Sky dreaming: a photomontage by Paul Warren

 

A photomontage by British artist Paul Warren, inspired by the title of my poetry collection Sky Dreaming, published by Graffiti Kolkata in 2012.

Poetry reading at Spilt Milk, Melville

From left: Arja Salafranca, Gary Cummiskey, Shorty the Melville Poet, Karen Lazar.

Arja Salafranca

Shorty the Melville Poet

Poetry evening at Spilt Milk, Melville, 21 February, 2023. Dark, romantic setting courtesy of Eskom.

Review of The Edge of Things, by Sope Maithufi

 

Arja Salafranca’s two-page “Introduction” to her collection of short stories, The edge of things, extols the virtues of the short story genre and delights in the energy recently injected into the publishing of this art. Written in the form of an editorial, this opening naturally also takes the reader on a rather hurried tour of the many related themes contained in the stories. My review, by contrast, focuses on a cumulative impression that the stories make in relation to their challenging South African settings.

Her book is a helix of twenty-four short stories that elaborate on what it means to expand moral compass in the South Africa that is mired in prejudice and coercive discourses. This is a theme that sets the book apart from some of the South African collections of poetry and short stories such as The heart in exile and Transitions. These respond to the dawn of non-racial democracy by valorizing the quotidian. The short fiction in Salafranca’s book “gathers” the concept of the everyday into a coil of localities, each vibrant with “governmentality”. Reading them resembles setting a whorl in motion and watching a swell and quell of portraits of power. Some, fashioned by the dominant social narratives of apartheid such as race and nation, appear to jostle for prominence with those hatched in liminal spaces between whiteness and blackness, and between the semiotic and the symbolic. Feminist in shape, these images appear in manifestations that reveal complexities within possibly the very basis of the dawn of nonracial democracy: the existential “being for the other”. As a result, some of these stories deploy narrative perspectives that deftly cross over ontological boundaries with ease.

The first story, “Bounce” by Jayne Bauling, sets the tone. It is a striking reminder of a famous story, Jack Cope’s “Power”. Central to this story is a young boy who successfully implores his parents to take pity on a bird that is apparently trapped in an Eskom electric power line. The narrator’s documentation of this character’s pleading on the bird’s behalf incidentally spells out his maturation in terms of liberal human ideals. Integral to this growth appears to be a valorization and privileging of nature above industrialization. Bauling’s “Bounce”, by contrast, is subtly neither interested in certainties nor in the kind of fruition that is linear. This story considers an elderly woman’s concern about the fate of a bird caught in the mouth of a dog. The story poses further questions about the moralities of sympathy and intervention that have possibly yet to be elaborated upon in ecocritical perspectives. For, as a human being standing outside of and, paradoxically, within the world of animals where the norm is “survival of the fittest”, how much swathe of human ethics is to be worn or shed in “being for the animal other”?

Arja Salafranca’s “The iron lung” further expands on the concern with how the human imagination can gel with everyday life. As it were, this story subtly substitutes the notion of a desperate bird with that of the narrator’s indigent mother and father, afflicted by polio and cancer, respectively. Also reminiscent of “Bounce”, the focus falls primarily on an able-bodied subject, Rosemarie, especially on her alleged magnanimity towards her parents. Throughout the story, the narrative crisscrosses from her to her mother who is described as being “in an iron lung” for the “last thirty-seven years” (19). Both “voices” unwittingly corroborate each other, revealing that her empathy for her parents is severely undermined by her intense unhappiness in having to nurse them. This displeasure is apparent when she regrets that her taking care of her parents makes her forfeit her basic right to have relationships such as in marriage or having a boyfriend.

However, if, as also demonstrated in Magdalena Karina’s “The basket”, the ethics of expecting compassion are gendered and patronizing, then there is a need to argue for feminisms that are mobile and tactical. The storyline, for instance, introduces the challenges. Elizabeth’s husband, Rainer, has just passed on after his car had collided with another driven by a woman whose name is not disclosed. The latter, comatose (77), is confined in a hospital. Prior to his death, he was opposed to Elizabeth seeking employment (69) and appears not to have been ardent when it came to love-making. This seems borne out in the narrative’s flashback to one incident in which Elizabeth poignantly reflects that “it had been years since [her husband had] tried to give her any particular pleasure” (67). When the story concludes, she delivers a bouquet of flowers to the woman at the hospital. This gesture appears to be paradoxical, because it signals her sympathy for her, but may also hint at the attempt to repress anger, perhaps as the passed-out woman is directly implicated in the car accident that claimed Rainer.

