A THOUSAND DEMONS RELEASED
My Ghost in the Bush of Lies by Paul Wessels (deep south publishing) (Some sort of Skin)
Reviewed by Anton R. Krueger, Phd student in playwriting and lecturer at the University of Pretoria
“I need some sort of skin. I’m all out of my own.”
South Africa’s hardcore poet of the outer edges of despair has produced an unstoppable, genre-defying assault on the senses. He has covered his soul in an explosion of texts, in a multitude of meanings. Paul Wessels has become legion, he has released a thousand demons.
Every word is precise, and each page has been honed down to the barest essentials, and yet the language still seems excessive. Sentences slip and spill off the page. Here are dreams, and pornographic letters; book reviews and e-mails from his mother. Here are orgies and theatre and trials in a court of law. Here are the dark themes of a white South African unconscious – the farm, the border. Here is war and sex and philosophy. We encounter new perspectives on de Sade, Baudrillard, JM Coetzee and Deleuze & Guattari. Nietzsche is everywhere. Occasionally the moon wrestles itself free of clouds and the author’s beautiful, cold poetry shines through.
Inside this dark dream we encounter a plethora of Pauls – from the Road to Damascus to Valery to Paulus Nomad to Wessels. It seems to be a kind of “factless autobiography” (to redefine Pessoa’s term), in that it reveals Wessels as a diffuse collection of warring texts, which makes a mockery of any desire for the coherence and unity of identity. We could not get any closer to Wessels, nor any further away. In permitting this savage explosion, these fractured revelations, the author has also obliterated himself. Now we know everything and nothing. He has become the purest conduit of the messages which flow through him.
July 29th, 2007 at 12:04 pm
Dear friends,
Some phrases from this review are translated in french by me. On my article about the same book.