kagablog

All the good people
let you down
eventually
All the
proud
people
on their
knees eventually
All the dead people
risen up eventually

“A widespread taste for pornography means that nature is alerting us to some threat of extinction.”
- JG Ballard

The Devil was dressed in black velvet
When he came to fetch my immortal
soul. He bound me in nylon cords,
sat me down In front of a 66
inch colour monitor, Used
two silver toothpicks to
jam my eyelids open.
Then he showed me
a video of my one
true love In a loft
in Brooklyn,
gang-banging
thirty niggers for
kicks and crack. I could
not turn my head, there was
a razor on either side of my face
digging into my cheeks I watched her
drink that niggah cum I watched Her gulp
their piss and beg for more I watched her crawl
on her hands and knees I watched her lick them nigger
toes gratefully I watched her clean their assholes with her
little pink tongue after they’d shit on her I watched this all but
the Devil’s plan backfired See she is my one true love And as long
as she’s doing what she wants to do That’s ok by me. The devil rode
away on his velvet horse And I went back to sleep I dreamed about my
one true love
I know she
dreams
about
me

Take me home
Take me to your
apartment, Bathe
me feed me Inject
me with soft music
Dim the lighting slowly
unbutton your vacillations
I’ve waited for this moment
since I first recognized you, It
was two years after the beheading
You were working as a waitress in a
darkroom Bar, that night you served me
the catalogue. You said you knew me, You
said you’d met me last year at Marienbad. I was
confused, I’d never been to Marienbad, But I knew
the movie. That was enough to convince me that I loved
You, but then you vanished, The only trace you left a lipstick
message Daubed in runes across the bar counter: “Take me home
Take me to your
apartment
Bathe me
feed me”

photo pierre borasci

Bugs bunny flees Disneyland
To take up the sax
Blowing “C” notes
In the ears of deaf monks
Outside the stars commit cunnilingus
With the universe
A group of wise men back
From the manager
Sit cross-legged on the floor
Chanting Zen mantras
At a donkey doing the mamba
On the back of the bearded
Circus lady
A Voodoo priest reciting the
Lord’s prayer backwards
Turning a cup of liar’s dice
Into a bag of bones

The priest runs out of wine
The altar boy runs off
With the wafers
Falsetto notes turn sour
Perform fellatio
On the saxophone

Five lines of khat and Oskar is feeling fine
Debby the rabbit squeaks: “I might have
to not give up drugs” Nadine is from a
Spanish colony in the karoo “All the
wives are bitter in crimpeline and
blue rinse” Did you get unplay-
able? We have the luxury of
being able to trivialize our-
selves, We relate to each
other like empty cups
on flying saucers.
We were mad
together
We tasted
the madness

For the last five years, deaf learners coming into grade 8 have been illiterate. They are fearful of the written word and cannot associate a sign with some very simple words: e.g. they know the word ‘hand’ but do not know the word ‘fist’. There is a wide range in abilities of a deaf learner, and a wide range in their psychological history. The latter cannot be emphasized more strongly.

My biggest surprise with deaf education has been the collective lack of will amongst deaf learners to read. I then realised that reading is a taught skill. How do you know what a word IS if you haven’t heard it? Given the fact that most of their parents cannot sign, cannot communicate with their own children, reading is rejected willfully. This is particularly marked in the lower grades, for eventually as the learners mature and they realise that the mode of learning is through the written word and cannot be avoided - exam format, setting homework - they begin to adjust their attitude. At least they are able to associate a sign with a word and thus improve their ‘text’ vocabulary. But you will never find a deaf learner at my school with a reader, or with the slightest interest in reading per se. The challenge then has been to get them to use words, in the same way that I have to use my hands (to sign). Sign Language is an accredited subject in the school, where the educator uses a video camera to film the learners response as a record of their ability.

