparency and, therefore, the near invisibility of coercion in our times: A wonderful device which manages to make us work throughout the year and throughout the week. As a result, the continuous implantation of habits of work intensification is perpetuated. In retrospect, whip-yielding master on horse-back managed to make serf and peasant work three to four days a week and three to six months a year. Till about three hundred years ago the ensemble of monarchs, emperors, kings, lords, priests, knights, samurais, usurers, etc. managed to extract one-tenth to one-fourth of the total produce. Today more than 95 % of the produce is extracted. Governments alone extract more than one-half of the global produce, and far from being called exploiters, governments are advertised as the overseers of our welfare.
The ingenuities in the management of seduction lie in the efficiency and, therefore, the near ubiquity of make-believe in our times. The managers of seduction try to make us believe, to instil in us an interconnected cobweb of illusions: "Work is meant to make our lives easier. Work is meant to make the world a better place. Technology is developed to solve humanity's problems. Money makes social interactions simpler. It is a sin to live without working for a living. The wages we get are equal to our contribution in production. The militaries, governments, leaders and representatives are there for our benefit." The most ingenious task entrusted to the managers of seduction is to make us believe that most of us believe this make-belief. An intriguing question: What makes coercion so invisible now, and what makes its seductive disguise so effective?
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Casting out bad love spells
'Durban - The fate of a massive foreign-funded R550 million contract to build one of South Africa’s first private power generation plants hangs in the balance with the project already shut down for a month because of continued violent attacks by dismissed workers. Group Five Projects, which is building the Avon Power Peaking Plant at Shakaskraal on the North Coast for Italian consortium Ansaldo Fata, has been forced to get an urgent Durban High Court interdict against about 500 former employees “who are either participating or associating themselves with the anarchy. The project is of national importance because it is aimed at generating additional power for Eskom,” Group Five’s human resources director, Cindyanne May, said in her affidavit. The plant is one of two of its kind in South Africa... representing foreign investment of about $1 billion (R13.6 billion) in the country. The company is facing penalties of up to R1 million a day and its wages and plant costs were almost R20 million a month. Workers first downed tools in an unprotected strike earlier this year and ignored an interdict granted by the Labour Court. This resulted in mass dismissals of the workers. May said after discussions, the workers were reinstated but soon after, the violence began again. According to a document before the court, their grievances related to payment of transport subsidies, additional pay for working consecutive shifts, and general workers doing semi-skilled work and not being paid for it. “This time it was worse and resulted in a number of injuries to employees and managers. There was also large-scale destruction of property and assets,” May said. “On August 26, the employees surrounded the site office, intimidating and ultimately assaulting the contracts director, Chris Willemse, and supervisor Theo Janse van Vuuren who required medical attention.” The workers were again dismissed and the site was shut down because the company could not ensure the safety of employees. May said new workers were hired, but when the company tried to reopen the site last week a group – led by former shop stewards on site – took scaffolding off the site and blocked the public road, in full view of the police. The group, armed with pangas, knobkieries, mallets and sticks, barricaded another access road with logs and tyres. “The propensity for violence and damage to property increases with each day that the unlawful gathering remains in place and criminal acts continue. They have recourse in terms of the Labour Relations Act should they feel aggrieved by their dismissals but have elected to conduct themselves unlawfully”' ("‘Anarchists’ halt R550m project", The Mercury, 08 October 2015)
'All memorable events, I should say, transpire in morning time and in a morning atmosphere... Poetry and art, and the fairest and most memorable of the actions of men, date from such an hour... To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning. It matters not what the clocks say or the attitudes and labours of men. Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me. Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep... To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face? We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavour. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look... To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.'
It is necessary to speak of poetry for the same reason as it is necessary to make it. Clearly, the exhausted discussions of cultural forms still prestigious among poets and professors belongs in the trash-can of history along with the specialists paid to reproduce this empty chatter. Beyond useless and outdated aesthetics, poetry consists entirely of human potential. It is written on the faces of adventures and in the form of cities yet unborn. Nothing is more urgent than the discovery of unknown desires and pleasures, the creation of new adventures and construction through upheaval. To me, poetry means the elaboration of absolutely new behaviours -- those beautiful though rudimentary gestures of insubordination and insolence through which a new era of human existence struggles to be born and to be known, to become concrete and articulate -- as well as the methods of making their tactics more passionate and their goals more precise. The possibilities for new types of behaviour lie within play -- not merely with words, but with the material basis of life as a whole. This is a game which can only be conducted with the utmost rigor. At heart, it involves -- and in-forms -- the clarity and coherence towards which the obscure and stammering expression of revolutionary will -- the language of the concrete -- stumbles, stutters and staggers.
A poetry that accompanies the dissolution of a society (and bourgeois civilisation has lingered on for more than a century in a state permanent decadence -- 'in history, as in nature, decay is the laboratory of life') does not therefore concern itself with expressing rage, much less with presenting mere images of rage. It seeks to understand, to unconditionally but critically support, to describe, to express in forms appropriate to its content, and to precipitate a movement that is developing before our very eyes. As for those who present us with their own pseudo-rage as a sort of newly fashionable artistic content, it is obvious that this is merely their way of compensating for the spinelessness, compromises, and humiliations of their actual life — which is why spectators so readily identify with them. Those who claim to approve of the perspective expressed in the phrase 'Larney, jou poes!' have approved too many other things to be capable of approving it; and those who say they don’t approve it have also accepted too many other things for their judgment to have the slightest significance.
'Occult related crimes are on the increase, with the South African Police Service (SAPS) in Gauteng currently investigating 48 cases, police said on Wednesday. Lieutenant–Colonel Hennie de Jager, from the SAPS Provincial Detective Services, told a media briefing on Wednesday that police have, in the last three months alone, dealt with 78 enquiries and have interviewed 452 people. He said the unit was responsible for investigating cases dealing with harmful practices where there was no physical evidence. This is in addition to investigating muti murders; spectral evidence, including spiritual intimidation and astral coercion; curses intended to cause harm; voodoo; vampirism; harmful cult behaviour; animal mutilation and sacrifice where evidence of occult involvement is believed to be indicated; human sacrifice, and the interpretation of alleged occult signatures. National Commander of the unit, Colonel Attie Lamprecht, advised parents and guardians to be on the look-out for signs that their children are experimenting with satanic groups. Police have presented workshops in various schools and churches to raise awareness and to stop harmful practices in schools.' (South African Government News Agency, 26 February 2014)
Exemplary as the courageous provocations of these pioneers was in the conditions of their own time, attempts to reproduce their methods today are unlikely to produce anything better than the perfectly sterile commercial successes of a Damien Hirst or a Banksy. 'To tell the truth,' said a young Lettrist, 'all the worthwhile works of this generation and the precursors that it recognizes lead one to think that the next revolution in sensibility will not be conceived as a novel expression of known facts, but as the conscious construction of new states of existence in the world.' Let's be perfectly clear. There was more poetry produced by illiterate children and workers during the years of the South African revolution than is to be found in the complete works of all the poets ever produced by this country. Rather than verses recited or written on a stage or page, this poetry was improvised in the streets and factories; rather than a commodity held as the exclusive intellectual property of a persona: an anonymous creation, subject to the collective invention of anyone and the appropriation of all; rather than an artefact whose form, expressed in one medium or another, was fixed for all time: a fluid ensemble of elements, a transitory series of situations, now constructed using placards and pamphlets, now using dances and songs, now petrol and matches, now funerals and prayer gatherings, wildcat strikes and mass-meetings, hijacked vehicles and barricades, each situation one integral moment in a movement of creative rebellion as exemplary as any the world had ever seen. To make poetry is always to make revolution; it is to make thought and feeling into a material force strong enough to shake the world, to give passion physical form, to transform existence according to the imagination, skill and desire of the human being; it is the marriage of will and circumstance and the consummation of that sensuous activity which lies at the base of all intelligent life.
'Here in Fraga [a small town in Aragon], you can throw banknotes into the street and no one will take any notice. Rockefeller, if you were to come to Fraga with your entire bank account you would not be able to buy a cup of coffee. Money, your God and your servant, has been abolished here, and the people are happy.' (Quoted in a proletarian newspaper during the Spanish Revolution)
'The manner in which the violent uprisings that swept South Africa in 1976/77 have been defined by the international spectacular society and its pseudo-opposition exposes their willful determination to misinterpret, misrepresent, and misunderstand what was a decisive event in the history of proletarian struggle in that country. Everything emanating from established circles – from the Nat regime in South Africa to the racist white man or woman on a Johannesburg street and from the African National Congress and the Pan Africanist Congress (ANC and PAC) to pseudo-oppositional leftists the world over – has not only undermined but also distorted the events that occurred in South Africa.
For a start; what happened in South Africa cannot be encapsulated in alienated notions of time and space. It was not isolated to June of 1976. It was not restricted to Soweto. It was not merely the act of students. Nor was it simply a revolt, rebellion or unrest. It was creative revolution in the making, in the desperately clear moment of confrontation.
Let the moralists and the humanitarians pretend the students were always peace-loving, and mere victims of the violence. The events in South Africa have exploded that insipid myth. In a situation in which state violence is institutionalised on such an overwhelming scale, one affirms one’s humanity not by “turning the other cheek” and suffering with dignity, but by willfully and consciously accepting one’s share of violence and by understanding that brute systematic force can only be destroyed by the creative violence of the masses.' (Selby Semela, Sam Thompson & Norman Abraham, Reflections on the Black Consciousness Movement and the South African Revolution, 1979)
'Can it be denied that the riots of Sebokeng were part and parcel of the fight for liberty by black South Africans? Although the motive was to strike against the rising rents, the course taken by the rebellion was so horrible that even the police could not withstand it. This I say because there was no roof of the business buildings that remained tall after the strikes except the well-planned Mphatlalatsane hall, Perm building and various churches.
In Zone 11 all the shops were burnt down. The rent office, the bottlestore and the beerhall were burnt . Three houses were burnt. One councillor was killed. Several cars were burnt, including a brand-new Honda Ballade. The petrol station and the soft-drink cash-and-carry wholesale were also attacked. The roadhouse café was broken into and goods were taken away. Tarred and untarred roads in the zone were blocked with stones, boxes and anything else that was easy to carry. The Post Office was attacked and burned, not surprisingly.
We are Africans and brothers in love, and ought to share the pains of bitterness and the fruits of joy...
'My love for you allows me to pray to the spirit of eternal beauty and tenderness mirrored in your eyes or fling you down under me on that softy belly of yours and fuck you up behind, like a hog riding a sow, glorying in the very stink and sweat that rises from your arse ['...but she makes hungry', says the Bard of Cleopatra, 'Where most she satisfies: for vilest things Become themselves in her...'] glorying in the open shape of your upturned dress and white girlish drawers and in the confusion of your flushed cheeks and tangled hair. It allows me to burst into tears of pity and love at some slight word, to tremble with love for you at the sounding of some chord or cadence of music or to lie heads and tails with you feeling your fingers fondling and tickling my ballocks or stuck up in me behind and your hot lips sucking off my cock while my head is wedged in between your fat thighs, my hands clutching the round cushions of your bum and my tongue licking ravenously up your rank red cunt... All I have written above is only a moment or two of brutal madness. The last drop of seed has hardly been squirted up your cunt before it is over and my true love for you, the love of my verses, the love of my eyes for your strange luring eyes, comes blowing over my soul like a wind of spices. My prick is still hot and stiff and quivering from the last brutal drive it has given you when a faint hymn is heard rising in tender pitiful worship of you from the dim cloisters of my heart. ...You seem to turn me into a beast. It was you yourself, you naughty shameless girl, who first led the way. ... Have I shocked you by the dirty things I wrote to you? You think perhaps that my love is a filthy thing. It is, darling, at some moments.' (James Joyce to Nora Barnacle, 2, 3 & 6 December 1909)
'The most moving and at once distressing event in the life of a human being is his discovery that he is alive. From that moment to his death the fact of life is a constant white glare over him, an unsetting and shadowless sun. For darkness, for repose, for a quiet examination of the conditions of existence, for the experience of appreciation and pleasure, it is found necessary to close the eyes, to create an interior where life is a dim infiltration through the heavy curtains of the flesh into this dark room of the soul and where, so seen, through eyes reopened in a more endurable light, it appears lovely, describable. Art has become an evocation of the shadows. What has happened? We have been blinded by life so we turn out senses inward, against it; and the utterance of relief is made in pride, the cry of cowardice becomes the authentic act of art. The tradition of art, of poetry especially, as a catharsis has so thoroughly legitimized this process that it is almost impossible to attack it. It is not a question of proving another method more legitimate. There is no other method. For if the matter be examined more closely it will be seen that the quarrel must be made not with the way we write but with the way we live. For art is the way we live, while aesthetics, in divorcing art from life, sets the seal of approval upon the philosophy of escape. We live life by avoiding it. Art then as the strategy of this philosophy is no more than an inversion, and, as an inversion, is barren. It is not, as it should be, the conduct of life itself, but merely an abnormality of conduct... the poetic tradition accomplishes the vitiation of life in art. The pressure of life is unbearable and the poet in this hazard does not hurl himself against it but finds a safety-valve in song; and existence, that art should have spiritualized, becomes despiritualized in art.