Ostensibly, by virtue of (indirectly) knowing the extent to which apartheid utilized them in order to mount a gendered racial supremacy, white women in the post-apartheid of this collection of stories endeavour to make up for the humiliation suffered by black men. In the story, “Cordelia, age 26”, the eponymous heroine artist suffers from manic depression, because she had learnt that clients did not like her graphic art, as they were interested in the black-authored ones. Subsequently, she hits the bottle and is ultimately jilted by her late 40s black boyfriend, Desmond, who is described as having never imagined white women as forbidden fruits to be plucked. Through this simple plot, the story may be interpreted as a post-colonial response to Frantz Fanon’s (1967, 41–82) notorious eliding of the white woman in “The woman of color and the white man” and in “The man of color and the white woman”. In the midst of one of her heated arguments with Desmond, the reader hears her “begging Desmond to be black”: “You don’t consider me a true African artist just because I’m white”, “Happy to lick the white pussy – but too embarrassed to introduce her to your black mama” (173). When this story concludes, Cordelia is taught by her only surviving relative, her white grandmother, to appreciate the endurance of and to emulate working-class black women. But one chore surfaces prominently: slaughtering fowl humanely REVIEWS Downloaded by [Brought to you by Unisa Library] at 04:13 22 August 2014 132 and ethically. Presumably, the sensitivities involved in this task, as they also resonate in “Bounce”, may be apparent in another white female protagonist, that of Hans Pienaar’s “Telephoning the enemy”, who reflects on how, not being “officially” subscribed with the African National Congress, apartheid tragically fails to conceive of the possibility of a full-scale war.

Also worth mentioning in this category of short stories that may be considered dramatic elaborations on the theme of “being for the other” are Angelina Sithebe’s “Sepia” and Jeanne Aromnik’s “Losses and gains”. In the first, the principal characters are a 45-yearold (184) black woman who is apparently haunted by “amadlozi” and her “sixty-five” (187) year-old white husband who is terminal with cancer. He reveals the glue that connects them together through mythopoeia after being initially opposed to her consulting “i’Sangoma”: “When we met your terror reflected mine like a mirror … . I believe we met through a connective energy in the dimension of the terminally petrified” (195).

By contrast, it seems that Aromnik’s “Losses and gains” will not countenance that cross-racial romance happens only under psychologically problematic contexts as, perhaps, the white male is indisputably the symbol of white colonial power. This is why central to this story is an explicit account of the alleged epistemic violence that informs J.M. Coetzee’s portrayal of women in Disgrace. In order to find this critique persuasive, however, the reader needs to agree to be hailed into “being for black women”. The power of this ideology is enunciated by the black heroine’s bewilderment by and annoyance at Coetzee’s apparently condescending approach towards the black women that his hero takes sexual advantage of.

It seems, therefore, that one may chart a leitmotif of gradual and systematic disavowal of the institution of marriage especially when, pertinent to it, it is the heterosexuality that these stories portray as misogynistic or that leads to psychological predicaments. Perhaps the story that cogently introduces this decadence is Gillian Schutte’s aptly-titled “Doubt” wherein the heroine is implicitly perturbed that “marriage … resulted in only knowing your intimate self through the reflection of one other person [or husband]” (59). This is because, in addition to his philandering, she poignantly discovers that the extra-marital affair that she begins out of frustration and loneliness is a mere farce that makes her project “the archetype” of a faithful husband (59) onto her boyfriend.

