kagablog

South African-born Oliver Schmitz, who now lives in Germany, first made a name for himself with the feature Mapantsula which impressed film critics at the Cannes International Film Festival in 1988. The film about a petty criminal from Soweto went on to win a number of international festival prizes. His documentary film Hijack Stories which looks at young people after the collapse of the apartheid regime won a prize at Cannes in 2001 in the section Un Certain Regard

Schmitz („Paris je t’aime“, „Doctor’s Diary“, „Turkish for Beginners“), a German Grimme Award laurete, is now back in South Africa directing the film Chanda’s Secrets based on novel of the same name by Canadian Allan Stratton. Chanda’s Secrets. Filming which began on 16 November in Elandsdoorn near Johannesburg, tells the story of a family on the verge of disintegrating.

Chanda is growing up in Elandsdoorn and lives an ordinary life up till her sister Sara dies at the age of only a year. From now on nothing is as it used to be: Chanda’s stepfather Jonah disappears, her younger siblings Iris and Soly are raising trouble, and her mother Lilian, the heart and centre of the family is falling seriously ill. Chanda is now burdened with the responsibility for her siblings. A fate which has befallen many children in South Africa whose parents have contracted HIV and died.

South African actors comprise the entire cast of Chanda’s Secrets and also involves the residents of the township Elandsdoorn.

watch it here

(view unyazi of the bushveld here)

halim el-dabh is an honorary lifetime member of the african noise foundation

The central bus station of Namanga Mori had been converted into a refugee exit point. It was a baroque place: colonial architecture left to waste in the squalor of a fallen town. Dusty marble and filthy filigree had long since given way to tacky jungle chicken stands and trinket arcades. But now even these mercantile enterprises had fallen beneath the overwhelming chaos of the symbiote infestation. The yawning halls and atriums were packed with people desperate to leave the city. Figures clamoured hither and thither, clutching all manner of belongings. The scene had become a menagerie of wicker fowl cages, suitcases, trunks, rolled rugs and dismantled furniture. A blaze of late afternoon sun fell through the large skylights and batteries of dirty windows, illuminating the masses from above. A sea of dust swarmed like fireflies amidst heads, old wood and memorial plaques, lending an atmosphere of worry and displacement to the scene. Soldiers and wrestlers were herding refugees with rifles and cattle prods, occasionally barking nonsensical orders at one another. Checkpoints had been set up at intervals throughout the large sprawl of tiled corridors and chambers, and officials were frisking individuals for any sign of symbiotic contamination. Those with humps or greenish, broken skin were taken to an abandoned parking lot and sprayed with flamethrowers. The symb parts, which were invulnerable to heat, lay twitching and writhing amidst a clutter of charred body parts and smoking bones. The more fully formed symbiotes simply crawled away, creeping back into the city like wounded insects. The screams of the burning could be heard over the bustling chaos inside and almost everybody was either aggravated or terribly disturbed by the sound. Voices announced gibberish over megaphones, creating dissonance. Tinny Bossanova music played over all of this, much like air freshener sprayed copiously to disguise the aroma of rotting corpses, putting one in mind of elevator music that had been elevated to a form of torture. Vintage coaches clustered in the gothic lots, choked by passengers, guided by nonsensical commands and verbal abuse. These busses departed occasionally, grinding down swoops of concrete, pregnant with mournful passengers. Taty dragged her suitcase wearily through the mob. She sported a black eye, bruised cheekbone and split lip. She was also limping badly. Her hair was an unholy mess and she looked inexpressibly bleak. The couture dress had been utterly destroyed by the soldiers, so she had been forced to change into whatever was at the top of her case: a pair of blue denim shorts and her KAMIKAZE KUPCAKE t-shirt. Her machine gun was gone forever and she hugged her fur jacket protectively around herself, headphones scarfed around her neck, too wacked out to cry. Although she was in a tremendous amount of pain, she pushed resolutely on, a bloodstained cigarette spindling off her puffy lip. Her mouth and throat burned, but she kept lighting cigarettes, as though the tar would erase the passage of foreign objects forever. Eventually she stopped moving, jostled by passing strangers, staring at the busses in growing confusion. After a moment’s deliberation she decided to approach the nearest one. It was filling rapidly with passengers, fed from several crazy queues, which had evidently been coagulating for hours. Trivial arguments erupted all around her while she navigated her way to the driver’s window and began to bash numbly on the glass. The driver waved her off, engaged in an argument with a large woman in purple robes. Taty persisted and he eventually opened the plexi-glass partition.