'The lyrical is the mother of the political.'
Revolution is the brother of the Oedipal
instinct, but one who disdains the shame,
the chip on the shoulder that murders his twin
in the name of guilt. Revolt is a sin
committed in the clear light of a cold sun,
a fury that eschews the shadows of doubt
that shroud the unconscious and heap on the son
the unbearable burden borne by one
who had suffered and fought, desired and loved
and died, never having known
what the storm and stress was all about.
'With my heart’s blood I’ve lived for you,
Dear poetry, and, now death comes closer by,
Now I want to tell you one last time.
From childhood on I felt you, poetry,
I can remember nothing of which you weren’t
Part. The reflection of my thoughts,
That I sensed in all things, was you.
The sweet murmur of the sea, my Mother’s voice,
The gait of my comrades, the light
Of the world. People walking. The night.
They all mattered only for your sake –
It was for your sake too that I loved –
Love itself meant nothing but for your sake.
The body’s deepest joy meant nothing to me.
Women’s dark womb meant nothing to me.
The oblivious self-giving meant nothing,
Except that I found deep in their womb,
Deep in the infinite obscurity
Nothing but you – you, you, dear poetry.'
In contrast to Gorter, what I myself have defined as 'poetry' until now involves an altogether different dimension of activity, and might better be subsumed under the more general term 'art', since what I meant was an essential way of relating to things for
their own sake, by which the relation is completed and transfigured
to the point where a distinct subject no longer relates to a distinct
object; where human beings are reflected in a world they have
themselves created; where human beings and the material universe
interpenetrate to such an extent that a physical universe thoroughly transformed
by human labour becomes humanised and a thoroughly
cosmopolitan humanity becomes universal.
Both of good and of ill.
Mama screamed 'Mandela can go to hell!'
Poor brother died
As cruel cops crushed his skull;
Mama moaned 'Mandela can go to hell!'
Exhibit B
Almost exactly one year before Our Saviour joined his Nazarene predecessor at the right hand of the Lord, seven blacks died and 230 collapsed after 30 000 unemployed youths took part in a fitness test in the hope of securing one of 90 jobs with the Kwa-Zulu Natal traffic police. The massive crowd of job-seekers took part in the deadly fitness test -- which was held in a sports stadium named after another heroic Stalinist, Harry Gwala -- after they each received text messages informing them they had been 'shortlisted' for the precious traffic cop jobs. 100 000 people applied. On the first day 15 000 of those 'shortlisted' turned up - many after trekking long distances - and were told to run 4 km in the 30-plus degree heat. Not knowing what to expect, few even had appropriate clothing. Many had neither eaten nor drunk anything all day. They all had very limited access to drinking water at the stadium. Consequently 100 people collapsed of heat stroke, 6 ending up dead. A seventh man committed suicide by slitting his throat when he learnt he had not finished the race in time. Not satisfied with the body-count as it stood, the cops repeated the whole fiasco the next day with the remaining 15 000 qualifying applicants, resulting in similar results. By the end of the recruitment process 230 people ended up in hospital. It's unclear if anybody actually ended up getting a job. Among the dead was Lenny Nxumalo, 28-year-old father of two whose body was only discovered over four hours after he died when the vast crowd finally cleared out of the stadium. He had collapsed having completed the race with ten minutes to spare. On 30 December 2012 his best friend Brian Ngcobo told The Witness newspaper: 'My friend was so determined to become a traffic officer that he ran his life out.'
Better than soccer. De Doorns Farm-worker's strike, 2012
3.
Sometimes, tear-gas can make you see better.
-- Graffito in Athens from the 2008 uprising
Dear president
Served his rich patrons well.
Mama wailed 'Mandela can go to hell!'
Poor blacks waited
For their 'good life for all':
Mama sighed 'Mandela can go to hell.'
Exhibit B
'Durban - Completion of the R352 million upgrade of the often gridlocked N2/Umgeni Road interchange is under threat with the main contractor wanting to pull out because of constant “guerrilla-warfare” attacks on employees, allegedly by residents of two adjacent shack settlements. The contractor, Rumdel Cape/ EXR Holdings/Mazcon Joint Venture, says the site, with enhanced security costing R1m every month and a trauma counselling facility, is “being run like a military outpost behind enemy lines”. “The situation is nothing short of anarchic,” project manager Gary Williams said in an affidavit before Durban High Court Judge Mahendra Chetty. Williams said the contract had been “bedevilled” from the start by unrest and disorder, instigated by the communities of wards 23 and 25 because they believed they should be employed on site. After a “threatening letter” warning of dire consequences from the community and meeting with local councillors, Sanral had decided that the (non-skilled) labour should be drawn equally from the two wards. Williams said Rumdel had gone along with this because it seemed members of the community were intent on obstructing the project until they got their way. But after that, there were numerous illegal work stoppages for various reasons, all of which were marked by intimidation, mob violence and destruction of property. There were also legal strikes and, even when the labourers did come to work, they were militant and unproductive. In May, after a month-long wildcat strike, they were dismissed en masse. “In anticipation of further trouble, we established an escape plan for employees and we enhanced security. At a public liaison meeting, the ward councillors adopted an extremely aggressive attitude and threatened bloodshed unless the workers were reinstated. “It was stated that the community is prepared to die for their jobs. They would stop the project and no army or police force would prevent that,” Williams said. Since then, there had been further acts of violence. A worker had been struck on the head so hard that his hard hat had shattered. Another had had a lucky escape after being dragged into the bush by an angry, armed mob. The cab on a mobile crane had been set alight. Special “car port” screens had been requested to protect vehicles belonging to employees of the engineer on site from “projectiles thrown during riots”. An interdict granted by the labour court had had little effect and, on June 2, a security guard had been fatally stabbed. So far losses, excluding stoppages and strikes, were estimated at R113m.' ("KZN N2 flyover delayed by 'anarchy'", The Mercury, July 31 2014)
Better than night-clubs. Soweto, 2014
Revolutions are the festivals of the oppressed and the exploited.
-- V.I. Lenin, Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution, 1905
And then they fought –
Since they all got gatvol –
Mama cursed 'Mandela can go to hell!'
Since life is short –
And all kings have to fall –
Mama spat 'Mandela can go to hell!'
Sentence
'All important revolutions that appear before our eyes must have been preceded by a secret revolution in the spirit of the age, which is invisible to most, least of all to its contemporaries, and which is as difficult to explain as it is to discern.' (Hegel, How Christianity Conquered Paganism)
'All important revolutions that appear before our eyes must have been preceded by a secret revolution in the spirit of the age, which is invisible to most, least of all to its contemporaries, and which is as difficult to explain as it is to discern.' (Hegel, How Christianity Conquered Paganism)
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Money in your account
Marriage problems
Clean all debt
Unfinished job for free
MIRACLES HAPPENS
Lost Lover Spell
Win Lotto/Casino
One of the participants in the radical agitation that rocked Mexico in 1968 described the thousands of graffiti squads who re-purposed the face of the city as a canvas for their revolutionary slogans -- revolutionary not merely in what they had to say but in the way they subverted an urban environment that censors all public communication other than advertisements and traffic signs, in the means through which they creatively destroyed a form of city that suppresses all public expression other than that of the capital and the state. Here and now, it is the publicity campaigns of a thousand petit-bourgeois charlatans who have re-purposed the face of the city, this time as poetry. In this its most absolutely modern of guises, poetry fulfils the demand of the young Rimbaud by returning to its original source in the prophecies, prayers, magical spells and incantations of primitive religion. Fittingly enough, the best verses of this thoroughly demotic art recall the terse cryptic pronouncements of the I-Ching and the Delphic Oracle. It is just as apt that these admirable results of human self-alienation should so intimately involve sex, race and class all at once: black female proletarians being the most powerless regarding the most basic aspects of their everyday life (such as, for example, control over the basic functions of their own bodies), they are naturally the biggest customers/victims of these street poets/witch doctors.
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R300
'We are not called upon to gather the fruits of the past, but to be its torturers and persecutors. We must Judge it, and learn to recognise it under every disguise, and immolate it for the sake of the future.'
Anti-cultural provocation always serves to pass the time. Revolutionary thought is not elsewhere. I pursue my little uproar in the limited beyond of literature, and it is necessary to do better. Naturally it is to reveal ourselves that we write poetry or manifestos ('one publishes to find people', a young surrealist once wagered, 'and for no other reason'). Impertinence is a quite beautiful thing. But our desires are perishable and disappointing. Youth is systematic, as one says. The weeks spread themselves out in straight lines. Our encounters are by chance and our precarious contacts lose themselves behind the fragile defense of words. The earth turns as if nothing exists. To say it all, the human condition doesn't please me. It is necessary to dissuade -- or (if they prove too obstinate, slow on the uptake, or complacent) dismiss -- those who at this late date still believe in the utility of leaving traces. Each passing day -- so full of shit, so empty of joy; so rich in petty disappointments, so poor in meaningful accomplishments -- that drags us closer to death ('Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest') condemns the insufficiency of all existing ideas and behaviour. Holding onto any of these only assists the police with their inquiries. The present society can therefore be divided into just two groups: revolutionary wiliewerkers and informants. In this regard readers are referred to a famous episode in the life of Sameul Bellamy, 'the highest earning pirate' according to Forbes magazine, which relates the story of his ship overtaking a sloop commanded by Captain Beer. Bellamy had wanted to let the captain keep his ship, but his crew had just voted to burn it, and the captain of the merchant vessel had just declined an invitation to join the pirates. Bellamy is attributed with making the now-famous speech recounted in Captain Charles Johnson's, General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates:
'I am sorry they won't let you have your sloop again, for I scorn to do any one a mischief, when it is not to my advantage; damn the sloop, we must sink her, and she might be of use to you. Though you are a sneaking puppy, and so are all those who will submit to be governed by laws which rich men have made for their own security; for the cowardly whelps have not the courage otherwise to defend what they get by knavery; but damn ye altogether: damn them for a pack of crafty rascals, and you, who serve them, for a parcel of hen-hearted numbskulls. They vilify us, the scoundrels do, when there is only this difference, they rob the poor under the cover of law, forsooth, and we plunder the rich under the protection of our own courage. Had you not better make then one of us, than sneak after these villains for employment?
The law waits for us to stumble on a mode of being, a radical and inspirational soul incompatible with the TRC-approved rainbow-coloured used-condom that passes for a social-conscience in this country, and as soon as we begin to act in harmony with our passionate and material interests, handcuffs and guns us down. Proletarian, there are only two choices before you: either play the blessed obedient martyr or accept the fact that you're a criminal and be prepared to act like one.