I feel (and this is a personal view entirely) that the real issue surrounding the matter of illiteracy began some years ago when ‘mother tongue’ became the buzz word. Somewhere along the way, they got the idea that Sign Language was their mother tongue and that they had a right to be taught in that language. Fair enough, but within this parameter every negative trait associated with ‘mother tongue’ seems to have become magnified. This has caused the deaf learner to shut out the hearing world, almost to a point of denial in trying to create their own ‘culture’. How this notion caught on, or why, is an absolute mystery. What is certain, is that it has caused more damage than good. Apart from the fact that Sign Language is a VISUAL language i.e. it has no written form, the notion of Sign Language as a LANGUAGE has to be seen in the context of a DEAF person. The crux here seems to be that the deaf are attempting to create a culture out of a handicap! Yet, the fact that a deaf person lives in a HEARING world can never be denied, and the advent of SMS and internet further emphasise the importance of the WRITTEN word. To this end, it must also be mentioned that in my subject, Life Science, the syllabus has become extremely TEXT based causing the deaf learner to be marginalised even further! This has wiped out any notion of ‘academia’ in Deaf Education and for a deaf person to acquire a matric certificate through Deaf Education as it currently stands. Not only is there a greater emphasis on text, but also on cognitive abilities such as hypothesis formulation and testing. So even if they coped with the text, they would be stumped in this arena. Having an interpreter in the exam room is not a solution either, as a sign for a particular word could quite easily suggest the answer!

A deaf learner lives in a very literal world: black and white. The development of nuance in their cognitive abilities only develops much later as a form of communication. I am not saying they are not aware of nuance, it just becomes extremely problematic when a deaf learner is asked to express this aspect of literacy in the classroom. It becomes impossible to cover every viable angle in explanation of a concept. This is a skill which is mostly acquired through experience and rests on an ability to extract information and apply it to a situation. To cross-reference. Question and answer i.e. deductive learning, takes on an added dimension of energy input. Imparting information within Deaf Education therefore follows its own unique pattern. This is because you can never fully comprehend how little knowledge the deaf learner has, even at matric level e.g. I was truly astonished to discover that my two matric learners did not know how day and night came about. It is therefore imperative for me to be able to intuit how the lesson unfolds. I am much aided by a computer and video projector permanently installed in my classroom, with access to an enormous amount of visual stimulation. We often embark on tangential journeys in our exploration of understanding! In a sense, this is what real education should be, but given that everything has to be ‘standardised’ and measured and that I am filling gaps that should in essence already be known, becomes problematic in ‘syllabus’ terms.

In my three years of teaching deaf learners I have faced one baffling situation after the next. While initially I felt partially to blame because my signing skills were still rusty, I had to step back to navigate my way intuitively through this dilemma and to analyse where the root cause lay in what I perceived as their collective lack of will or drive. It is herein that one requires an enormous amount of compassion because there are many tragic scenarios. But I was amazed to discover that the exact same problems I was experiencing were being experienced by deaf educators themselves!!

I therefore had to ask myself this question: How do I get inside a deaf child’s head in order to ascertain how the particular learning problems arise? How do I, as an Educator, rise to the challenge of taking their education seriously? In this process, I have had to re-examine everything I had taken for granted in ‘hearing’ education.

My 25 years experience in art, theatre, writing, performance,fashion is not acknowledged in the teaching profession. Yet, I would say that these skills are far more important than my recognised ‘professional’ qualification. This becomes a thankless journey which I take on for myself. I am not saying that this input is not appreciated. Of course it is. And I am fully aware of how I am growing as an individual, and how I manage to spark interest in my subject. But it makes absolutely no difference to my pay package! It simply highlights the level of double standard inherent in the Education system: it is OK and ENCOURAGED for me as an educator to draw on whatever experience or mechanism I can in the effective execution of my duties, but I cannot expect this to be acknowledged! Given the fact that I work for the Governing Body that has no policy document in this regard, and that I do not receive a pension, medical aid, or housing subsidy, or any Government ‘handouts’, and that this shortfall is not built into my contract, this could quite easily become a sore point. In this sense, the system fails ME and I have no more standing than a domestic servant! Even when applying for this job, nothing could have prepared me for the reality!

For me, the immediate problem has been that deaf learners themselves do not take their education seriously. Oh yes, they do understand the importance of schooling, but it is naive and misplaced. They are more interested in ATTENTION than in INFORMATION. This is more true of the lower grades. But I do not make the former statement lightly or without compassion! But for me to have arrived at this insight required an enormous amount of soul searching and observation. I certainly did not read this in a thesis somewhere on Deaf Education, or on the internet!!