From this disillusionment with the heteronormative and racist discourses, it appears that, as dramatized in Bernard Levinson’s “Tokai”, difference is possible via a “radical wing of the feminist movement … the lesbian wing” (Eric Njeng 2007: 22). The plot of this story resonates with the reclamation of what Njeng (2007: 26) calls the “first impulse”, that is, the “primary relation” that all human beings have with their mothers and, for lesbians, with “motherhood” (2007: 27). Told mostly from the perspective of a midwife after she had assisted a woman of possibly black/Khoi descent give birth, the narrative presents a graphic account of how the former began a “secret dialogue between [her] hand and the womb” (126) as it engaged “rhythmic pulsations, discharging the afterbirth and passing the movement onto her till she “entered the pendulum beat, hearing [her] body” (126). It is interesting to note that this is a “dance” that excludes the child’s father who, through the narrator’s perspective, is part and parcel of the social symbolic that immediately disposes of the “afterbirth”. In possibly classic African ritual terms, the father’s ostensible burying of the placenta in the soil spiritually reconnects the child with the ancestors and pleads with them to intercede on its behalf.

The title story, Jenna Mervis’s “The edge of things”, Jennifer Lean’s “The end”, Beatrice Lamwaka’s “Trophy”, and Dan Wylie’s “Solitude” also explore liminality by focusing on the productive degrees to which those who are marginalized by the violence of the dominant social hegemonies re-insert themselves via tactical choices and strategies. However, these stories do not contain the intense drama of maturation that involves sexuality, emotions and rationality in comparable ways as Levinson’s “Tokai”. By contrast, Kaganof Aryan’s “Same difference”, the story that appears to associate male homosexuality with the Bohemian, is a puzzling oddity that seems to have been included in the collection merely for the sake of enunciating difference in radical terms. The dialogues in this story attest to people who have retreated from “Life” (112), who associate it with the femininity that they describe as sexually violent and who also reflect on themselves using the very rhetoric of the homophobic: “we’ve been fucked upside down and sideways by Miss Life. Neither of us was smart enough to surrender. We just taking it up the ass. Two assholes” (112).

Works cited

Cope, Jack. 1979. Power. In: G.E. de Villiers (ed.), Close to the sun: stories from Southern Africa. Johannesburg: Macmillan South Africa.

 De Kock, Leon & Ian Tromp (eds). 1996. The heart in exile: South African poetry in English, 1990–1995. London: Penguin Books.

Fanon, Frantz. [1952] 1967. Black skin white masks. NY: Grove Press, Inc. MacKenzie, Craig (ed.), 1999.

Transitions: half a century of South African short stories. Cape Town: Francolin.

Njeng, Sipyinyu Eric. 2007. Lesbian poetics and the poetry of Audre Lorde. English academy review 24(1): 23–36.

***********************************************

Dye Hard Press: South African Short Fiction, selected by Arja Salafranca, was published by Dye Hard Press in 2011. 

This review by Sope Maitufi was published in Scutiny 2: Issues in English Studies in Southern Africa, in October 2012.

Interview with British artist Paul Warren in The Odd Magazine (Oddity 25)

 

Paul Warren is an artist and illustrator with an interest in surrealism and abstract art. He works in a variety of different mediums, including collage. Paul's work has been published by Dumpster Fire Press, The Odd Magazine and Word Vomit Zine.  He has online galleries at Deviant Art and Instagram. He lives in Daventry, England.

You live in the town of Daventry, Northamptonshire, in England. What is the art scene like in England these days? What is the support for visual art? Is there a fair bit of regionalism?

I think the art scene in England is pretty staid these days. It only exist in most people’s lives when Banksy sprays something on a wall somewhere.  All of the big exhibitions are London-based, with a corporate sponsor. From time to time something interesting will pop up in an independent gallery away from the capital. I usually find out about these after the event. National media focus only on the big exhibitions: Monet or Hockney, for example. Living here these things easily pass you by! So yes, I think there is some regionalism. Read more. 

The Odd Magazine: Oddity 25 is out!

This is the silver anniversary issue of The Odd Magazine, based in Kolkata, India. 

It features poetry by Emmanuel G G Yamba, Jay Passer, Jim Landwehr, Kathleen Hellen, Matthew Friday, Scott C Kaestner and Susan Kotler.

There is also short fiction by Jacob Rousseau, Jamie Brown, Kenneth Pobo, Louella Lester, Paul Beckman and Stephen Nelson.

Art contributions are from Belinda Subraman, Michael Noonan and Serge Luigetti.

And last but not least, an interview with British artist Paul Warren by Gary Cummiskey.

Check out Oddity 25 here!