'The Department of Justice's investigation of the Ferguson Police Department has scandalized the nation, and justly so. But the department's institutional racism, while shocking, isn't the report's most striking revelation. More damning is this: in a major American city, the criminal justice system perceives a large part of that city's population not as citizens to be protected, but as potential targets for what can only be described as a shake-down operation designed to wring money out of the poorest and most vulnerable by any means they could, and that as a result, the overwhelming majority of Ferguson's citizens had outstanding warrants... The entire population was criminalized... in many municipalities, as much as 40% of the money governments depend on comes from the kinds of predatory policing that has become a fact of life for the citizens of Ferguson...And this pattern can be observed down the line... Almost every institution in America—from our corporations to our schools, hospitals, and civic authorities—now seems to operate largely as an engine for extracting revenue, by imposing ever more complex sets of rules that are designed to be broken. And these rules are almost invariably enforced on a sliding scale: ever-so-gently on the rich and powerful (think of what happens to those banks when they themselves break the law), but with absolute Draconian harshness on the poorest and most vulnerable.'
There are no
nihilists, there are only powerless people. Almost everything is off
limits to me. The abuse of artistic ruins and the use of polemics, like all of my gestures generally speaking, are pursued to
surpass the void. Many of my comrades are in prison for theft or destruction of property. I've been there myself, more than once. However possible, I stand
against the pains inflicted on those who have become aware that
it isn't absolutely necessary to work. But I refuse asinine discussion. Human
relations must have passion, if not terror, as their foundation (on Shatterday 25 April 2015 -- anniversary of the death-day of the social peace of fascist Portugal ['The Portuguese revolution rightly made the men of power and all the powers of the world despair because it clearly showed that the workers were not pushed to the subversion of this social organization by some passing enthusiasm for extremist slogans, but by the enduring powerlessness of all that exists outside of them, which gives them the opportunity and the need to take charge of the material organization of their lives'] -- Cape Town residents returned to vacant land owned by the state weapons manufacturer to rebuild homes which had been destroyed by the uniformed thugs of the law earlier that month: 'Police threw stun grenades at the crowd and fired bullets. Some in the crowd threw stones at the police…When comment was sought from people in the crowd, they said: “We are not talking to journalists today. Just go away.” They threw stones at the photographer who was taking pictures. “They took my material the last time, but I managed to buy new material. We won’t stop until we get this land. We’ll fight till we die”'). By and large, my purpose and my strategy are one with those comrades of the past, first grouped together in the Lettrist International, who scorned as a waste of their time and talents any activity apart from the conscious and collective establishment of a new civilization:
Anti-cultural provocation always serves to pass the time. Revolutionary thought is not elsewhere. I pursue my little uproar in the limited beyond of literature, and it is necessary to do better. Naturally it is to reveal ourselves that we write poetry or manifestos ('one publishes to find people', a young surrealist once wagered, 'and for no other reason'). Impertinence is a quite beautiful thing. But our desires are perishable and disappointing. Youth is systematic, as one says. The weeks spread themselves out in straight lines. Our encounters are by chance and our precarious contacts lose themselves behind the fragile defense of words. The earth turns as if nothing exists. To say it all, the human condition doesn't please me. It is necessary to dissuade -- or (if they prove too obstinate, slow on the uptake, or complacent) dismiss -- those who at this late date still believe in the utility of leaving traces. Each passing day -- so full of shit, so empty of joy; so rich in petty disappointments, so poor in meaningful accomplishments -- that drags us closer to death ('Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest') condemns the insufficiency of all existing ideas and behaviour. Holding onto any of these only assists the police with their inquiries. The present society can therefore be divided into just two groups: revolutionary wiliewerkers and informants. In this regard readers are referred to a famous episode in the life of Sameul Bellamy, 'the highest earning pirate' according to Forbes magazine, which relates the story of his ship overtaking a sloop commanded by Captain Beer. Bellamy had wanted to let the captain keep his ship, but his crew had just voted to burn it, and the captain of the merchant vessel had just declined an invitation to join the pirates. Bellamy is attributed with making the now-famous speech recounted in Captain Charles Johnson's, General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates:
'I am sorry they won't let you have your sloop again, for I scorn to do any one a mischief, when it is not to my advantage; damn the sloop, we must sink her, and she might be of use to you. Though you are a sneaking puppy, and so are all those who will submit to be governed by laws which rich men have made for their own security; for the cowardly whelps have not the courage otherwise to defend what they get by knavery; but damn ye altogether: damn them for a pack of crafty rascals, and you, who serve them, for a parcel of hen-hearted numbskulls. They vilify us, the scoundrels do, when there is only this difference, they rob the poor under the cover of law, forsooth, and we plunder the rich under the protection of our own courage. Had you not better make then one of us, than sneak after these villains for employment?
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[Beer replied that his conscience would not let him break the laws of God and man, and Bellamy continued] You are a devilish conscience rascal! I am a free prince, and I have as much authority to make war on the whole world as he who has a hundred sail of ships at sea and an army of 100,000 men in the field; and this my conscience tells me! But there is no arguing with such snivelling puppies, who allow superiors to kick them about deck at pleasure.' The law waits for us to stumble on a mode of being, a radical and inspirational soul incompatible with the TRC-approved rainbow-coloured used-condom that passes for a social-conscience in this country, and as soon as we begin to act in harmony with our passionate and material interests, handcuffs and guns us down. Proletarian, there are only two choices before you: either play the blessed obedient martyr or accept the fact that you're a criminal and be prepared to act like one. 'The Department of Justice's investigation of the Ferguson Police Department has scandalized the nation, and justly so. But the department's institutional racism, while shocking, isn't the report's most striking revelation. More damning is this: in a major American city, the criminal justice system perceives a large part of that city's population not as citizens to be protected, but as potential targets for what can only be described as a shake-down operation designed to wring money out of the poorest and most vulnerable by any means they could, and that as a result, the overwhelming majority of Ferguson's citizens had outstanding warrants... The entire population was criminalized... in many municipalities, as much as 40% of the money governments depend on comes from the kinds of predatory policing that has become a fact of life for the citizens of Ferguson...And this pattern can be observed down the line... Almost every institution in America—from our corporations to our schools, hospitals, and civic authorities—now seems to operate largely as an engine for extracting revenue, by imposing ever more complex sets of rules that are designed to be broken. And these rules are almost invariably enforced on a sliding scale: ever-so-gently on the rich and powerful (think of what happens to those banks when they themselves break the law), but with absolute Draconian harshness on the poorest and most vulnerable.'
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At the moment when theoretical critique can reappear in our epoch, and can only count on itself to be diffused in a new practice, some still believe they can oppose to us the exigencies of practice, when those who speak of them (at the level of methodological delirium) are on all occasions abundantly revealed to be incapable of success in the least practical action other than the one they do best: submission. As for me, I am inclined toward anger and revolt. But if I am for the moment required to accept the temporary role of theoretician specifically to subvert it and the conditions that require it, this is because I absolutely do not consider it practical to leave repetitive platitudes -- which skillful charlatans circulate as if they were new discoveries -- free to maintain a situation of general falsification. Theory is only the practical concentration of the revolutionary project, as practice is only theory to such a degree of concentration that it conquers its realization. Until now, so-called theory has only interpreted the world; it is now a question of transforming it. Until now, practice has only reinforced the existing world; it is now a question of overthrowing it.
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Thus, until now, no one in this country has dared to take sides in favour of total revolution. I will do so. The old world writhes in convulsions of rage whenever it discovers that radical critiques of the prevailing misery -- hitherto provided a privileged position in the sterile factories of the cultural and educational industries -- can have a real use value in concrete struggles, that they may appear in the streets, and that the real scope of the conflict that they announce is global. Everywhere that this conflict appears, it has only elicited democratic litanies that, interpreting the thought of the "nation," deplore irresponsibility and disorder, thus deploring the new customs that inaugurate the beginning of an era. While the rock-stars of world-peace confess their terror in this Holy Alliance, it is not only necessary for any useful critical theory to recognize the reason of revolutionary proletarians, but also to contribute by giving them their reasons, by enriching theoretically the search for practical truth expressed historically and socially by their actions.
I need nothing more for a resume than this.
Siddiq lives in Cape Town, where he was born
at 8 o clock during a shrill April
night in 1990. He is forlorn.
A product of his times, his time's been spent
within the murderously narrow range
of passions, adventures, dreams and dead ends
presented to him in the flotsam-form
of a rotting world and its spectacle
against which he can only set himself
as an irreconcilable opponent.
His writing is both the direct result
and the all too partial, insufficient
negation
of this melancholy situation.
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Became the best in your fieldThe ingenuities in the management of seduction lie in the efficiency and, therefore, the near ubiquity of make-believe in our times. The managers of seduction try to make us believe, to instil in us an interconnected cobweb of illusions: "Work is meant to make our lives easier. Work is meant to make the world a better place. Technology is developed to solve humanity's problems. Money makes social interactions simpler. It is a sin to live without working for a living. The wages we get are equal to our contribution in production. The militaries, governments, leaders and representatives are there for our benefit." The most ingenious task entrusted to the managers of seduction is to make us believe that most of us believe this make-belief. An intriguing question: What makes coercion so invisible now, and what makes its seductive disguise so effective?
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'Durban - The fate of a massive foreign-funded R550 million contract to build one of South Africa’s first private power generation plants hangs in the balance with the project already shut down for a month because of continued violent attacks by dismissed workers. Group Five Projects, which is building the Avon Power Peaking Plant at Shakaskraal on the North Coast for Italian consortium Ansaldo Fata, has been forced to get an urgent Durban High Court interdict against about 500 former employees “who are either participating or associating themselves with the anarchy. The project is of national importance because it is aimed at generating additional power for Eskom,” Group Five’s human resources director, Cindyanne May, said in her affidavit. The plant is one of two of its kind in South Africa... representing foreign investment of about $1 billion (R13.6 billion) in the country. The company is facing penalties of up to R1 million a day and its wages and plant costs were almost R20 million a month. Workers first downed tools in an unprotected strike earlier this year and ignored an interdict granted by the Labour Court. This resulted in mass dismissals of the workers. May said after discussions, the workers were reinstated but soon after, the violence began again. According to a document before the court, their grievances related to payment of transport subsidies, additional pay for working consecutive shifts, and general workers doing semi-skilled work and not being paid for it. “This time it was worse and resulted in a number of injuries to employees and managers. There was also large-scale destruction of property and assets,” May said. “On August 26, the employees surrounded the site office, intimidating and ultimately assaulting the contracts director, Chris Willemse, and supervisor Theo Janse van Vuuren who required medical attention.” The workers were again dismissed and the site was shut down because the company could not ensure the safety of employees. May said new workers were hired, but when the company tried to reopen the site last week a group – led by former shop stewards on site – took scaffolding off the site and blocked the public road, in full view of the police. The group, armed with pangas, knobkieries, mallets and sticks, barricaded another access road with logs and tyres. “The propensity for violence and damage to property increases with each day that the unlawful gathering remains in place and criminal acts continue. They have recourse in terms of the Labour Relations Act should they feel aggrieved by their dismissals but have elected to conduct themselves unlawfully”' ("‘Anarchists’ halt R550m project", The Mercury, 08 October 2015)
'But what’s going on today? One could speak of a certain return, our
return: a return to working-class violence, a return to youth violence
in the streets, a return to the violence of the “old” who pass stones to
the “young” in homage to that which they’d never ceased wanting. The
words of an old man in Lyon to a young rioter, “we give you the stones
we can no longer throw.” What had been so perfectly unlearned and
forgotten reappears today with all the violence of a thing repressed.
The question of violence is no longer posed, but everywhere imposed.'
'Theory is a moment in the self-education of the proletariat, whose
curriculum involves inflammatory pamphlets and beer-hall oratory as much
as barricades and streetfighting.