Deaf learners struggle with memory. It was only within the last 6 months that I discovered that speech and learning patterns are established before the child is three years old. (In my experience, the learning ability seems to strengthen again after the age of 16 so what I have to say here is focused on the younger deaf learner.) Just think of your average hearing three-year-old who is a fireball of questions at that age, and think of a deaf learner whose parents cannot sign, and are in denial that they have a deaf child. It is the exception rather than the rule, that parents of deaf children embrace their responsibility in this regard. Even though classes are given free to parents, they fail to make use of this facility. Of course there are justifiable reasons why some parents cannot attend these classes. Yet, by the time the learner gets to grade 8, lack of memory seems to have become so ingrained that it is used as an excuse not to do something. Initially I found this extremely disturbing until I realised that the problem is compounded by the fact that deaf learners certainly know how to play up! This problem therefore becomes a self perpetuating one. Yet, to break this pattern of excuse, takes an enormous amount of psychological insight and sensitivity.

Another very difficult pattern to break is that deaf learners struggle with being taught as a class, collectively. They expect you to give the instruction to each one of them individually. This happens no matter how much you insist on their attention when you initially impart the instruction. Remember, that a deaf learner comprehends you with his/her eyes, and if they look away for a moment, they miss the message. Thankfully, class size is relatively small (2 to 11 learners - apparently you X by 7 as far as energy input goes for a ‘normal’ class) but even so, one does an enormous amount of repetitive explaining. Yet if one of them gets an answer right and you acknowledge it, the learner unhesitatingly, triumphantly tells the rest of the class. Those little fingers can rattle off an entire sentence with hardly a glance!! Getting the learner to NOT do this with their information has taken an enormous amount of restraint on my part i.e. to not respond immediately when they get something right. There is an intensely collaborative code amongst deaf learners that undermines and overrides the core aim in education: to get them to arrive at (understand) the answer independently.

It would be too simplistic to argue that deaf learners should be taught by deaf teachers. If this were the case there would be no schools for deaf learners as there is an intense shortage of deaf educators. Given the current adjustments to the text based syllabus, this problem is going to get far worse.

The hearing world is never going to go away. It will always remain as a necessary point of access to life. This is the challenge that will never abate. How Deaf Education adjusts to this challenge will determine what role deaf people play in our developing society. A lot of research has gone into this aspect of deaf education, but there is little consensus of the best way forward. There is much debate in the deaf world with regard to the various education ‘modes’: oralism, inclusion, the use of cochlea implants, speech therapy. One parent has placed her profoundly deaf daughter into a hearing school. She attended school with her daughter as interpreter for the first term, and in spite of the difficulties feels this is the best way forward for her daughter.

What is absolutely evident however, is that in spite of the fact that deafness is ‘an invisible’ handicap, it never-the-less is a very serious one.

It becomes imperative therefore, for hearing people to become more aware and compassionate towards the challenges that face deaf people.

I drank a cup of
Handy Andy.
Boy, Did
I shine!

I was sentenced to death
the minute she vomited
me out of her hole.
Snip snip, Sur-
geon cut the
cord then
the
howling
began. The
taste of dry air
in my lungs as repulsive
as the tit that I bit on. Now
I’m 39 years old Half my allotted
lifespan is over, 8 months before I’m
40. I don’t want to become like you, You
are my worst nightmare - A blog reader!

Irked by folks who grumble that there is nothing to do in Joburg, Laurice Taitz decided to set them straight. She certainly has plenty to say right now, and talking books is high on her list.

Two recent blog posts alight on a debate that South African readers and writers are currently discussing in numbers. Or that is my personal experience at least, engaging with writers and editors as I sally around the country meeting bookish folks. But both arguments sound a little grumpy and I don’t entirely agree with her.