More memories from the launch of New Coin December 2016

Some more photos from the launch of the December 2016 issue of New Coin, at David Krut Bookstore in Rosebank, Johannesburg, February 2017. That was the last issue of New Coin to be edited by me, before handing over the reins to Dashen Naicker.

 

Arja Salafranca

                                                           

Medzani Musandiwa

                                                         

                        

Saaleha Idress Bamjee

Raphael D'Abdon

                                                                    

                  

Linda Lindrish Ndlovu

                                                         

Dashen Naicker

                                                                   

Lionel Murcott

                                                        

Gerard Rudolf

Myesha Jenkins

                                                      

Kwenzakile Ntlati

                                                           

Review of Bloodred Dragonflies, Jim Pascual Agustin: published in Stanzas 27

Review of Bloodred Dragonflies, Jim Pascual Agustin, deep south, 2022

Review by Gary Cummiskey, published in Stanzas 27

 

A man arrives in South Africa in 1994. He is from the Philippines, an archipelago of islands with a history of colonial oppression and the object of a tug-of-war between Spain and the US a hundred years ago. And having shaken of the colonial yoke, the islands then became subjected to a series of dictatorships and rampant corruption. It’s something that sounds somewhat familiar.

This is no doubt why Jim Pascual Agustin’s latest poetry collection – his first to be published in South Africa – resonates within the contemporary South African context, since both the subjects and imagery remind us of our own history and more recent tribulations.

The first poems in this collection, such as ‘After the First Monsoon Rain’, ‘The Crabs’ and ‘Naartjie’ deal with childhood, but even within this cocoon of innocence the outside world of pain, fear and violence occasionally intrudes, such as in ‘You Had to Leave’, which starts: ‘Nightmares no longer scare you / like they used to’, or more strikingly in ‘Seeing in the Dark’, in which the child is given the following prophecy:

you will leave your country

stare loneliness in the eye

bury the dead among the living …

Indeed, it is only a few poems later that violence and oppression burst into the poet’s consciousness, and the past world of innocence is crushed like his family’s house in ‘Dragonflies’:        

                                       

The government didn’t just tear down

its foundations. They buried it

under twenty feet of soil.

 

And in ‘Face in the Tar’ the children of the dictator are showered with lavish gifts while ordinary citizens go without, and anyone who dares speak out will ‘disappear from their homes and be found / floating down a river …’ But life still continues under such conditions, and the poet even undergoes military conscription, wearing: 

Hand-me-down boots

deep jungle green

a size too big, reeking of memories

of someone else’s feet.

 (‘Citizens Military Training’)

Not surprisingly, there is also the rousing voice of resistance, as in ‘Defiance’ or ‘We Will Not Allow The Dead To Be Silenced’:

 Though the dead may be left

unclaimed in morgues

or dumped on the side of the road,

their faces bound with packaged tape,

 

they will never be silenced … 

But Agustin does not focus solely on contrasting worlds of innocence and (political) experience ‒ to do might risk becoming formulaic, predictable and one dimensional. In the second part of the collection there are poems more intimate in tone, with memories of his father, such as ‘Rats’ and ‘My  Father, Leaving’ , or meditations on aging and mortality, such as ‘Angels of the Old Cemetery’ or the somewhat alarming ‘What I’ve Always Been’:

someone who loses and gains

all the time. Not seeming to care

 

or able to see an oncoming train

on its side, the ground grating

against its metal skin, screams

twisting on the tracks …

 

The collection consists of both new and selected poems – some written in English and others translated from the Filipino ‒ though with the exception of some giveaway poems, such as ‘Sunday, Rondebosch’ and ‘The Undiminished’, it is not clear which are older poems, perhaps written before his arrival in South Africa, and those written since living here. ‘The Undiminished’, for example, opens with a description of a clearly recognisable South African suburban peak-hour rush to work: 

                                …. a dash to join

others who wait in line

 

for a taxi packed beyond capacity.

Always, the unavoidable

pressing of skin against skin, sharing

the scent of familiar strangers.

 

An eternity to get to work …

Considering Bloodred Dragonflies is a selected volume, it is a pity there is not a greater number of poems – I certainly wanted to read more.

Coming soon: Aiyo! by Pravasan Pillay

Three tales of bizarre love by Pravasan Pillay, author of Chatsworth.

