In this guest post, Glenn Farred deals with pain, memory and difficult encounters in the trenches. These things – which come with a distinct lack of closure, given how things have turned out in Mzansi – follow us now. However, poets and poetry can help us revisit and process those unspoken things. By GLEN FARRED.
It was a late afternoon, “cold and bright,” as Orwell might have said, when we gathered for one of those tense and fretful meetings. Kids, in their respective school uniforms, moved around awkwardly. In a classroom, we gathered to plan or, more precisely, receive instructions. At the head of the classroom, teacher-like, stood a young woman no older than 18, fierce and stern.
Some misadventure was being proposed and she was dutifully instructing us on our acceptance. People shuffled their feet under the desks. Some murmuring of discontent was hidden behind surreptitious coughing. People looked down, sideways, out the window – no one looked directly at each other – as if avoiding embarrassment.
I turned to the person behind me, who had arrived late, and sat throughout in silence. “Comrade, this is crazy…”I muttered at him.
The COSAS organiser, the chap behind me, already a grown man, who should, one hoped, have known better, growled back and hissed: “Why are you telling me?”
We exchanged those sounds between each other, the ones made are between the tongue, the teeth and the cheeks; indeed, through quiet stares and imperceptible facial tics our exchange took place:
You know this is crazy!/
Yes but it’s not my problem/
It’s your fucking job/
Still not my problem/
Arsehole/
Fuck you!”
The little man, the organiser, is actually quite a whimsical fellow. Short in stature, gruffness was projected to convey a gravitas otherwise lacking. You could take him seriously but only up to a point. He did however possess an enormous facility to mimic voices and accents; acting was his more natural calling, with such skill as to paint entire pictures with only his voice. Once seen in this light, you would know instantly that he had passed through that most cultured of youth organisations: LAGUNYACRO (Langa, Gugulethu, Nyanga, Crossroads Youth Organisation).
That afternoon there was no place for culture or art or laughter.
The voice of authority, at the head of the classroom, possessed an entirely different persona. This was a person whose complete emotional range seemed to be irritation, contempt, back to irritation. It was entirely natural and foretold that in the years to come she would spread her scorn from the employ of National Treasury, in what one can only imagine they believed to have been the “glory days” of GEAR! Can someone be born spiteful? Incontrovertibly, she was well suited for those roles.
The “line” was being given and had to be dutifully received.
Clearing of the throat… “Comrade Chair, can we consider...” In return the look, the evil eye and cold stare. The madness wasn’t entirely the fault of the messenger, although some people are naturally more inclined to be anti-democratic. When armed with an entire political, ideological and organisational framework in which to operate, they will indeed flourish, if that’s the correct expression.
Our tense exchange was brought to an abrupt halt by the sounds of police sirens screaming and screeching nearby, close but not yet at the scene of our gathering. Quickly the meeting dispersed, convinced of course that we were the target needing to escape. Whatever mayhem was being unleashed, we left, mercifully having to abandon, for now, the crazy little scheme.
But everything that day sat uncomfortably. Everything. It left a niggling feeling, an unpalatable residue on the tongue, irritating the back of the throat, an itch at the nape of the neck. Wrong. Off.
Making my way home, night having fallen, and in a heightened state of alertness, passing an alley, a voice spoke from the gloom. All the micro decisions pop up: Turn to the speaker? Ignore and move on? Run? Which way? Across the field? Back across the road? What are the distances? Which way is safer?
Turning to face the voice, which emerged from the shadows, it was recognisable - as was the fact that it should not be there.
The voice told: “Ashley Kriel** had just been murdered at the safe house; I was supposed to meet him there. The taxi I was taking broke down here and delayed me. It is not safe for me to go back to where I was. Take me to so-and-so.”
A month or so later that young man*** would be captured and tortured (to say brutally would be a tautology) and sentenced to 14 years on Robben Island. He would be one of the last to leave that island. He would lose some essential part of himself but struggle to retain so much, and perhaps in the end, having gained something in return.
Years later, although not so many as have passed now, deep into the night, we sat together on the field of a stadium that was named after him, in a little town at the edge of that province.
There was a kind of madness between the man on the field and the name on the stadium. We smoked and talked and laughed and took the piss out of the fountain of bitterness which life had made us drink.
Who would know these things? Who could say what could not be spoken or even understood? Who would forge the language – craft the words – for that which no language or words yet existed?
It begins simply. We will never know exactly how. It comes from the part of ourselves we know and do not wish to know. It is the voice of prophecy foretold; the words, sounds and images which summon the deed, the action, the bold. Before the beginning, it had already begun.
Words on paper. Images on canvas. Notes and voices in song.
Bob Marley said:
“This judgment can never be with water, No water can put out this fire!
It’s the Fire that’s burning down everything… Everywhere this fire is burning and melting their gold!”
James Baldwin said:
“God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, Fire next time!”
There can be no consciousness, no consciousness at all, without the poets, the writers, the singers, the musicians, the artists. They are not only our conscience but the awakening of our consciousness – they open in us the windows and doors to the inner workings of the mind and its imaginings.
The artist
spoke
And fire was made flesh
The fire came
The fire
burnt
Will we be
Next time?
Biko Lives!
by Glen Farred
*See Mongane Wally Serote's poem, When Lights Go Out. **Ashley Kriel died in 1987, murdered by the Apartheid regime in cold blood, aged 20. ***Nicklo Pedro (see pics below) was 20 years old when he was arrested in 1987.
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