In this regard, theory is more a map than a set of directions: a
survey of the terrain in which we find ourselves, a way of getting our
bearings in advance of any risky course of action. A map produced by the lost themselves, offering them the difficult view
from within rather than the clarity of the Olympian view from above.'
On the streets of New York, another kind of poetry is at work:
'But beyond the practical value of counterlogistic information, there is what we might call its existential value: the way in which being able to see one’s own actions alongside the actions of others, and being able to see as well the effects of such concerted action, imbues those actions with a meaning they might have otherwise lacked... This is another one of the values of theory with regard to praxis — the ability to place struggles side by side, to render struggles visible to each other and to themselves.'
By virtue of the same ability to project particular beauty -- the beautiful struggle -- the struggle of the beautiful to be born in a stubborn world -- onto a universal stage, poetry may assume some of the valuable functions of theory. MAY -- if it is used right. There is no valuable art, only valuable uses of art. The virile beauty thus deployed to flow whither it will is naturally scandalous to a world dominated by the sterile pecuniary canons of the spiritually hideous bourgeois. The revolution of modern art, in which William Carlos Williams played no small role at the start of the 20th century, was always inseparable from the modern art of revolution, though its protagonists have often only been able to recognise this obliquely, as was the case with WCW himself:
Here's to the baby,
may it thrive!
Here's to the labia,
that rive
to give it place
in a stubborn world.
And here's to the peak
from which the seed was hurled!
'By virtue of works of art the beauty of woman is released to flow whither it will up and down the years. The imagination transcends the thing itself. Kaffirs admire what they term beauty in their women but which is in official parlance a deformity. A Kaffir poet to be a good poet would praise that which is to him praiseworthy and we should be scandalized.'
On the streets of New York, another kind of poetry is at work:
Often when I day dream
I just create scenarios in
my head of the two of us
'But beyond the practical value of counterlogistic information, there is what we might call its existential value: the way in which being able to see one’s own actions alongside the actions of others, and being able to see as well the effects of such concerted action, imbues those actions with a meaning they might have otherwise lacked... This is another one of the values of theory with regard to praxis — the ability to place struggles side by side, to render struggles visible to each other and to themselves.'
By virtue of the same ability to project particular beauty -- the beautiful struggle -- the struggle of the beautiful to be born in a stubborn world -- onto a universal stage, poetry may assume some of the valuable functions of theory. MAY -- if it is used right. There is no valuable art, only valuable uses of art. The virile beauty thus deployed to flow whither it will is naturally scandalous to a world dominated by the sterile pecuniary canons of the spiritually hideous bourgeois. The revolution of modern art, in which William Carlos Williams played no small role at the start of the 20th century, was always inseparable from the modern art of revolution, though its protagonists have often only been able to recognise this obliquely, as was the case with WCW himself:
Here's to the baby,
may it thrive!
Here's to the labia,
that rive
to give it place
in a stubborn world.
And here's to the peak
from which the seed was hurled!
'By virtue of works of art the beauty of woman is released to flow whither it will up and down the years. The imagination transcends the thing itself. Kaffirs admire what they term beauty in their women but which is in official parlance a deformity. A Kaffir poet to be a good poet would praise that which is to him praiseworthy and we should be scandalized.'
In recent years the routine murders executed by agents of the state have
produced increasing opposition. Mexico, Burkina Faso, the United States,
France, Greece, England, Turkey, the Congo, to name only a few, have
witnessed riots, strikes and demonstrations in protest against the
everyday operation of a Law and Order built on brutal dispossession and
exploitation. This is all to the good. It is important, however, to
recognise the limitations of protest and go beyond them, or further
victims will simply be added to the list of barbarous outrages that has
not ceased its savage accumulation. It is necessary to fight the ongoing
repression, not to lament it; the point is not to mouth rhetoric about murderous cops, but to abolish them. The primary goal
of all repression has always been to put social contestation on
the defensive. It is no coincidence that the recent upsurge in protest
against police brutality coincides with an upsurge in global class
struggle. The rhetoric of anti-repression protests, which forces the anger and rage of the oppressed to stay on the defensive, plays into the hands of the police. To be effective, the fight against repression must be an offensive struggle,
as must every struggle against the powers of class society. Fighting
repression does not merely involve masses in the streets, but must also always clearly reveal all those who enforce it
and the different ways they do so. To recognize and name
all of their enemies is a necessary preliminary for all those who fight
and win. Further, it's essential to grasp how the violence of
repression is inversely proportional to the violence of the struggle and
the number of the combatants. When many break the law and social
convention, no one is punished (or insignificantly few in any case), and
while limited battles are easily
repressed, great and serious ones are rewarded with victory. To the
extent that it exists, repression is a reality that can be fought not by
making ridiculous appeals to the bureaucrats in power, but by
returning to the offensive, generalizing it and unleashing new
struggles that make
the old ones seem small. Historically, as in the present day, the
revolutionary movement has grown each time that it has attacked, and
it can only be defeated if it gives up this strategy. The practical
problem that Ferguson, Baltimore, Marikana, Ayotzinapa, and all the other battles
of the last few years in which blood has
been split has posed isn’t the problem of disarming the police, but that
of arming the proletariat.
Another kind of spell:
'The Tzar's immediate successor was the people of Russia, who ceased all business and lived in the streets as in a perpetual holiday. There was no government. Joy was the sovereign of all Russia. They opened the jails and liberated the prisoners... The funeral of the martyrs of the February Revolution was not a funeral, but a gigantic triumphal march of the people. In this momentous upheaval which overthrew its despotism and democratised the government of an empire, only a few hundred men and women lost their lives.'
Execution
Another kind of spell:
DON'T
SUPPORT
THIS
SMELLY
NOISY
TRUCK
'The Tzar's immediate successor was the people of Russia, who ceased all business and lived in the streets as in a perpetual holiday. There was no government. Joy was the sovereign of all Russia. They opened the jails and liberated the prisoners... The funeral of the martyrs of the February Revolution was not a funeral, but a gigantic triumphal march of the people. In this momentous upheaval which overthrew its despotism and democratised the government of an empire, only a few hundred men and women lost their lives.'
 |
| Main road of the district in which the author spent his first years. Maitland, Cape Town |
Execution
A Scottish traveller, present at the burning of the Hôtel de Ville during the Paris Commune, provided the following description that puts to shame the ridiculous circumlocutions by which art critics tart-up with vapid conceptual face-paint the saleable commodities on which they build their careers: 'Never could I have imagined anything so beautiful. It’s superb. I won’t deny that the people of the Commune are frightful rogues. But what artists! And they were not even aware of their own masterpiece! I have seen the ruins of Amalfi bathed in the azure swells of the Mediterranean, and the ruins of the Tung-hoor temples in Punjab. I’ve seen Rome and many other things. But nothing can compare to what I have seen here tonight before my very eyes.'
'As this summer warms up, last August's riot is being remembered less as chaos and more as art. Some talk now of a balletic quality to it, a coordinated and graceful drawing of cops away from the center of the action, a scattering of The Man's power, either with real incidents or false alarms.'
Another kind of poetry in the service of another kind of magic:
Another kind of poetry in the service of another kind of magic:
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'Others remember it in terms of music; through much of the rioting seemed to run, they say, a remarkable empathy, or whatever it is that jazz musicians feel on certain nights; everybody knowing what to do and when to do it without needing a word or a signal: "You could go up to anybody, the cats could be in the middle of burning down a store or something, but they'd tell you, explain very calm, just what they were doing, what they were going to do next. And that's what they'd do; man, nobody has to give orders."'
After all, it was modern poetry, for the last four hundred years, that had led them there. The handful of blacks quoted above in Thomas Pynchon's Journey Into The Mind of Watts are the precursors of the throngs whose simultaneous acts in the streets of dozens of cities across every continent demonstrates the urgent need to carry out its exalted programme, not merely in books, but in reality -- and in any case to do nothing else. A programme that embraces both the riotous choreography of forgotten Elizabethan John Davies, whose Orchestra, or A Poem of Dancing, includes the lines
Yet in this misrule they such rule embrace
As two, at once, encumber not the place.
as well as the desire to totally transform life of Rimbaud, who abandoned writing verse when he realised that it was useless in accomplishing his demand A bas l'histoire! I stand with all those (such as Octavio Paz when he says 'poetry has no other mission than to transmute history' -- though his ideas on how it is to accomplish this mission remain regrettably mystified and mystifying) who affirm that poetry must realise this demand in fact rather than merely in the imagination -- or completely abandon its lofty pretensions altogether and take its place alongside solitaire and baseball as just another past-time, a game whose inflated posturings some, such as the mature Rimbaud, have judged to be beneath the dignity of grown men and women.
After all, it was modern poetry, for the last four hundred years, that had led them there. The handful of blacks quoted above in Thomas Pynchon's Journey Into The Mind of Watts are the precursors of the throngs whose simultaneous acts in the streets of dozens of cities across every continent demonstrates the urgent need to carry out its exalted programme, not merely in books, but in reality -- and in any case to do nothing else. A programme that embraces both the riotous choreography of forgotten Elizabethan John Davies, whose Orchestra, or A Poem of Dancing, includes the lines
Yet in this misrule they such rule embrace
As two, at once, encumber not the place.
as well as the desire to totally transform life of Rimbaud, who abandoned writing verse when he realised that it was useless in accomplishing his demand A bas l'histoire! I stand with all those (such as Octavio Paz when he says 'poetry has no other mission than to transmute history' -- though his ideas on how it is to accomplish this mission remain regrettably mystified and mystifying) who affirm that poetry must realise this demand in fact rather than merely in the imagination -- or completely abandon its lofty pretensions altogether and take its place alongside solitaire and baseball as just another past-time, a game whose inflated posturings some, such as the mature Rimbaud, have judged to be beneath the dignity of grown men and women.
The Albanian insurrection of 1997 is to the Paris Commune what the Commune is to riots such as Watts: the opening of the field, the extension of the dance-floor, the broadening of the canvas into an immeasurably vaster dimension. This particular example demonstrates fantastically well the recognition that if work is to become play, tools must become toys. The transformation of the main work of every government -- class domination through violent coercion -- into an exciting game of revolt was at no moment in the history of the world more clearly demonstrated than in Albania where, at an unprecedented and truly staggering scale, guns became toys. 'In the whole southern region of Albania, there is no police, no army, no jails, no courts, not a sign of state or governing authority. The power of weapons is prevailing everywhere. Everyone is armed, driving around in cars with the kalashnikovs at hand, walking in the streets carrying automatic weapons, revolvers, Chinese TT (always at least two of them and ready to use) in their belts or inside their jackets. It's impossible to estimate the accurate number of these weapons. Some say they are over four million.
What we know for sure is that all police stations, all army storehouses, all factories where weapons were constructed or assembled have been looted (one of these factories, a kalashnikov construction unit in Polytsa, was one of the first). The question that immediately comes to mind, how people got hold of all these guns, is a bit complicated to answer. It is a fact that there have been no massive attacks or well organised violent acts. A characteristic example of what happened is the case of the police station in Saranda. In the afternoon of May 1, a few people started throwing stones against the police station, inside which there were about one hundred well armed policemen. Their commander repeatedly called the minister, in Tirana, for instructions. The answer was "we'll let you know". The instructions never came, so the police force abandoned the station, leaving behind most of their arsenal. The about fifty members of the secret police -SHIK- had left much earlier. About the same thing happened with the navy station in Saranda. The commander called Tirana as soon as he learnt of the attack and was told that "you'll receive orders". The orders were never given and as a result almost all the weapons were abandoned and carried to a place in the open, where anyone could go and pick up anything he liked. A navy map of Albania, labelled "top secret", was found a few days later by two French reporters who happened to pass by the area. A notebook with records of army equipment circulation, was found torn amidst looted army tracks with flat tires inside a destroyed and looted army camp in Dropolis.