“What is it?” he grumbled. “You need medical attention?”

“I need to get to the Outer Necropolis,” she shouted above the din.

He looked at her as though she were crazy, noting her wounds and perhaps fearing some form of potential insanity.

“What do you want out there in the jungle? There’s nothing but crocs and contamination out there. None of the coaches are going that way. We’re all heading to the Lowlands.”

“I need to get to the pyramids!” Taty practically shrieked.

The driver rubbed his jaw, regarding her now with concern. The woman in robes was pawing at him but he shrugged her off and leaned out the window.

“You got family out there or something?” he asked, rubbing his jaw.

Taty hesitated for a moment before answering.

“Yes…my brother’s out there. I need to…I need to save him.”

“Jesus girl, well I guess the best thing is to double back there, down to lot thirteen and ask the supply route boys. They’re doing some runs in the hotzone - it’s a ways off from the Outer Nec’s, but better than nothing I reckon. They might take you, I dunno…”

He shrugged uselessly and pointed out the direction she should take. She thanked him and headed that way, leaving him to his argument. Red arrows were painted onto the walls, indicating paths to each part of the station. There were also mad spaghetti maps of the terminal posted everywhere, so it was relatively easy to find her way, despite the chaos. She crossed thoroughfares and hobbled down wide flights of concrete stairs, pushing her way through the crowds. She eventually penetrated the outer lots, which were located on a sublevel. The crowds thinned out as she entered large, gloomy open-air spaces reeking of machines. Long barbed wire walls enclosed the yards and she had to walk carefully to avoid tripping over rusted machine parts and clumps of unchecked weed. A thin drizzle began to fall, further complicating things. She skirted the shells of busses and large refueling dumps, heading for the yellow glare of rainy floodlights. Lot thirteen was a rambling hanger with filthy tin walls and oversized exit ramps. Two coaches lay in a corner like loaves of bread, belittled by the breadth of the relatively vacant lot. A neat pile of military equipment was stacked beside these vehicles. The seats had been torn from the busses to make space for the hardware, arranged in surreal rows along the floor of the hanger - like a cinema without walls or a screen. Some drivers were standing beside the equipment, talking with a large Wrestler in a bright white and blue leotard with matching cape and mask. Across the hanger, a squad of soldiers loitered, smoking cigarettes and comparing mustaches. The sight of the soldiers caused her to feel immediately nauseous, but she girded herself up - emerging into the sallow glare of the hanger. She approached the gaggle of drivers, shooting nervous glances across at the soldiers, who were now staring at her. The drivers had also stopped to watch, prompting the wrestler to turn around.

“You!” he barked at Taty. “What are you doing here?”

She froze at the sound of his voice and one of the drivers took pity on her.

“You aren’t allowed here little girl,” the driver called. “You have to go back to the central hall - all the Lowland coaches depart from there.”

“Please, can you help me?” she pleaded, dragging her case across the greasy concrete. “I need to get to the Outer Necropolis, my brother’s dying out there and needs my help.”

“Those are now forbidden zones,” the wrestler declared. “You are to report back to the hall and take a coach to the Lowlands just everybody else.”

“But…”

“Are you refusing to evacuate?” the wrestler asked, folding his arms across his chest.

Taty hesitated, looking to the driver who had spoken for assistance. He shot her a sympathetic glance but said nothing. The wrestler was about to speak when one of the soldiers hailed him from across the floor. The squad had begun to mobilize, gathering up their guns and tying their shoelaces.

“Command!” the soldier yelled, holding up a walkie-talkie. “We have a truck of morph zombies inbound on the banana boat - Lucho say’s to double-double down to the Kentucky frizzler and catch some steel rain for the ringside tickers.”