Laurice’s post Indian-nish and Indian-ness bewails the dearth of literature with a clearly established South African flavour. She writes: “It left me thinking I would be hard-pressed to come up with a list of 10 books that carry a sense of South African-ness. There are whispers of it in JM Coetzee’s early work, and in Patricia Schonstein-Pinnock’s Skyline, Fred Khumalo’s Bitches’ Brew and Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to My Hillbow but a few titles do not a canon make.” Can’t find 10 books? I can think of 10 author’s that fit the bill: Consuelo Roland, Ivan Vladislavic, Susan Mann, Marlene van Niekerk, Niq Mhlongo, Ingrid Winterbach, Aryan Kaganof, Zakes Mda, Imraan Coovadia and Nadine Gordimer immediately come to mind. I’m not sure I quite get the point:

Then, in her post Writers in trouble, or just living in troubled times she reflects on the recent Sunday Times Literary Awards and says: “South African writing is flourishing with more novels being published than ever before and yet having followed its rise I can’t help feeling disappointed in its “un-Africaness”, it’s seeming dislocation from place and time, its lack of experimentation with form.”

Indeed we are seeing more and more “un-Africaness” (is that in concert with or in contrast to “Indian-ish”?) in local titles - think Michiel Heyns, Sarah Lotz, and recent JM Coetzee; and we’re seeing books like Alex Smith’s Drinking from the Dragon’s Well that treat home and away in ways that expand upon and and contextualise both:

The Sunday Times book awards were held at Summer Place on Saturday night. I used to be an organiser and now have joined the ranks of the guests — which I have to say is infinitely more pleasant as I didn’t have to sweat any of the detail. The theme of the night was “Writers in Troubled Times” and it left me wondering why South Africa’s writers seem so dislocated from the place, mostly unable or unwilling to engage with this country or to attempt to define some part of it.

this article first appeared on books.co.za

There are three kinds of coloureds. Those who think they’re white; those who’ve been duped - against the ontological evidence of their senses - into believing they’re black; and the rest of us – the sane ones - those who know we’re all coloureds.” – Aryan Kaganof

an essay by Nicole Turner

Forgive me if the facts are screwed, Y days were heady and chaotic. I think it was the late summer of 98 when it all started. In the precinct of Time Square, in Yeoville there was not much square and all the clocks had all stopped. That suited us fine, it was African time.

I was in this corner café, diagonally across on Rockey Street, talking to the newsstand. The shop was on its third owner since I had arrived in Johannesburg. In a matter of months, two owners had been taken out in armed robberies. I was berating the newspapers and magazines for the failings of the timid, greedy, unimaginative pale old men in charge of them when a tall dark man with a beard tapped me on the shoulder. “Excuse me,” he said, stepping back in a half-bow, “I think you should write for us.”

Us was Y magazine, just starting up. The tall man was S’busiso Nxumalo commercially known as The General. He was a DJ, social luminary - comfortable anywhere, uneasy in the right places and a jolly good writer. He had been made editor of South Africa’s FIRST BLACK youth magazine. But Nxumalo is generally lax to say the least and so he pulled someone slightly more qualified for the job, insisting the publishers make Itumeleng Mahabane editor with him as general roust-about.

When I say heady, one day Mahabane was toasting his first published piece in some women’s rag with cognac and a cigar - which made even the punch bag whores run by ex-CCB officers raise their eyebrows from their brothel balcony above the square where the Ghetto Luv girls were tantalizing ex-MK soldiers eating Yemese bread while they debated meaty issues of transformation - and the next he was editing a magazine.

Every cover stated evocatively “Ubuza Bani?” which you could translate as “you want to know?” but the best way to describe it is: “If you have to ask you’ll never know.” Contrast this to the payoff line on sister (white) publication SL that stated: “everything you know is wrong”.

Over the cold expanse of ten years, it’s difficult to encapsulate the sheer exuberance that accompanied those times and danced from the pages in staccato, machinegun prattle prose that stretched the boundaries of what was then considered magazine journalism.

Excuse me, I need some kwaito playing while I write this. Y mag had a soundtrack, abrasive in parts and with more than fragments of the toyi-toyi coming through, but it was largely kwaito that set the rhythm. Bennie was making us mal, Brenda was very much alive, TKZ were huge, Mdu was the man, Ghetto Luv and Ismael and Roots 3000 were nascent, blk sonshine were just jamming at Monday Blues and MXO was a little boy fresh from Dwezi (Ibayi) sleeping rough in a Mahala hotel, dreaming of getting onto that stage.