The gun, at least in the south of Albania, dominates everyday life, in fact it IS everyday life. An ordinary person sees, hears, touches, uses a gun -i.e. it occupies one's senses- as often as the cigarette would in another society. It is the centre of life; it's an amusing toy for the kids (school's out, anyway) and, very often, a sport for the adults. You can see groups of people going for target practice, some were shooting at the cross of the Saranda church in the middle of the day, joking at each other, some other -a dozen of well dressed Albanians- had set up a roadblock with Mercedes and jeeps in the highland road between Vouno and Cheimara, and did target practice, not having in mind that some car might appear from the side of the road they were shooting at. Those less involved in guns just use them for self defence. They don't show them off and most of them keep them at home, just in case of a robbery. However, the Albanians were armed and well acquainted to guns in the past, too. The revolt just gave them the opportunity to replace their guns with more modern ones.
During daytime, the kalashnikov shots are rather scarce. They shoot from the paved with stones Saranda coastal road towards the sea, they shoot from the hills around, they shoot from the slope of Gjirokaster, from the small hill at the side of the Greek consulate, from the port of Vlore, here and there all the way to Fieri.
After 6 - 7 p.m. every night, it looks like Greek Easter [when traditionally there's a lot of fireworks]. The bursts of gunfire light the sea, they get more frequent or stop without apparent reason, sometimes some passer by gets shot or a hotel glass is broken. We are sitting inside the "luxury" hotel by the seaside of Vlore staring at the spectacle of shots and flashes which is rather a festival of joy to the participants in it.
It's really hard to believe that the fear and terror inflicted by the gun which means death at the hands of an 'official' of some 'established' authority has become an ordinary and inseparable element of life in the Albanian communities, that the gun has become fun and source of an absurd pleasure.'
 |
| Police investigation, Mexico, c. 1930s |
DINNER?
YOUR HOUSE?
WEDNESDAY?
*(I'm also free Fridays)
375-548-11290
If anyone wants
to talk about
anything,
call me
(031) 469-328
Jeff, one lonely guy
The gun, at least in the south of Albania, dominates everyday life, in fact it IS everyday life. An ordinary person sees, hears, touches, uses a gun -i.e. it occupies one's senses- as often as the cigarette would in another society. It is the centre of life; it's an amusing toy for the kids (school's out, anyway) and, very often, a sport for the adults. You can see groups of people going for target practice, some were shooting at the cross of the Saranda church in the middle of the day, joking at each other, some other -a dozen of well dressed Albanians- had set up a roadblock with Mercedes and jeeps in the highland road between Vouno and Cheimara, and did target practice, not having in mind that some car might appear from the side of the road they were shooting at. Those less involved in guns just use them for self defence. They don't show them off and most of them keep them at home, just in case of a robbery. However, the Albanians were armed and well acquainted to guns in the past, too. The revolt just gave them the opportunity to replace their guns with more modern ones.
Octopus for hire
During daytime, the kalashnikov shots are rather scarce. They shoot from the paved with stones Saranda coastal road towards the sea, they shoot from the hills around, they shoot from the slope of Gjirokaster, from the small hill at the side of the Greek consulate, from the port of Vlore, here and there all the way to Fieri.
Hearst doesn't return my calls :(
After 6 - 7 p.m. every night, it looks like Greek Easter [when traditionally there's a lot of fireworks]. The bursts of gunfire light the sea, they get more frequent or stop without apparent reason, sometimes some passer by gets shot or a hotel glass is broken. We are sitting inside the "luxury" hotel by the seaside of Vlore staring at the spectacle of shots and flashes which is rather a festival of joy to the participants in it.
DICK
DICK IS A NICKNAME FOR RICHARD
TO CALL A DETECTIVE A DICK
OR A MAN'S PENIS A DICK
IS CONSIDERED A PUTDOWN
TO THE NICKNAMES OF RICHARD
GOD SAYS THAT I AM TO USE DICK
WHEN I AM TALKING ABOUT DICK HAYES
DICK POWEL DICK KNOWELLS DICK KISSINGER
THE EXPRESSION D_____ SUCKER
AND SUCK MY D_____ IS OFFENSIVE
DICK IS NOT MY FAVOURITE NAME
SINCE THE USE OF THE WORD DICK
IS OFFENSIVE
 |
| Police booking an arrested man into jail, Mexico, 1930s |
NEED TO WHACK
SOMEBODY?
(LOVERS, BUSINESS PARTNERS, INSURANCE FRAUDS...)
PROFESSIONAL, RELIABLE
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It is necessary to speak of poetry for the same reason as it is necessary to make it. Clearly, the exhausted discussions of cultural forms still prestigious among poets and professors belongs in the trash-can of history along with the specialists paid to reproduce this empty chatter. Beyond useless and outdated aesthetics, poetry consists entirely of human potential. It is written on the faces of adventures and in the form of cities yet unborn. Nothing is more urgent than the discovery of unknown desires and pleasures, the creation of new adventures and construction through upheaval. To me, poetry means the elaboration of absolutely new behaviours -- those beautiful though rudimentary gestures of insubordination and insolence through which a new era of human existence struggles to be born and to be known, to become concrete and articulate -- as well as the methods of making their tactics more passionate and their goals more precise. The possibilities for new types of behaviour lie within play -- not merely with words, but with the material basis of life as a whole. This is a game which can only be conducted with the utmost rigor. At heart, it involves -- and in-forms -- the clarity and coherence towards which the obscure and stammering expression of revolutionary will -- the language of the concrete -- stumbles, stutters and staggers.
A poetry that accompanies the dissolution of a society (and bourgeois civilisation has lingered on for more than a century in a state permanent decadence -- 'in history, as in nature, decay is the laboratory of life') does not therefore concern itself with expressing rage, much less with presenting mere images of rage. It seeks to understand, to unconditionally but critically support, to describe, to express in forms appropriate to its content, and to precipitate a movement that is developing before our very eyes. As for those who present us with their own pseudo-rage as a sort of newly fashionable artistic content, it is obvious that this is merely their way of compensating for the spinelessness, compromises, and humiliations of their actual life — which is why spectators so readily identify with them. Those who claim to approve of the perspective expressed in the phrase 'Larney, jou poes!' have approved too many other things to be capable of approving it; and those who say they don’t approve it have also accepted too many other things for their judgment to have the slightest significance.
Poets – pissing on the lamp-posts that mark their own particular territory – propagate the lie that poetry is an artefact whose production is reserved for individual genius trained in the arcane methods of a medieval craft. Those who can't make, teach. The best history to come out of the old world has been written to communicate some sort of didactic lesson. The best poetry to come out of the old world has been written for the same purpose. This is the case whether the poem be classical – 'gather ye rosebuds when ye may' – or modern – as in the dadaist sound-symphonies which, written in a time when 'the war to end all wars' ushered in a century of civilised brutality, perfectly communicated the utter degradation suffered by consciousness -- and the medium of consciousness: language -- under the present civilisation. Those who can't make news are forced to contemplate it; the idiocy of the spectacle presented to them, acted out by political, cultural and economic celebrities whose imbecility is matched only by their mendacity, is compounded by the idiocy of the intellectuals who are paid to to tell the spectators what to think about the dominant show. 'In Sir Henry Wotton's jocular definition', wrote Samuel Johnson, '"An ambassador" is said to be "a man of virtue sent abroad to tell lies for the advantage of his county"; a news writer is "a man without virtue, who writes lies at home for his own profit". To these compositions is required neither genius nor knowledge, neither industry nor sprightliness, but contempt of shame and indifference to truth are absolutely necessary. He who by a long familiarity with infamy has obtained these qualities, may confidently tell today what he intends to contradict tomorrow; he may affirm fearlessly what he knows he shall be obliged to recant, and may write letters from Amsterdam or Dresden to himself'. The contemptible stage-managers of the spectacle present themselves as admirable, having taken on the job of directing social activity on behalf of masses too busy with the daily grind and its compensations to handle such a task for themselves. The ambassadors of the spectacle, who are beneath contempt, present themselves as above admiration, having taken on the job of directing social consciousness (as 'unacknowledged legislators of the world') on behalf of masses too busy with the daily grind and its compensations to handle such a task for themselves. Whereas the managers of society lie in the service of slavery, their servile intellectual savants lie in the service of the servants of servility. When Kurt Schwitters and Hugo Ball recited nonsense syllables that they called 'poetry' they were directly attacking the spectacle of a suicidal society that called organised insanity the embodiment of reason. Karl Kraus, their contemporary, railed against the same murderous newspeak in excoriating satires almost as shocking to his peers as the shenanigans of the dadaists.
Exemplary as the courageous provocations of these pioneers was in the conditions of their own time, attempts to reproduce their methods today are unlikely to produce anything better than the perfectly sterile commercial successes of a Damien Hirst or a Banksy. 'To tell the truth,' said a young Lettrist, 'all the worthwhile works of this generation and the precursors that it recognizes lead one to think that the next revolution in sensibility will not be conceived as a novel expression of known facts, but as the conscious construction of new states of existence in the world.' Let's be perfectly clear. There was more poetry produced by illiterate children and workers during the years of the South African revolution than is to be found in the complete works of all the poets ever produced by this country. Rather than verses recited or written on a stage or page, this poetry was improvised in the streets and factories; rather than a commodity held as the exclusive intellectual property of a persona: an anonymous creation, subject to the collective invention of anyone and the appropriation of all; rather than an artefact whose form, expressed in one medium or another, was fixed for all time: a fluid ensemble of elements, a transitory series of situations, now constructed using placards and pamphlets, now using dances and songs, now petrol and matches, now funerals and prayer gatherings, wildcat strikes and mass-meetings, hijacked vehicles and barricades, each situation one integral moment in a movement of creative rebellion as exemplary as any the world had ever seen. To make poetry is always to make revolution; it is to make thought and feeling into a material force strong enough to shake the world, to give passion physical form, to transform existence according to the imagination, skill and desire of the human being; it is the marriage of will and circumstance and the consummation of that sensuous activity which lies at the base of all intelligent life.
How does thought and feeling, the stuff of theory and poetry, become a material force strong enough to shake the world? By breaking violently with the modes of thinking and feeling which render human existence impossible. In this task, noted Andre Breton in relation to Aime Cesaire's first poem, 'nothing will do short of lifting a certain number of taboos': of finally eliminating from human blood and brain the deadly toxins fostered in it by a terminally topsy-turvy world whose spectacle turns the most discredited materials – ugliness, stupidity and servitude -- into not just gold or the philosopher's stone but into beauty, genius and freedom itself. The slogan "Slavery is Liberty" is written not merely above the gates of Hitler's death camps or the pages of Orwell's books but in the hearts and thoughts of all those who subscribe to the notion that 'becoming independent' means 'finding a boss to work for'.
The power of theory and poetry rests principally in the power of transmutation that they bring into play in the opposite direction: to set an upside down world on its feet, to inject the celebrated pleasures permitted by this world and the furiously touted rubbish of which they are comprised with a negative charge explosive enough to bring into the open the public secret of their own thoroughly discredited misery, to say what is censored, to do what is prohibited, to totally transform (detourn) all that exists by taking it apart bit by bit and putting it back again in an entirely new way.