The wrester seemed to suddenly forget about Taty. He turned to the drivers, adjusting his cape and leotard with military precision.

“You have your orders,” he snapped. “Try not to breathe the fumes.”

He trotted off imperiously, following the departing soldiers out into rainy darkness. When he was sure the wrestler was out of an earshot, the driver turned to Taty.

“Listen little girl, we don’t operate out in the Pyramids, but some of the truckers are still doing runs. You can try them?”

He pointed out into the night and she nodded numbly, lighting another cigarette.

“If I was you I’d forget about going out there,” one of the drivers told her, in a fatherly sort of way.

“Yeah,” another piped. “Let the soldiers deal with the lost children.”

“I don’t fucking think so!” Taty scowled, staggering back across the lot in disgust.

They stared at her in surprise, shocked by her sudden rudeness.

“It’s a pleasure!” one of them called sarcastically.

She ignored them, emerging into what had now become rain. The steaming forms of several rigs lay across the dark yards and she headed resolutely for them. As she drew closer she could make out some of their external details. Most had chrome plating, seared by use and travel. Some had flames painted along their cabs, while others sported jungle skulls and spiked bumper guards. Machine gun pods had been mounted along the customized rims and the majority of the external piping had been reinforced with steel plating to survive the attacks of cargo-bandits around the zone. A tarp had been erected in the shadow of one of the larger rigs and she could just make out two robust figures, smoking by the light of a moth-haunted hurricane lamp. The truckers were a curious breed, sporting waist length beards and woodcutter flannel. Large wooly jackets disguised ponderous bellies and utility belts, wherein lurked the implements of the road. One turned to the other and pointed to Taty.

“Look what we have here Allen - looks like a little hitchhiker.”

“Shit Jerry,” his partner nodded solemnly. “She looks like a song man.”

He held a hand to his mouth and called out at her.

“Hay little girl! You look like a song man!”

She staggered into the shade of the tarp, shaking rain from her hair and letting her heavy case down with a wince.

“Got a little trouble with your eye and lip though, huh?” Jerry said. “A little too much of the fucked-up mascara.”

“I need a ride out to the Pyramids,” Taty said. “Can you help me please?”

“Told you she was a hitcher man. There aren’t that many hitchers around anymore, you’re dying breed. Say, you want some dooby?”

He held out a large joint, which she refused.

“Some joe?” he offered, waving a battered canteen.

She eyed it for a moment and he took this as a sign to crack the top and pour out a paper cup.

“Can you help me please?” she sniffed, pawing rain from her damaged face.

He held out the cup of steaming coffee and smiled, showing all the cracks around his eyes.

“Go on little song, drink up now.”

She accepted it with undisguised gratitude, swallowing it all in one gulp. It scalded her damaged mouth but was so pleasurable it almost caused her to cry. She realized that she hadn’t received any sustenance since the caviar and ginger beers and for a moment it felt as though she had taken some form of hard drug. The kindness of the truckers was disorienting and she stopped for a moment, her internal mechanisms of survival faltering like a clock.

“Better get that face-job looked at as well sister.”

“Please can you help me?” she pleaded.

“Well, we’re off the clock man, but Uncle Bill and Keruoac are heading out that way in an hour or so. Maybe you should give them a try.”

“Cancel that Allen, Kerouac pulled a freight job in the liminal zone. He trucked out a few hours ago. Roster’s shot to hell man. It’s all these ass-fucking bug boys messing with the order of things.”

“Yeah, try Uncle Bill man. His is the big red dragon rig down by the garbage release. Just bang on the cab and tell him Allen and Jerry sent you.”

“Thanks, you guys totally rock.”

“Just keep on trucking little song.”