Y Fm had been wrestled from community and Youth League interests and was now a full-tilt commercial success, the fastest growing radio station in Gauteng. Y Fm opened the media planners’ sleepy white eyes to the market presence all those young black people might hold, and it was suddenly cool to be black - especially if you were white. When the magazine launched, the media world was all a twitter, here was a publication for black youth, by black youth. The thing is Y mag was never a black journalist’s association, which explained my presence among the regular contributors.

This was before Mandoza pulled in and crossover was in thin streaking veins across Johannesburg’s inhospitable chiefdoms. So the concepts of black and white youth were still vastly segregated. The publishers decided on separate development approach where one day SL and Y would merge and become SLY. That never happened.

I think I did my best work ever for Y magazine, especially in the early days when we were really pushing the boundaries. Look it was pretty crude stuff…but beside the fashion and horoscopes and practical jokes by the editorial team, there was some extraordinary journalism. I recall the brilliant, subtle story Nxumalo wrote about Lance Stehr of Ghetto Ruff records and Mahabane’s piece on the youth of Richmond. There were lots of voices that you had never heard before, all excited all vibrant, all pushing to be heard, and as far as I know it was lapped up greedily by an audience that had never been addressed in its own language before.

I never went inside the cool clean offices on lime street in Aukland Park, never beyond the reception area to collect a cheque, but what came out of those offices - and most business was in bars and in cars and under stars - was a new voice, sharp and collected, politically aware yet unaffected. I gather the office was party central, as it would have to be, to come up with cover lines like “WHY BLACK people SHOUT.”

We heard of attempts to dumb it down, and I remember that when I produced a piece of friction in two parts the publishers were aghast…we don’t do that, they said, and were overridden, and it was done. Despite the frantic grappling that was afoot, to package and sell a user-friendly version of black youth, Nxumalo and Mahabne held sway. We got wind of attempts to dumb it down, but we kept using words like dilettante alongside moegoe and tito.

For me as a writer, it was a golden time. I never have had, nor I suspect will ever again, the space that was provided on those glossy pages, to speak in a voice that came naturally, that caused kak, or maybe I was just full of kak, maybe we all were.

this essay originally appeared on chimurengalibrary

get married have a baby DIE
DIE DIE become your parents
get a cell phone get a baby DIE
DIE DIE get a husband get a wife
get a cell phone get lost and found
in nothing be happy with an iron-on
smile
DIE
DIE
DIE

the buggers

Translated literally, the succinctly descriptive Afrikaans term ‘derms ryg’ means ‘to pull out intestines’; figuratively it is taken to mean ‘baring one’s innards/gut’.

When I was a little girl, our family visited a peanut farm in the then West Transvaal during a school holiday. My brother and I were allowed on the back of the bakkie when the farmer and some farmworkers went out on a baboon hunt – naturally baboons were a major problem on a peanut farm.
A large male baboon was shot in the abdomen; he threw his head back, baring his teeth, and made sounds like I’d never heard before or since.
He tore open the bullet hole with humanoid digits and started pulling out his intestines, trying to get to the source of pain.
His innards and organs lay on the red soil before him in a glistening heap, steaming in the early-morning air. He didn’t stop pulling and he didn’t stop howling until one of those fuckers with a gun finally managed to aim true and put a merciful bullet into his head.

It seems that ‘confessional art/expression’ is the mode du jour, and communication technology makes it possible for anyone to ‘bare their all’ to whoever is willing to engage with it. Lamentable then that so many are pulling out their innards only to reveal that they never had a bullet in the gut. The ‘work’ is frequently little more than undisciplined and self-indulgent emotional projectile vomiting without style, substance, or, indeed, sense.

She lights her cigarette on the candle’s nude flame
He leans across the bar counter Says: “don’t do
that, it’s bad for your health” She bursts into
flabbergasted laughter “Here I am sucking
unmitigated cancer into my lungs and
you’re worried about a miniscule
amount of wax?” He shrugs,
“Every little bit helps, I’m
concerned about life.” “I
appreciate your con-
cern,” she inhales
deeply on the
freshly-lit
cigarette,
blows the
smoke
out
into
his face
He hits her
very hard on
the mouth with
the fist of his left
hand. She leans forward
and kisses him on the mouth
The taste of her blood arouses him
and makes him feel nauseous at the
same time. She whispers, “Take me home”
He ties her up, Inserts a catheter. While he’s away
She waters
his plants