Your latest trick

 

Lionel Murcott reading in February 2017

The late Lionel Murcott reading at the launch of the December 2016 issue of New Coin  at David Krut Bookstore in February 2017. Lionel's work was published in a few issues of Green Dragon, published by Dye Hard Press, as well as in New Coin, which I edited from 2014 to 2016.

Entertain me as a child

 

Aiyo! Why do these things happen to me?

Aiyo!, a chapbook of three tales of terror by Pravasan Pillay, is soon to be published by Dye Hard Press! 48 pages.

Watch this space  ..

What is surrealist poetry? An introductory talk by Gary Cummiskey

The following is the English version of an introductory talk I gave at a surrealist poetry event I participated in the Dai Art Gallery, Zamalek, in Cairo, on 14 December, 2022. The event was hosted by Mohsen L Belasy and Ghadah Kamal Ahmed.

An Arabic translation of the talk appears in Sulfur 'Surrealist Jungle'.

What is surrealist poetry?

It was about a month ago that Mohsen asked me to give a talk for this evening on ‘What is surrealist poetry?’ My reply at the time was that this was an almost impossible question to answer comprehensively, and that I was not sure if I could answer it. Now it is a month later, and I still do not have a comprehensive answer. And besides, I am suspicious of answers, and much prefer questions.

What is surrealist poetry? Well, among the French-language poets, we may have read Breton, Éluard, Péret and the great post-Second World War poet Joyce Mansour, who was Egyptian. 

Joyce Mansour

When we read their work we should get an idea of what constitutes surrealist poetry. And among the English poets, if we read the early work of David Gascoyne or Philip O’Connor, or that of Roger Roughton or Roland Penrose, we may get an idea of what constitutes surrealist poetry to the English. And then in the US, there is the work of the great Philip Lamantia – ‘the voice that rises once in a hundred years’ – as Breton said about him, or the work of the contemporary surrealist poet Will Alexander, and also the late Ronnie Burk. Unfortunately I cannot speak about surrealist poetry in Latin America, other European countries such as Spain, Portugal or Romania, or even countries such as Egypt, because I am not knowledgeable enough.

Philip Lamantia

But to get back to the question. For me, a problem with trying to explain something, to define it, is to risk limiting and restricting it – and that is the exact opposite of what surrealism has always been about.  If we say, for example, as is usually said, that surrealist poetry is characterised by dream imagery, then we are saying that surrealist poetry should contain dream imagery.  But is that true? And if we say that surrealist poetry is the result of automatic writing, then we are saying that surrealist poetry must have been written quickly and without conscious intervention or revision. But we know that is not true – Breton himself rejected automatic writing as far back as 1930. And neither Aragon, Char, nor Éluard – the great poets of surrealism –  ever practised automatic writing.

For myself, as much as I admire Breton, Éluard and Péret among the French-language surrealist poets, I much prefer the work of the more borderline or renegade surrealists – poets such as Artaud, Prévert, and some of the members of Le Grand Jeu, such as René Daumal and Roger Gilbert-Lecomte. None of these poets produced poetry that can be immediately recognised or labelled as surrealist. That is because their poems do not have the outward characteristics of what is considered surrealist poetry.

René Daumal

And in the post-Second World War period, moving into the 1950s and 1960s, I admire the work of the PANic movement – Arrabal, Jodorowsky, and Topor. There is the story of how Jodorowsky travelled from Chile to France determined to rescue surrealism, and when he finally met Breton, he was dismayed to find that the great leader of surrealism did not like rock music (actually Breton did not like any music!), science fiction, or comics. And so Jodo decided to form PANic.

 And among the American poets, much as I admire Lamantia, I also have tremendous admiration for the work of Bob Kaufman and Marty Matz, who are more usually associated with the beats than with surrealism. Then there is the psychedelic work of the poet, photographer, and film maker Ira Cohen, who would rigorously shake off any label, whether  ‘surrealist’ or ‘beat’.