She had to cross into another lot, an area occluded by acrid yellow smoke and steam. A mess of coolant pipes had ruptured, creating sulphuric fog, which obscured the entire area and caught in her nose and throat. Floodlights lit this haze from above, causing it to glow in places. The rain had stopped as suddenly as it had started and she passed by rows of wet, towering trucks until the very end of the line. There, she came upon the ornate dragon-boat truck that the bearded men had described. It emerged from the rift like a creature of fable, horned and scaled with red metal. The rig itself was hefty sixteen-wheeler, customized for war and radiation, with a wide, spacious cab. The chassis had been cloaked by what looked like a bullet-proof carnival float, forged out of metal and scarlet trim. Filthy ribbons trailed from its many aerials. Greenish eye decals had been plastered over the quad of headlights, creating a staring dragon’s face bisected by a pig-iron grille, buoyed up by a meter high bumper ram. Large blue-headed lizards clung to its crimson flanks, soaking up the heat, which radiated out through the metal. She could hear twisting flute and zither wafting from a sound system within the beast and called up the collapsible steps.

“Uncle Bill?”

Something moved in the shadowy cabin, and she called out again. But when Uncle Bill appeared, it was from behind her, out of the cloying smoke in a white Panama hat. He was thin, angular and bespectacled, perhaps in his late sixties. He had been wearing the same impeccably cut cream suit for what seemed like days, and the tie and collar had been loosened, revealing a heavily lined, sunburned neck. The red neck lent him a somewhat reptilian appearance, compounded by his lipless mouth and lens-magnified eyes. Taty saw that he was leveling a small ornamental pistol at her and stumbled back awkwardly.

“Are you with the Mexicans?” he enquired in a peculiar, looping drawl.

“Allen and Jerry sent me.”

He re-holstered the pistol quickly, as though embarrassed by it.

“Forgive me, I have some unresolved differences with the current militia and must remain en guard at all times.”

“I need a ride out to the pyramids, can you take me please?”

He regarded her with his watery blue eyes, summing up her appearance and weighing the request in his mind. To his credit he did not interrogate her further about what business she might have in such a strange locale.

“I suppose I could. It will take several days though. The main roads are infested and I must circumvent the border posts if I am to deliver my cargo.”

“I don’t mind. I just need to get out there and no-one else will take me.”

He stared at her for a moment, before summoning her up the steps. She left her case at the foot of the stairs and followed him up to a battered airlock.

“Take a gander,” he drawled, fiddling with the hydraulic seal. “My arrangements are…somewhat unusual - perhaps you won’t want to travel with me after all.”

The airlock opened with a clank and a hiss, revealing a remarkable interior. A vintage French Quarter apartment had been somehow miniaturized and adapted to fit the confines of the larger than average cab. Small potted palms and antique furniture had been bolted to deco wallpaper. A wireless blared flute music while an old lace lampshade illuminated the boudoir in a pleasant light. The floor had been tiled in checkerboard monochrome and a red velvet chez longue floated behind a mahogany coffee table and a wicker chair. An oil painting of a desiccated mummy brooded beside a coat and hat stand. Some steps adjoined the driver’s cabin, a spacious area which floated behind a large bubble-dome of tinted glass. Yet despite the uniqueness of the décor and the size of the truck, it was the symbiote she noticed first. The creature sat in the corner like a sculpture, tittering to itself, somewhat more animated than the beings in the city.

“Is that thing your friend?” Taty asked, confused by its presence.

“No.” he answered, moving past and sitting down in the chair. “It is a portal to another world.”

She watched from the doorway as he attached a cigarette to a long ivory holder, his back to the Symb.

“So you’re a bug fucker,” she stated blankly.

He lit the cigarette and crossed his legs, relaxing back into the creaking wicker weave.

“Well, that’s one way of putting it I suppose.”

“How come you’re not greening out?” she asked, eyeing the symbiote with suspicion.

“Well, I went down to the Voodoo surgery and took my medicine like a good little boy.”

“Yeah, the cat also gave me a pill.”

“If the Soft House had its way, I would be up against a wall. But no-one else will run uranium into the diamond zone.”

He turned his lined, lizard-like face and regarded the symbiote with a strange expression.

“The wrestlers allow me my ‘symbiotic explorations’ while they still have need of me - As long as I am not seen of course. Willing interaction with the symbiotes is still regarded as a transgression punishable by death. It is after all, an invasion.”