The situationists, speaking of the decline and fall of the spectacle-commodity economy in the spontaneous ballet of Watts — a permanent decadence that continues today in the creak and moan of burning barricades and broken windows in Istanbul, Oaxaca, Athens, Delhi, Cape Town (though without the injection of a more concrete poetry, in the absence of any attempt to choreograph in a libertarian and co-ordinated way the spontaneous gestures erupting everywhere with such beautiful ferocity, it will all likely come to nothing, or less than nothing, as before) — wrote: 'The Los Angeles rebellion was a rebellion against the commodity, against the world of the commodity in which worker-consumers are hierarchically subordinated to commodity standards. Like the young delinquents of all the advanced countries, but more radically because they are part of a class without a future, a sector of the proletariat unable to believe in any significant chance of integration or promotion, the Los Angeles blacks take modern capitalist propaganda, its publicity of abundance, literally. They want to possess now all the objects shown and abstractly accessible, because they want to use them. In this way they are challenging their exchange-value, the commodity reality which molds them and marshals them to its own ends, and which has preselected everything. Through theft and gift they rediscover a use that immediately refutes the oppressive rationality of the commodity, revealing its relations and even its production to be arbitrary and unnecessary. The looting of the Watts district was the most direct realization of the distorted principle: “To each according to their false needs” — needs determined and produced by the economic system which the very act of looting rejects. But once the vaunted abundance is taken at face value and directly seized, instead of being eternally pursued in the rat-race of alienated labor and increasing unmet social needs, real desires begin to be expressed in festive celebration, in playful self-assertion, in the potlatch of destruction. People who destroy commodities show their human superiority over commodities. They stop submitting to the arbitrary forms that distortedly reflect their real needs. The flames of Watts consummated the system of consumption. The theft of large refrigerators by people with no electricity, or with their electricity cut off, is the best image of the lie of affluence transformed into a truth in play. Once it is no longer bought, the commodity lies open to criticism and alteration, whatever particular form it may take. Only when it is paid for with money is it respected as an admirable fetish, as a symbol of status within the world of survival.
ARE YOU
FREE ON
SATURDAY
FROM
4-7PM?
Looting is a natural response to the unnatural and inhuman society of commodity abundance. It instantly undermines the commodity as such, and it also exposes what the commodity ultimately implies: the army, the police and the other specialized detachments of the state’s monopoly of armed violence. What is a policeman? He is the active servant of the commodity, the man in complete submission to the commodity, whose job is to ensure that a given product of human labor remains a commodity, with the magical property of having to be paid for, instead of becoming a mere refrigerator or rifle — a passive, inanimate object, subject to anyone who comes along to make use of it. In rejecting the humiliation of being subject to police, the blacks are at the same time rejecting the humiliation of being subject to commodities. The Watts youth, having no future in market terms, grasped another quality of the present, and that quality was so incontestable and irresistible that it drew in the whole population — women, children, and even sociologists who happened to be on the scene. Bobbi Hollon, a young black sociologist of the neighborhood, had this to say to the Herald Tribune in October: "Before, people were ashamed to say they came from Watts. They’d mumble it. Now they say it with pride. Boys who used to go around with their shirts open to the waist, and who’d have cut you to pieces in half a second, showed up here every morning at seven o’clock to organize the distribution of food. Of course, it’s no use pretending that food wasn’t looted. . . . All that Christian blah has been used too long against blacks. These people could loot for ten years and they wouldn’t get back half the money those stores have stolen from them over all these years. . . . Me, I’m only a little black girl." Bobbi Hollon, who has sworn never to wash off the blood that splashed on her sandals during the rioting, adds: "Now the whole world is watching Watts."'
 |
| Woman accused of witchcraft, Mexico, c.1920s |
Words you CANNOT say on radio*:
FUCK
SHIT
CUNT
COCK
PISS
TITS
ASSHOLE
FUNBAGS
*Per the FCCs definition of "indecency" especially within the hours of Safe Harbour, i.e. 6am-10pm. Variations on the above are also prohibited. This is not a completed list
For a start; what happened in South Africa cannot be encapsulated in alienated notions of time and space. It was not isolated to June of 1976. It was not restricted to Soweto. It was not merely the act of students. Nor was it simply a revolt, rebellion or unrest. It was creative revolution in the making, in the desperately clear moment of confrontation.
Let the moralists and the humanitarians pretend the students were always peace-loving, and mere victims of the violence. The events in South Africa have exploded that insipid myth. In a situation in which state violence is institutionalised on such an overwhelming scale, one affirms one’s humanity not by “turning the other cheek” and suffering with dignity, but by willfully and consciously accepting one’s share of violence and by understanding that brute systematic force can only be destroyed by the creative violence of the masses.' (Selby Semela, Sam Thompson & Norman Abraham, Reflections on the Black Consciousness Movement and the South African Revolution, 1979)'Can it be denied that the riots of Sebokeng were part and parcel of the fight for liberty by black South Africans? Although the motive was to strike against the rising rents, the course taken by the rebellion was so horrible that even the police could not withstand it. This I say because there was no roof of the business buildings that remained tall after the strikes except the well-planned Mphatlalatsane hall, Perm building and various churches.
In Zone 11 all the shops were burnt down. The rent office, the bottlestore and the beerhall were burnt . Three houses were burnt. One councillor was killed. Several cars were burnt, including a brand-new Honda Ballade. The petrol station and the soft-drink cash-and-carry wholesale were also attacked. The roadhouse café was broken into and goods were taken away. Tarred and untarred roads in the zone were blocked with stones, boxes and anything else that was easy to carry. The Post Office was attacked and burned, not surprisingly.
Brothers, if the time to fight has come, we ought to fight. There is no need to watch how the other partner is fighting. I don’t support the destruction of shops and offices, as they play a role in my daily existence, but if everything is to be destroyed, then let us destroy and not exempt even a single thing. Let us not lose God’s support by doing in justice; that is, doing harm to some and securing others, whereas they are all on the same elevation of guiltiness. Let us not be like King Saul, who infringed by securing King Hagat though ordained to exterminate everything by God.
We are Africans and brothers in love, and ought to share the pains of bitterness and the fruits of joy...
I ask if South Africa will survive the irresistible forces of history. Really, the treasure of the South African government is crumbling. It can’t resist the criticisms and attacks it faces every day. The solving of the problem by means of tortoise-paced reforms will give the state a long headache; the blows from outside get harder... If we cooperate together on all levels of mutual interest to the fullest possible extent, then I cannot see any obstacle that can thwart us.' (Johannes Rantete; The Third Day of September; 1984)
This
song is not about sex. It is about revolution. But it is also about
sex. To love is not necessarily to struggle, but to struggle is
necessarily to love, and to love is necessarily to make love,
to woo, seduce, embrace, cherish, O taste and see; to kiss,
interpenetrate, devour a passion together with the whole person,
lick, tickle, spank, fuck; to indulge, pamper, venerate, criticise,
argue, rage, rail at, wail at, fail at, languish, lash out in anguish
against, flail, debate, resist, praise with great praise, ravish with
carnal and spiritual knowledge, commune, share, respect; to be
present with others in a world of streaming communication, of an
image given and received; to wonder, marvel, honour, tease, nibble,
suck, pull, bang, stroke – but not, of course, all at once in
relation to every loved one. No two love relations are the same –
not even to the same person at different times.
As,
during sex, the juices of the lover mingle with those of the beloved
to produce something new – the conception of a child – so, in
love, the rawest animal instincts mingle with the most loftiest
spiritual impulses to produce something altogether new and uniquely
human: spiritual instincts. Here the unity of opposites, of
'You' in 'I', that impregnates the love relation throughout the
constant give and take of the daily grind, is bodily achieved. As
people became more and more colonised by the complex cobweb of
irrational taboo, convention, superstition and servile kowtowing
before hypocritical authority that's nowadays palmed-off under the
name 'civilisation', they got the strange notion into their heads
that there was something shameful about their animal origins, and
sought to suppress them. Nowhere has this imbecility been more
rigorously applied than the realm of love. All appearance of
animal passion (since the facts themselves remain too distressingly
stubborn to overcome in reality) was ruthlessly excised. But to
eliminate the mutual interpenetration of instinctual and spiritual in
the interests of moral purity or romantic chivalry has the same
effect as removing one partner from the act of intercourse. The
masturbation of the spirit
imposed by the dominant civilisation may eliminate the animal in
imagination, but it does not thereby sublimate the human in
fact. Instead, the wounds sustained through the amputation
inflicted on humanity by a moronic yet compulsory morality simply
fester and give rise to an internal rot. The gangrenous abomination
produced by this puritan hatchet-job, the infection having penetrated
both its head and heart, consistently acts more bestial, on an
unimaginably greater scale, the most ferocious beast would ever dream
to do.
The
play of dolphins as they leap parabolas of quicksilver through
lightshivered waves, the mutual preening which plays such a central
role in the social life of the birds, the collective child-rearing
and incendiary sex-life of bonobo chimpanzees, the majestic laziness
of lions – all demonstrate aspects of ourselves greater than
ourselves, aspects common to all higher animals, which capitalist
man, homo economicus, suppresses in himself, and which early
humans – and those pockets of humanity which have thus far escaped
the conquest of civilisation – freely express. A revolutionary
society would realise these aspects at a higher level: not less
than the animal, as is currently the case, but more. Capital,
by increasingly repressing the best animal qualities and magnifying
the worst to unrecognisable proportions, increasingly assumes the
shape of the curse Marx discerned a century and a half ago: the
ultimate denial of humanity.
To
love is to banish the murder of the body and the mutilation of the
human animal – inseparable from the human being –
inflicted by civilisation. Unfortunately, in most cases, love's not
love in this society ('Or the word love abused' as Walter Ralegh says, 'Under which many childish desires And conceits are excused.')
To
love is usually not to struggle. Too often to love is to try to
escape struggle. This is the frank admission of the lyric poets, who
evade the challenge of a world that threatens to overwhelm them by a
real retreat into an imaginary unity. This retreat is
what most couples attempt and it is one of the things that makes
love, and the art based on it, so powerful.
One
of the supreme examples of this is the long poem Sunstone by
Octavio Paz, which undoubtedly marks one of the crowning achievements
of the lyric tradition in the poetry of all the world. The values
with which the worldview of the lyric poet is impregnated, which are
the same throughout every
epoch and culture, here find
one of their most moving expressions in the context of a human
tragedy of world-historical import –
the Spanish Revolution, in which these values fought, audacious
and inchoate, against
the organised violence and treachery of the whole world: 'we carry
another world in our hearts' – these are the words Durutti
spoke, arms in hand, shortly he and his comrades were overwhelmed by
the Holy Alliance of Fascists, Stalinists and Republican Democrats.
The world they carried, the world that struggled to be born and died
in the womb,
was the world sung by the
poets, warriors and sages of
all ages. A world ruled by
love for nature, passion for the beloved, hatred towards the deadly
abstractions of the established order, disdain for wealth, scorn for
the pretensions and hypocrisy
of rank and title, admiration of
bravery and courage,
appreciation of simplicity and skill, derision for the vanities of
academic thought and art, praise for the immediate pleasures of the
fleeting moment, distaste for the imposition of compulsory morality,
contempt for alienated labour and property relations, acute
consciousness of the passage of time and the inevitable waste of all
bright things, veneration for true friendship and camaraderie,
sensitivity towards the
tragic nature and indelible
mystery of existence.
If
Paz here masterfully captures all that makes the best lyric poetry so
vital and compelling, he also betrays all that makes poetry, as
practiced by the best poets, ultimately unsatisfactory and unreal for
those immersed body and soul
in the messy matters
of totally overturning a
topsyturvy world. This is
most painfully felt by the fact that, in opposition to the
devastation of a murdered revolution,
Paz has nothing more to offer
than copulation among the ruins of a nation's broken dreams. 'And the
world is changed' whenever two people turn towards one another with
the entirety of their being
naked and open to the mystery of profane communion.
This is true, and it is well
said, but it becomes untrue
when the poet implies, as the
best poets tend to do, that
this is – because at present it's the
best that can be expected –
change enough. Other than
this retreat into erotic communion, the reader will search in vain
for any concrete response to the permanent crisis that faces the
lovers the moment they disengage from their lusty
embrace, and faces the reader the moment she lifts her eyes from the
lambent page.
There is a brilliant denunciation of the disaster and those who
profit from it, but other than that and an abstract affirmation of
the need for another world freed from such catastrophes (and the time
for the novel expression of known truths is well behind us)
there is a conspicuous and awkward silence.
