Beyond Touch listed as a pick of the week for Pride Month

 

Arja Salafranca's poetry collection Beyond Touch, published in 2015 by Modjaji Books and Dye Hard Press, has been listed a pick of the week for Pride Month!

Congratulations, Arja!

Green Dragon 4

 

On a day of reminiscing, I was just thinking about Green Dragon, which was a journal of poetry and prose published by Dye Hard Press that ran to six issues, from 2002 until about 2010.

Green Dragon #4 had 90 pages, which contained poetry by Gakwi (Goodenough) Mashego, Michelle McGrane, Colleen Higgs, Philip Hammial, Allan Kolski Horwitz, Mxolisi Nyezwa, Amanda van Rooyen, Liesl Jobson, Les Merton, Mkhosazana Xaba, Kobus Moolman, Aryan Kaganof, Joop Bersee, Haidee Kruger, Gus Ferguson, Bernat Kruger, Tania van Schalkwyk, Alan Finlay and Richard Fox, as well as prose by Allan Kolski Horwitz, Arja Salafranca, Haidee Kruger, Silke Heiss and Gary Cummiskey.

The cover design was by Arja Salafranca.

Dye Hard Press celebrates 30 years of publishing anti-bestsellers!

Wow, I have just realised that Dye Hard Press is 30 years old this month! That's 30 years of publishing anti-bestsellers! While it would not be an overstatement to say that Dye Hard Press is on life support, we are stilll around!

Thank you to all those who have supported us throughout the years.

Below are two of our most successful titles:

Arja Salafranca reading at the Red Wheelbarrow

Check out Dye Hard Press author Arja Salafranca reading at The Red Wheelbarrow this Thursday night. Dye Hard Press has published two of Arja's collections -- The fire in which we burn and Beyond touch (with Modjaji Books). Arja also selected the stories for the much-acclaimed short fiction anthology The Edge of Things.

A bootleg translation of Sky Dreaming

It seems a bootleg Bengali translation of my 2011 chapbook Sky Dreaming has appeared in India. The cover photograph is by Arja Salafranca.  I am honoured by the translation, but just wish I had known about it and some acknowledgements had been made. Arja also did not know that her photograph had been used.

Sky Dreaming was originally published by Graffiti Kolkata.

Interview with Gary Cummiskey in Bengali literary journal Boier Duniya (The Book World)

An interview with Gary Cummiskey in the Kolkata-based Bengali literary journal Boier Duniya (The Book World) by poet and publisher Subhankar Das. Subhankar is currently publishing my latest collection of poetry, Somewhere else.

An English translation of the interview is below:

When did you start writing poetry?

I was about fourteen when I started. One day in school our English teacher set us an exercise. He played the Peter Green-era Fleetwood Mac track 'Albatross' and told us to listen carefully. Then he told us to write a poem about an albatross for homework. I think I was the only kid in the class who liked the idea! That night I wrote a poem about a dying albatross and realised I wanted to write more poems … and so it started.

 

Tell us about your magazine Green Dragon.

Green Dragon was a literary journal that I published from 2002 to 2009. It ran to six issues and featured both poetry and prose, as well as interviews and reviews. The first two issues were staple bound, while the others were perfect bound. I printed about 300 copies of each issue. I published mainly South African writers but also some overseas ones, mainly from the US, but also from the Netherlands and the UK. The seventh issue was scheduled to be a short-fiction special, with material selected by South African writer and poet Arja Salafranca. But the amount of material we received was so big that it turned out to be a huge anthology in its own right, called The Edge of Things, which appeared in 2011 and was highly acclaimed. Green Dragon did not continue after that. I got tired of it, it was a huge amount of work.

 

Your favourite poets and how do they move you?

I have so many favourite poets and my preferences change. But my main influences have been the US beat poets and the modern French poets. Among the US beats my favourites are Gregory Corso and Bob Kaufman, as well as more borderline beats such as Marty Matz and Philip Lamantia. Among the French, Antonin Artaud, Jacques Prévert, Joyce Mansour and Claude Pélieu. Also the Spanish-language modernists, such as Neruda, Vallejo and Lorca. Among South African poets definitely Wopko Jensma, Sinclair Beiles and Seitlhamo Motsapi. A feature that that they all share is a willingness to experiment with language, to use language in new ways, often in a subversive manner. I am both intrigued and inspired by poetry that aims to challenge the norms in which language is presented or used.