Bob Kaufman

Ira Cohen

And then what do we make of the poetry of the US surrealist Ted Joans, who declared ‘Jazz is my religion, and surrealism my point of view’? As much as many of his poems are dedicated to surrealists, such as Joyce Mansour, with whom he collaborated, or reference surrealism or surrealists – a fairly famous one is about Breton – they generally do not have the characteristics of what we would expect from ‘surrealist poetry’. They are closer to jazz poetry, and indeed, Joans’s poetry seems more influenced by jazz than by surrealism. He is as frequently referred to as a jazz poet as he is referred to as a surrealist poet. He is seen by some as one of the fathers of spoken-word poetry. Yet Breton called him ‘the only authentic African-American surrealist of the hippie generation in America’.

 I have also been asked about surrealism in South Africa. Well, there is not much happening with regard to surrealism in South Africa, and certainly not amongst poets. One notable figure, however, was Sinclair Beiles, about whom I compiled a book, titled Who was Sinclair Beiles? Sinclair is better known for being a collaborator on the book of cut-ups called Minutes to Go, with William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, and Gregory Corso. He also helped with the editing and publication of Burroughs’s Naked Lunch. But he was also tremendously influenced by dada and surrealism, and while he was in Paris, in the 1950s, he met Breton and Tzara. He also later became very close friends with the Greek surrealist Nanos Valaoritis, who edited Sinclair’s selected poems, titled A South African Abroad. There is a long poem of Sinclair’s called Illuminations in White Tobacco Smoke, which is based on a poem by Tzara and dedicated to Artaud. In a documentary in the mid-1990s, Sinclair dismissed much South African poetry as ‘social realism’ and said he regarded his own work as surrealist. 

Sinclair Beiles

Incidentally, Sinclair once gave a poetry reading here in Egypt, at a Grateful Dead concert, when they performed at the pyramids in Giza in 1978.

 Well, I realise this talk has been rather meandering and so I want to return to the beginning, to the question ‘What is surrealist poetry’? Because, as I have already said,  I am aware of the dangers of definition, and I am even more aware of the danger of confusing outward characteristics with substance. In my opinion there is much contemporary, or near-contemporary, surrealist poetry that too often reads like a translation from the 1920s French. Such surrealist poetry is hardly innovative, but rather imitative, and if you want to bring a political slant into it, you could say that such poetry is more reactionary than revolutionary. It is such poetry that tucks surrealism safely away in museums and on to the walls of corporate boardrooms. It also reminds me of something that Sinclair Beiles wrote, that in its quest for unusual images, much (not all) surrealist poetry had become ‘mannered’, producing ‘beautiful seashells devoid of life’.

Ted Joans

In closing, I would like the quote the words of Ted Joans – words he uttered when I met him in Johannesburg in early 1994. Those words were: ‘The fantasy fades, but the surrealism remains’. He did not explain what he meant by that, but for me it is a matter of pointing out that the outward characteristics of ‘typical’ surrealist poems  – with images of oranges eating horses and eyebrows climbing over bannisters  (and those are my images, by the way, so you can’t use them!) –– will perhaps not fade as such, but become, in the words of Sinclair, ‘beautiful seashells devoid of life’. But the substance of surrealist poetry –– the spirit of surrealism – will remain.

 

 

 

 

 

A Dye Hard Interview: Armando Fragale: Completely autonomous

Armando Fragale is a multifaceted artist born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1985. He is a painter, illustrator, filmmaker, actor, musician, writer, poet, designer, and producer who works in various mediums. He developed the artistic technique called Drivage and founded the art movement Openism. He has shown his work all over the world and has also collaborated with a wide array of artists in various art forms. Notable exhibitions he has been involved in have been Cosmic Unity: Occult Art and Music in Latin America in New York, International Surrealism Exhibition in Cairo/Saint-Cirq-Lapopie and The Cabinet of the Solar Plexus: The Liminal and the Marvellous, in Dublin. He also runs a record label Wraith Productions, which he started in 2005. 

DH: I believe you were already drawing when you were a child. Do you remember when you first started? Have you had any formal art training? 

 AF: It all came about so early on as a child, and it all started with drawing from the moment I picked up a pencil. I’ve had formal art training at university, but I chose my own path in all of this with what I do, so I consider myself a self-taught artist. Read more. 

A wave from the sun

 

Five poems and three drawings by Gary Cummiskey at Sulfur

 You can read five new poems by Gary Cummiskey, and as well as view three of his drawings, here. Thank you, Mohsen El Belasy and Ghadah Kamal Ahmed of the Egyptian and North African Surrealist Group.