Let me be unambiguous. The immanent catastrophe of our times is a challenge to which the quest for mystical unity – whether erotic, artistic, fascistic (the sublime fanaticism that melded billions to the iron fists of Stalin, Mussolini and their epigones is by no means as irrevocably behind us as many would like to pretend) or mystic – stands as a disastrous evasion. The unity that is sought eternally escapes those who flinch from the unglamourous challenge of everyday misery. Lust that doesn't know itself is stupid and suicidal. Stop talking to me about unfathomable romance and you'll make me happy. When Eros veils itself in mystique and mysticism, a moment of passion has grown old, and can't be revived again with mystique and mysticism. The safety of the retreat was illusory. The unity that was sought elusive. Real love lies elsewhere. Always beyond, always past the point where reason and romance maintain their transparent boundaries. 'What will become of our hearts?' asks the hero of Lowry's tragedy from a flyblown town on the outskirts of Mexico City, his script deliriously unsteady, hand set atremble by the coruscation in his veins, his frayed arteries filled more with mescal than with blood. The novelist shows with pitiless clarity the veritable consequences of the poet's misty fictions. The contradiction must be overcome, in ever more coherent, ever more concrete ways. 'The question is posed afresh whenever people try to live differently...'
'Since 2005, South Africa has probably experienced more strike days per capita than any other country. The two largest were public-sector workers strikes held in 2007 and 2010, with the second of these entailing greater rank-and-file participation than the first. More broadly, the Workers Survey revealed that "around half COSATU members involved in a strike thought that violence was necessary", with most of the violence, or threats of violence, being directed at scabs. In addition, South Africa's level of ongoing urban unrest is greater than anywhere else in the world, and there were considerably more community protesters in 2012 than in the previous year. The working class gained confidence from the critical part it played in the overthrow of apartheid, and it has been accumulating grievances without suffering major defeats in the post-apartheid period. This is a dangerous moment for the country's rulers, and it is more difficult to reform the labour relations regime now than it was in 1924, 1979 or 1985. No doubt there will also be some in the cabinet who will recall Alexis de Tocqueville's aphorism that "the most dangerous moment for a bad government is when it begins to reform."' (Peter Alexander, Marikana: A View From The Mountain and A Case To Answer, 2013)
The world is changed whenever a few proletarians revolt against their misery in one way or another. But it is not changed enough. Those who concern themselves above all else with honesty and responsibility are forced to admit that the unity expressed by poets rings hollow in the face of the surrounding catastrophe, that it is doomed to colonisation and infiltration by the hostile forces that face it on all sides, that it must destroy its enemies or be destroyed by them, and that any plan of attack with a hope of success falls entirely outside the scope of the lyric impulse towards personal expression. All this was said long ago by Laura Riding, an independent contemporary of the Surrealists and one of the best poets of her generation, in an astonishing 1925 essay called A Prophecy or A Plea.Whilst poets have denounced their obsequious colleagues as sellouts at least as far back as the Roman poets Martial and Juvenal, only in the modern era have people been able to say not only that 'poetry, the eldest sister of all arts, and parent of most, seems to have resigned her birthright', as William Congreve put it in his preface to The Way of the World, but that all art has abdicated its role as the sensuous midwife of a self-recreating human spirit in continuous intercourse with a cosmos from which it evolves as an emergent consciousness, and taken up the job of CEO for the autonomous organisation of false consciousness known as civilisation. Whilst Riding, like all those who expressed such perspectives in her time, initially imagined that a prophetic vanguard could restore to art its birth right, she soon came to realise the vanity of such fancies, 'for the prostituted name of poet promiscuously levels all that bear it'. Drawing practical conclusions from this, she subsequently declared poet to be a 'lying word' and violently dissociated herself from any aspiration to such titles, never writing another line of verse again. Together with Antonin Artaud, she was the of her generation the most consistent (not only in her actions but in her refusals; not only in her words but in her silences) partisan of that phase of self-liquidation through which the revolution of modern art passed on the way towards the modern art of revolution. Riding, like Rimbaud before her, demanded of poetry that it realise the lofty claims of its partisans; once she recognised that, in the mouths of all these people, such claims were filthy lies, and that her own attempt to put them into practice by means of a prophetic elite proved impossible, she abandoned both poetry and its promise altogether. When the situationists, on the other hand, declared that 'fake, officially tolerated poetry is no longer the poetic adventure of its era', and that for them 'it is now a matter of a poetry necessarily without poems', they expressed a new phase in the adventure of the arts, the phase of self-transcendence that first burst startingly onto the stage of history in their generation and continues to pose the major question of our time the marvellous reinvention of all life more or less obscurely in all the epochal struggles of my generation. For me, it is necessary to abandon all permitted poetry precisely because I want to realise all its prohibited promise. I lost interest in everything that is tolerated under the prostituted name of poetry the moment I decided to participate, whatever way I practically can, in the only poetic adventure left to me by a society that has abolished every possibility for a poetic and adventurous life: the abolition of society. Now that I've ended my affair with aesthetic neo-shamanism I know how to hail beauty.
'The most moving and at once distressing event in the life of a human being is his discovery that he is alive. From that moment to his death the fact of life is a constant white glare over him, an unsetting and shadowless sun. For darkness, for repose, for a quiet examination of the conditions of existence, for the experience of appreciation and pleasure, it is found necessary to close the eyes, to create an interior where life is a dim infiltration through the heavy curtains of the flesh into this dark room of the soul and where, so seen, through eyes reopened in a more endurable light, it appears lovely, describable. Art has become an evocation of the shadows. What has happened? We have been blinded by life so we turn out senses inward, against it; and the utterance of relief is made in pride, the cry of cowardice becomes the authentic act of art. The tradition of art, of poetry especially, as a catharsis has so thoroughly legitimized this process that it is almost impossible to attack it. It is not a question of proving another method more legitimate. There is no other method. For if the matter be examined more closely it will be seen that the quarrel must be made not with the way we write but with the way we live. For art is the way we live, while aesthetics, in divorcing art from life, sets the seal of approval upon the philosophy of escape. We live life by avoiding it. Art then as the strategy of this philosophy is no more than an inversion, and, as an inversion, is barren. It is not, as it should be, the conduct of life itself, but merely an abnormality of conduct... the poetic tradition accomplishes the vitiation of life in art. The pressure of life is unbearable and the poet in this hazard does not hurl himself against it but finds a safety-valve in song; and existence, that art should have spiritualized, becomes despiritualized in art.
Now I am insisting that the pressure is a challenge not to a retreat into the penumbra of introspection but to the birth of a new poetic bravery that shall exchange insight for outsight and envisage life not as art an influence upon the soul but the soul as an influence upon life. The age of creation that was initiated by the Renaissance extends to-day to the physical aspects of life alone. For the rest we might as well be living in the Middle Ages. Our minds, compared to the noisy world inhabited by the flesh, are recesses of cathedral quiet. Living is the inspiration, art is the expiration. As such it is critical rather than creative, a criticism of life rather than a recreation of it. ... But it is now life itself that discredits the order by leaving art so far behind that both have become meaningless. Mechanics outrun metaphysics. Do not Philistines lead the race? Do they say to the poets: "You have lagged behind, lost contact with life, grown irrelevant and obscure?" The difficulty is to be settled not by trying to write poetry that the Philistines can understand but by outdistancing them in the very race they have set. For while poets have been the parasites of the spiritual world they were born to, sucking up old essences, these others have suffused the physical world with the breath of creation, they have turned visions into actualities. The artist too must turn producer: and his visions must be begotten not of the darkness that lies behind closed eyes but in the steady light of a life he not only confronts but, because he enters upon it fortified by personal faith alone, even creates. He will not recollect life, so that his art would seem touched with the past, but life will proceed from him...'
Each person alive today is well aware of the sickness of these times; the illness sits thick in the air we are forced to inhale; none can escape the infection. Violently separated – in the interests of Capital – from the means of consciously producing their own history through a magnanimous and intimate intercourse (or as Marx put it, a 'sensuous practical activity') with the flesh of the cosmos, human beings have gradually become separated from every element of their own existence, from the labours which define their basic life-activity to the perverted worlds and selves produced by this alienated labour. The painful spiritual separation that cuts to the quick in many of the most sensitive and eloquent sensibilities, the longing of the reed for reunion with the reed-bed which the Muslim mystic Rumi sings at the opening of his Mathnavī, by no means stands outside the material separation of humanity from conscious mastery over its own history. For an individual to step outside of time in bodily communion with the world spirit, and to stand naked before the mystery of another person, can never be an adequate evasion from the need to participate in a communal movement towards history; rather, such acts are a necessary moment of this movement, and the movement itself is a necessary precondition for the completion and transfiguration of this moment. The nature of historical evil is not recognised by the spirit as it were standing at a distance from it, sitting in a box and watching the drama of the historical pain produced by it as if before an unreal spectacle. The person whose spirit does this may have all sorts of brilliant thoughts about evil, pain, history, and humanity, but she will not recognise their nature. That is, the spirit does not remain outside and strip off reality; it casts itself into the depths of this real pain, takes up its abode in the pain, gives itself over to the pain, permeates it with spirit, and the pain itself, in such nearness, discloses itself to her. The recognition does not happen by the stripping off of reality but by the penetration into this definite reality, a penetration of such a kind that the nature of pain is exposed in the heart of this reality. Such a penetration we might call – were the word not currently used to designate its exact opposite – poetry.
'As it turned out, the sting of teargas was something that I’d come to miss a little, and it does wonders
for clearing the sinuses. In Taksim, it was the usual back-and-forth between jubilant demonstrators
and severe cops.' (Taksim square, Istanbul, 2013)
'And yet I love the looks that made me blind,
And like to kiss the lips that fret my life,
In heat of fire an ease of heat I find,
And greatest peace of mind in greatest strife.
That if my choice were now to make again,
I would not have this joy without this pain.'
– A.W, A Poetical Rhapsody, 1602
The response worthy of poetry is not to turn away, as the author of Sunstone does, from the gruesome betrayal of a bombed-out Barcelona, towards lovers copulating tranquilly among the ruins – rapt in the thick of devastation but elevated beyond it – whose redemptive intercourse mystically absolves and dissolves the historical rubble all around them. There is no beyond to the brute fact of devastation and the pain it produces. The nature of the devastating facts are disclosed to me by this very pain that I have here now, its being mine, its being now, its being here, its defined and particular being, the perfected presence of this pain. Under the penetrating touch of the spirit the pain itself communicates with the spirit in daemonic speech. Pain – and every real happening of the soul – is to be compared not with a drama but with those early mysteries whose meaning no-one learns who does not herself join in the dance. The spirit translates out of the daemonic speech, which it learned in intimate touch with the pain, into the speech of symbols. It is this translation which takes place in differentiation and removal from the object. “The symbolic criticism of values” is not primary, but secondary to poetry. The first thing is the discovery of a mode of being in communication with the brute facts, and this discovery is pre-eminently a poetic act.
'There is a passion through which the soul is simply inclined to seek what is suitable according to the senses, and to fly from what is hurtful, and this is called the concupiscible: and another whereby an animal resists the attacks of any agents that hinder what is suitable and inflict harm; and this is called the irascible, whence we say that its object is something arduous, because its tendency is to overcome and rise above obstacles. Now these two are not to be reduced to one principle: for sometimes the soul busies itself with unpleasant things against the inclination of the concupiscible appetite in order that, following the impulse of the irascible appetite, it may fight against obstacles... This is clear also from the fact that the irascible is, as it were, the champion and defender of the concupiscible, when it rises up against what hinders the acquisition of the suitable things which the concupiscible desires, or against what inflicts harm, from which the concupiscible flies. And for this reason, all the passions of the irascible appetite rise from the passions of the concupiscible appetite and terminate in them; for instance, anger rises from sadness, and having wrought vengeance, terminates in joy.' (Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, c.1265–1274)
'The lyrical is the mother of the political.'