You know about the Hungryalist writer movement here in the 60s, you were a friend of Pradip Choudhury. Do you think there is a common theme of independence or something worth mentioning about their work? Falguni Roy was also an important poet and Sharmy made a short film Eebang Falguni aka The lost lines of a beauty monster, which you have seen.

From the few Hungryalist writers whom I have read, there are certainly common voices of independence, of breaking away from conventional literary forms, a willingness to experiment, to take risks. There is definitely a countercultural stance. I have often seen the Hungryalists referred to as ‘the hungry generation’, which sounds similar to ‘the beat generation’. I don’t know where that phrase originated from, and while, yes, the Hungryalists and the beats shared a lot of common concerns and there was interaction between them – eg Ginsberg in India, and Ferlinghetti publishing some of the writers in the City Lights Journal, plus corresponding with Malay Roy Choudhury – the scenes were quite different, and in no way do I see the Hungryalists as ‘India’s version of the beats’ – the Hungryalists had emerged quite independently of the beats.

Falguni Roy is an interesting poet and I would really love to read more of his work – has there been a complete volume published in India? A tragic figure, publishing one collection in his lifetime and dying of drug abuse, and certainly influenced by the Hungryalists.

I sent you a book by Subimal Misra who was an antiestablishment exponent here, any comments. 

I haven’t read The Golden Gandhi Statue from America for a while, but I have it set aside for a reread. That book had a big influence on me as it encouraged me to continue writing short fiction, short fiction that didn’t have to follow conventional lines, or even have a narrative in the traditional sense. I liked what Misra said about his work not appearing in bookstores because bookstores sold products called books. That resonated with me deeply, as independent voices rarely find themselves stocked in bookstores here in SA. And I love that Misra dedicated the book to Jean-Luc Godard, whom, Misra says, taught him language.

Sky Dreaming, a chapbook of poems by you was published by Graffiti Arts Collective in 2011. I still remember Pravasan [Pillay] handing over the cover design of this book to me in Sweden in the venue where I was doing my poetry reading. Mouni Mondal did a  small chapbook translating a few poems from this book in Bengali and she did a good job.  Now this year we will be doing another poetry chap of yours, Somewhere else. Tell us about this new project and how you usually compose a poem?

Somewhere else is a collection of 26 poems, composed over the past four or five years. Some of them were inspired by a trip I took to Turkey in 2019. As usual with me, some of them are prose poems. And most of them quite surreal. Poems come to me – usually when I least expect it, not when I am thinking of writing. I can’t force poems out. I can’t sit down and decide to write a poem. The poem comes or it doesn’t. And while the initial inspiration may see the poem written down spontaneously, I do spend a lot of time on revision. I believe in craft in poetry.

I admire that work of yours on Sinclair Beiles, what a book. His books of poems are hard to find here. I wish I had a few so that I can translate his poems in Bengali. A beat poet who never got any recognition. What was the reason behind that?

There are a few reasons behind Beiles’s lack of recognition as a poet. First, from a South African literary perspective, he spent much of life outside the country. He wasn’t an active participant in the local literary scene until about the 1980s, but by his own admittance he didn’t want to fit in, anyway. Most of his publications were very small, limited editions – one chapbook in the 1970s was only 20 copies – another collection, in the 1990s, was only four copies. This has made access to his work very difficult. In fact, after the publication of the first edition of Who was Sinclair Beiles? in 2009, I found a chapbook of his I had not been previously aware of. Even the University of South Africa, which has most of his titles, neither had it nor had heard of it.

How is the independent writers' scene in SA? Here I count on the young guns. 

The independent writing scene is still around, and always will be, hopefully. South Africa has always had independent voices. One of the greatest threats to independent voices, in South Africa and elsewhere, is self-censorship: giving in and producing what is politically, culturally or commercially acceptable – and marketable. The temptation to produce what will generate applause and accolades – market success. The main challenge for independent writers, however, is the lack of publishing outlets and the ability to find readers. We need more small, independent presses in South Africa that publish quality, innovative work. We could do with more journals, and certainly more online journals.