“Its not an invasion,” Taty sighed, sinking to her haunches against the wall. “Its just a stupid joke the big Buddha is playing.”

“Most invasions start out as a joke.”

They sat in silence and Taty found herself quite overcome by fatigue. The weariness came in a shocking wave, but still she stared nervously at the creature, as though expecting an unseen hammer to drop. Uncle Bill watched her watching the creature, smoking quietly in the shadows. Her head nodded like a doll’s and she was asleep within minutes. He observed as she curled gradually to the tiled floor, like a bedraggled little animal. When he finished his cigarette, he brought up her suitcase and covered her with a cotton throw, closing the airlock behind him.

Peter Whitehead n’avait pas filmé depuis 32 ans. Son avant-dernier film datait de 1977. Maintenant il retourne derrière la caméra pour nous transférer à l’écran son dernier roman éponyme. Dans ce long métrage de 2h35, Whitehead nous livre le portait d’une ville glaciale mais peuplée par les grâces féminines de plusieurs jeunes actrices. C’est avant tout le portrait de Vienne d’aujourd’hui. Il y incarne le rôle d’un agent MI6 Michael Schlieman qui travaille pour les services secrets britanniques afin d’élucider le mystère et l’echec des plusieurs opérations du passé. Il y a des points communs sur l’épave du Ranbow Warrior de Greenpeace et le meurtre d’un photographe-reporter de la même organisation. Schlieman fait partie d’un groupe de terrorisme écologique et son alter ego Whitehead nous révèle que son roman est centré sur “la peur et le contrôle ou plutôt sur la peur que l’état diffuse afin d’assurer son contrôle (dans le catalogue de la Viennale 2009).

Le film commence avec la Cinémathèque de Vienne et Schlieman qui y vient poser des questions à une belle et jeune documentaliste, interpretée par Sophie Strohmeier. Cette recherche aimerait aboutir à l’écriture d’un roman. La documentaliste jouera surtout le rôle de l’interprète à ses contacts. La couleur bleue est présente dans plusieurs scènes de la ville fluviale et les vers de Seferis et Kazantzakis sont suimposés à l’image. Ces vers accompagnent la fluidité du récit.

Schlieman doit retrouver la jeune Maria Lenoir, la fille de Nora qui était le personnage central d’un autre roman plus ancien de Whitehead, publié en 1990 “Nora and…”. Une belle toupie mystique tourne pendant le film et le groupe local Black Flash chante ses chansons pendant que le monologue de Schlieman ne cesse de renverser les points de répère. La musique instrumentale composée par Whitehead accompagne la plupart des scènes.

Il y a une différence sur le plan de la mise en scène avec les films anciens du cinéaste. Les images ne sont pas pleines de recherches formelles basées sur l’esthètique de la déstruction. Mais la sensation poétique est basée maintenant sur la structure de cette histoire compliquée et à plusieurs niveaux.

A la fin de la troisième partie Schlieman sera retrouvé mort assassiné sans réponse à ses questions du début. Son corps est allongé sur le siège d’un wagon du métro viennois. Et le vers d’Homère nous assure que “la mort bleue ferme ses yeux”. C’est le troisième poète grec dans le film. Nous avions filmé le “making of” du nouveau long métrage et Whitehead nous assurait que “les personnes interrogées sont en train de monter le film de sa mort” (op.cit. “By any old light” publié sur le kagablog du 07-10-08).

“Nous avons détruit le Tiers Monde et nous détrusions maintenant la planète” (Whitehead, op.cit. dans la catalogue de la Viennale 2009).