Revolution is the brother of the Oedipal
instinct, but one who disdains the shame,
the chip on the shoulder that murders his twin
in the name of guilt. Revolt is a sin
committed in the clear light of a cold sun,
a fury that eschews the shadows of doubt
that shroud the unconscious and heap on the son
the unbearable burden borne by one
who had suffered and fought, desired and loved
and died, never having known
what the storm and stress was all about.
'Let it come! Let the sky break to pieces and wash the face of the world! Pound this hard ground into pocked mud; level us; batter all the windows; rattle all the gates! I am going in at last. Turning the handle on my last door, stepping across the threshold to meet my fate in the dim room. ...I know who gave birth to me. I’ve always known: Chance and fortune. Luck and the roll of the dice. These are my real parents. Always were. Who could ask for better? They have given me everything. No one has been luckier than me. I will know who I am. I will know who I am. I am not ashamed. Let the knowledge fall on me like a summer rain.' (Sophocles, King Oedipus, 429 BC)
'With my heart’s blood I’ve lived for you,
Dear poetry, and, now death comes closer by,
Now I want to tell you one last time.
From childhood on I felt you, poetry,
I can remember nothing of which you weren’t
Part. The reflection of my thoughts,
That I sensed in all things, was you.
The sweet murmur of the sea, my Mother’s voice,
The gait of my comrades, the light
Of the world. People walking. The night.
They all mattered only for your sake –
It was for your sake too that I loved –
Love itself meant nothing but for your sake.
The body’s deepest joy meant nothing to me.
Women’s dark womb meant nothing to me.
The oblivious self-giving meant nothing,
Except that I found deep in their womb,
Deep in the infinite obscurity
Nothing but you – you, you, dear poetry.'
-- Herman Gorter, Pan, 1916
Mexico City, 1968
What is this poetry that a person such as this, one of the most admirable revolutionists of his generation, should have fallen so completely beholden to it? To understand what
Gorter might mean by poetry here -- and anyone familiar with the man can do no less than grant him the honour of taking him at his word -- it might help to adopt a distinction
proposed by Martin Buber in his text What is Man?
In virtue of his nature and his situation man has a threefold living
relation. He can bring his nature and situation to full reality in
his life if all his living relations become essential. And he can let
elements of his nature and situation remain in unreality by letting
only single living relations become essential, while considering and
treating the others as unessential. Man's threefold living relation
is, first, his relation to the world of things, second, his relation
to men – both to individuals and to the many – third, his
relation to the mystery of being – which is dimly apparent through
all this but infinitely transcends it – which the philosopher calls
the Absolute and the believer calls God, and which cannot in fact be
eliminated from the situation even by a man who rejects both
designations.
As a
revolutionary materialist, Gorter would certainly have rejected such
designations in the strongest terms. Nevertheless,
what he speaks of as poetry here can only be explained in terms of
the third mysterious relation enumerated above. Buber further
indicates that 'every essential living relation has reached its
completion and transfiguration, that to things in art, that to men in
love, that to the mystery...' in what? Before getting to that, some
precisions.
In contrast to Gorter, what I myself have defined as 'poetry' until now involves an altogether different dimension of activity, and might better be subsumed under the more general term 'art', since what I meant was an essential way of relating to things for
their own sake, by which the relation is completed and transfigured
to the point where a distinct subject no longer relates to a distinct
object; where human beings are reflected in a world they have
themselves created; where human beings and the material universe
interpenetrate to such an extent that a physical universe thoroughly transformed
by human labour becomes humanised and a thoroughly
cosmopolitan humanity becomes universal.
Of
course, this magnanimous intercourse with the entirety of the
physical world is the opposite of art as it is commonly defined. But
neither is love as we know it the completion and transfiguration of
an essential relation of person to person, where the other is related to
for his own sake rather than for what the self can get out of the
relationship, where interaction excludes all notions of transaction,
where – to use the words of Buber – 'the barriers of individual
being are in fact breached and a new phenomenon appears which can
appear only in this way: one life open to another – not steadily,
but so to speak attaining its extreme reality only from point to
point, yet also able to acquire a form in the continuity of life; the
other becomes present not merely in the imagination or feeling, but
in the depths of one's substance, so that one experiences the mystery
of the other being in the mystery of one's own'.
We
live in an era where art, like God, is dead. Art must itself undergo
a total transformation if the living relation of which it was once an
expression is ever to reach completion for the majority of people
living today, as is also the case with love. For Gorter, as for
myself, social revolution remains the only means by which this
transformation can be expected to be carried out. For Gorter,
however, social revolution was not an end in itself. Nor, clearly,
was love or art. Here is precisely where he seems most valuable to us
today. Who is the being that makes love, revolution and art? To what
end does this being suffer through these violent and painful forms of
relation and creation? What is man? It seems to me, if we are to
understand his 'testament' correctly, we would have to define as
'poetry' the completion and transfiguration of a person's living
relation to this mystery of not only the human being but of all
being, not only of the human condition but of all conditioned
existence, and all that undergirds and encircles this existence: the question of 'man's special place in the cosmos, his connexion with
destiny, his relation to the world of things, his understanding of
his fellow-men, his existence as a being that knows it must die, his
attitude in all the ordinary and extraordinary encounters with the
mystery with which his life is shot through, and so on'. Only in
relation to this question, fraught with destiny because it does not
concern a connexion established by man but one by which man is
established, and which, constituting human life and giving it its
meaning, is not merely mirrored in the subjectivity of a
philosophical view or an artistic feeling, but is bodily fulfilled in
the wholeness of human life and 'become flesh' – only as the
completion and transfiguration of man's relation to this question
does Gorter's conception of poetry (whose egoistic expansiveness has many affinities with his contemporaries Riding and Mayakovsky) make sense.
In
this he shares much with Buber, who–describing the devastating
destruction of his attachment to German and Jewish mysticism which,
from Meister Eckhart and Kabbala to Angelus Silenus and Hasidism,
had strongly influenced him in his youth–wrote
'Since my own thoughts over the last things reached, in the first
world war, a decisive turning-point, I have occasionally described my
standpoint to my friends as the “narrow ridge”. I wanted by this
to express that I did not rest on the broad upland of a system that
includes a series of sure statements about the absolute, but on a
narrow rocky ridge between the gulfs where there is no sureness of
expressible knowledge but the certainty of meeting what remains,
undisclosed. … Poetry is the soul's announcement that even when it
is alone with itself on the narrowest ridge it is thinking not of
itself but of the Being which is not itself, and that this Being
which is not itself is visiting it there, perplexing and blessing
it.'
It
seems clear that for Gorter, however, poetry is not merely the
announcement of an essential attitude, shorn of the
distortion-ridden lenses of philosophic theories and religious
doctrines, toward the terrifying mystery that confronts each person
when they are most together and most alone, but the attitude
itself as it emerges from
the practical totality of a person's life-activity, from the basic
movement – 'I term basic movement an essential action of man (it
may be understood as an 'inner” action, but it is not there unless
it is there to the very tension of the eyes' muscles and the very
action of the foot as it walks), round which an essential attitude is
built up' – that embraces all the essential relations that make up
a person's life. As Lew Welch put it:
The
poem is not the heart's cry
(Though
it seems to be if you have craft enough)
The
poem is made to carry the heart's cry
And
only to carry it. And the cry is always the
Same
… for all times and every place the
Same
perceptions met a hundred times, or once.
The
rest is exuberance.
The
force left over after dealing with
An
undemanding planet in a square time …
No
more or less mysterious than the juicing
Of
the glands. The need to skip a stone
Across
that pond. To yell among high mountains.
You
think you read for the heart's cry
But
you do not. You read because no stone
Ever
skips perfectly. Because that mountain
Always
lets you down. Because no matter
How
you yell the voice bounced back
Is
flat. The words are puny.
The
need for another world that always works right
Is
the heart's exuberance.
We
don't hide there. We spill over and
Make
it.
The
fundamental question for us, then, as was the case with our
ancestors, as will be the case for our children, has to do with
making love, life and revolution in the service of poetry. To respond cheerfully to the the heart's cry despite and because of the inescapable and desperate misery through daily acts of determined magnanimity. To eschew the petty evasions of artistic representation. To refuse merely to imagine it or announce it but really to make it. To make it in a jubilant and exultant expansion of love and rage. Not
only is another world possible – a new struggle song sung by a
strong people whose spirit overflows into a remade present – her
impromptu polyphony is already being hammered together under the
blare of traffic and bomb-blasts. On quiet days, if you listen
carefully, you can hear her stammer.
The uprising in Greece in the December of 2008 was just one among many actions that do the talking here among the ashes of a burnt-out civilisation, and as can be expected from one struggling to be born, its language was not quite articulate: 'a cry made out of collapsing glass and flames, transforming banks and malls into a raging cloud'. Those who took up this raucous singing by swinging themselves bodily through the inferno could not help but recognise in the destruction 'a necessary yet insufficient condition for the transforming of the insurrection into an attempt for social liberation'. While the limits of this and all the other promising eruptions of our era remain boundaries between the nothing that we are and the everything we desire to be, boundaries can also be bridges. As those who liberated the Athens University of Economics and Business pointed out at the time:
The uprising in Greece in the December of 2008 was just one among many actions that do the talking here among the ashes of a burnt-out civilisation, and as can be expected from one struggling to be born, its language was not quite articulate: 'a cry made out of collapsing glass and flames, transforming banks and malls into a raging cloud'. Those who took up this raucous singing by swinging themselves bodily through the inferno could not help but recognise in the destruction 'a necessary yet insufficient condition for the transforming of the insurrection into an attempt for social liberation'. While the limits of this and all the other promising eruptions of our era remain boundaries between the nothing that we are and the everything we desire to be, boundaries can also be bridges. As those who liberated the Athens University of Economics and Business pointed out at the time:
Everything begins and matures in violence – but nothing stops there.
But yet the state of things require
But yet the state of things require
These motions of unrest;
And these great spirits of high desire
Seem born to turn them best;
To purge the mischiefs that increase
And all good order mar,
For oft we see a wicked peace
To be well changed for war.*
WE DESTROY THE PRESENT BECAUSE WE COME FROM THE FUTURE
The street in which the author spent his first years. Maitland, Cape Town, 2014
Siddiq Khan
Chief Financial Officer
Committee for Corrupting the Morals of the Youth
Life Unrest Celebration Ministry
2014-2015
***
* Ulysses and the Siren, Samuel Daniel, 1605
Glossary:
* Gatvol - Afrikaans: 'fed-up'
* 'Larney, jou poes!': Afrikaans slang meaning 'Fuck off, boss!' Another translation might be 'You rich cunt!'
* Wilie-werkers - Afrikaans: slackers, literally 'won't workers', as in Alabama an ethnomusicologist scouring the county jails for work-songs was confronted by a convict who sang him an "aint workin song"
*TRC - Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a neo-apartheid institute headed by Desmond Tutu, who coined the phrase 'rainbow nation' and advocated the 'forgive and forget' school of 'democratic transition' that was pioneered by the Fascist regime in Spain during the 1970s to protect its members from legal prosecution once the dictatorship became incompatible with the needs of modern capitalism.
* 'Larney, jou poes!': Afrikaans slang meaning 'Fuck off, boss!' Another translation might be 'You rich cunt!'
* Wilie-werkers - Afrikaans: slackers, literally 'won't workers', as in Alabama an ethnomusicologist scouring the county jails for work-songs was confronted by a convict who sang him an "aint workin song"
*TRC - Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a neo-apartheid institute headed by Desmond Tutu, who coined the phrase 'rainbow nation' and advocated the 'forgive and forget' school of 'democratic transition' that was pioneered by the Fascist regime in Spain during the 1970s to protect its members from legal prosecution once the dictatorship became incompatible with the needs of modern capitalism.