Poet at work

 Photo: Arja Salafranca

Panel discussion on independent publishing at the African Women Writers Symposium

On Saturday 14 October I participated in a panel discussion on independent publishing at the African Women Writers Symposium in Newtown, Johannesburg. My fellow panelists were Flo Wellington and Dr Nkateko Masinga, and the faciltator was Shafinaaz Hassim.

Also at the symposium, Dye Hard Press author Arja Salafranca gave a workshop on the poetry and song of Leonard Cohen, with musician Siya Makuzani.

Dye Hard Press author Arja Salafranca presents workshop

 

Arja Salafranca, author of The fire in which we burn and Beyond touch, both published by Dye Hard Press, will present a workshop on the poetry and music of Leonard Cohen, together with musician and composer Siya Makuzeni, at the Market Photo Workshop on Saturday 14 October, as part of the African Women Writers Symposium.

Pros and cons of self-publishing: should you do it? by Arja Salafranca

So you’ve finally written your novel and you want to get it published. You’ve heard of the tremendous success of self-published authors, such as Colleen Hoover.  Now you’re wondering if that’s the way to go. Is it? Read more here.

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.

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

                                                           

The wanderer at sunset

 Photo of Gary Cummiskey by Arja Salafranca

Pravasan Pillay's Chatsworth gets mention in review

Pravasan Pillay's Chatsworth gets a nice wee mention in Arja Salafranca's Media24 review of Terry-Ann Adams's debut short story collection White Chalk.

(Note: There is a paywall for the review.)

A review of Chatsworth, by Arja Salafranca

Chatsworth, the township, links the stories in this slim but powerful debut collection of short stories by Pravasan Pillay, who comes from the Durban-based area. This volume collects 11 short stories that highlight a range of characters from all age groups. Here’s a kaleidoscope view of people living, loving, being punished, growing, ageing and moving through the experiences we all do. Read more.

Outside the cave entered into the GBAS Book Cover Design Awards

 

Dye Hard Press has entered Outside the cave into the GBAS Book Cover Design Awards - the first time South Africa has had such awards!

Outside the cave was designed and laid out by Arja Salafranca.

Finalists will be announced on 15 November, and the winner on 1 December! I am keeping my fingers crossed!

Four copies of Green Dragon #5 for sale

 

This weekend I unearthed FOUR copies of my literary journal Green Dragon #5, dating back to 2007!

The issue contains poetry and prose by y Arja Salafranca, Kelwyn Sole, Goodenough (Gakwi) Mashego, Kobus Moolman, Colleen Higgs, Motjidibane Bapela, Kaye Axon, Karen Press, Dawn Garisch, Lauri Kubuitsile, Haidee Kruger, Joop Bersee, Tania van Schalkwyk, Philip Hammial, Hazel Frankel, Abbey Khambule, David wa Maahlamela, Allan Kolski Horwitz, Richard Fox, Amanda van Rooyen, Gary Cummiskey and Liesl Jobson.

96 pages.

You can buy a copy from me for R160, including courier to your door. Send an email to dyehardpress@iafrica..com.

Remembering Electric Juice

 

Electric Juice, published by Dye Hard Press in 2000, contained work by, among others, the late Gus Ferguson, who passed on last month.

The Odd Magazine #20 is out!

Great news - a stunning issue of The Odd Magazine has landed in cyberspace!

Do have a wonderful time going through this stellar issue, curated in a time when the world needs to fight the odds, more than ever before:

Odd Poetry: Adrian Manning, Arja Salafranca, Brian Rihlmann and Wayn F.Burke

Odd Shorts: Charlei Swailes, Gary Cummiskey, Kari Gillespie, Robert Keith and Yrik-Max Valentonis

Odd Art: Collaborations: Don Yorty-Md Akram, Jan Theuninck-Herman Van Rompuy, Margarita Serafimova-Milen Neykov , Neeti Banerji (Text and Art)

Odd Video: ‘Round Around’ – a film by Yogi Rajput

Odd Interview of Benoit Delaune by Gary Cummiskey (in English and French)