écrit par Dionysos Andronis

neither death, nor life
neither dreams, nor aims
neither alcohol, nor drugs

neither purity, nor filth

i am something else
(i dream about energy)

neither to live, nor to die
neither be silent, nor to talk
neither to stay, nor to arrive
neither to believe, nor to know

i want something else
(i am my own energy source)

neither body, nor soul
neither time, nor space
neither past, nor future
neither summer, nor winter

the home is something different

(the energies are met in a state)

neither tears, nor smile

neither to have, nor to want
neither learning, nor to forget

neither repairing, nor knocking down

the life is something different
(the energies are renewing every moment)

neither to be, nor not to be
neither black, nor white
neither small, nor large
neither flooding, nor dry

the existence is something like this
(energy is flowing around)

I’ll try and be brief: I think this is an opportunity because for the first time Michael’s music is coming out in a way in which you can re-hear and re-examine. And I think people will be contemplating the music more exactly and finding in repetition what a concert often hides, so I’d like to sketch three broad ways in which one can see his music as a project, as a work in progress, and I hope that removing himself from teaching and organising activities a little, his music will fast fill the horizons you possess in blueprint in this CD.

The first of the three themes which really resonate with Michael Blake’s music is his place within the historical tasks of any composer growing up and having their formation in the 1970s: aware of their situation in Africa but also aware of the indifference of the rest of the world - and he’s taken a very unusual stand within his broader historical situation.

He could have been a very successful parochial composer had he chosen to be, but he has chosen to confront a number of widely defined historical problems directly in his work. And so it’s quite easy to locate Michael Blake stylistically in a kind of force field opened between the great alternatives of the 1970s: the path taken by Stockhausen and the path taken by Feldman.

But on the other boundary it’s also easy to locate Blake in another - derived - force field: that is one moving from the present to reprise the nineteenth century in the hands of Kevin Volans and moving the opposite way with Wolfgang Rihm, who crosses the various boundaries which made strands of twentieth-century music in the 50s and 60s – a kind of trek towards the present based on fecund taboo breaking.

Now Blake is so interesting because he’s not trying to adhere to a path, even idiosyncratically - he’s trying to create the exception. When I met him he was one of a few proficient double bassists so he was conscripted into the student orchestra. And the conductor of this orchestra was a very idiosyncratic man who thought he was Herbert von Karajan, and would make cutting remarks - I remember he made a nasty remark to Blake who’d second guessed him about something - he said “Mr Blake, one rotten apple spoils the barrel!” And in that way he characterised something really unique and fundamental about Michael without knowing it. If you observe a thousand white swans you’re still not sure that all swans are white, because the 1001st swan might turn out black. But if you observe just one black swan then you know for sure that all swans are not white. So Michael has always gone after the exception in terms of the historical frame of reference, the international force field in which his music operates - hoping it will cause the barrel of meek assumptions to rot. He has always tried to find the loophole, that one black swan, that one case which either makes other bodies of work seem absurd, paradoxical or portrays them in a very strange light.

So if there is quotation of style or engagement with other composers, it’s usually to wring their neck. And this maybe explains why his work has such a broad spectrum - it seems to drill here and then there, it feels like a whale moving under water popping up to spout here and then somewhere quite unexpected - in fact its sole consistency is that it exists to find the loophole and the exception.

The second perspective from which to approach Michael’s music is its return - in several ways - to an ideal of the baroque: to find the machine that could be infallible, could implement a method perfectly, that could correct itself. We know that when Bach was dying he had a copy of Leibniz’ Théodicée next to him, so there was this great dialogue between composers and thinkers who were each trying to find a machine of knowledge, a machine of experience, something that could run all by itself - the fugue in the case of Bach and the monad in the case of Leibniz.

Now it’s tempting to draw a parallel between Michael’s compositions and today’s equivalent of Leibniz - somebody who is trying to find the machine that can not only correct itself - interrogate itself - but perhaps become conscious of itself. One would like to see the parallel developed between Michael Blake and Douglas Hofstaedter. Hofstaedter became famous for his book on Gödel, Escher and Bach, but very few people saw that he was really talking about a power of a system to be self-referring, to create a kind of loop with itself, and to gather what new kinds of consequence may come from the loop.

A great deal of Michael’s music is self-referring - what is extremely systematic or motoric in his music, or what seems almost formally or fugally structured is a scramble to use the ongoing output of the composition as its input - to make an automaton.

Hofstaedter and Blake share an instinctive love of anagrams. Hofstaedter wrote a very brilliant book on anagrams and he anagrammatises his way through all of his books, even on very technical subjects, and nobody is ever safe from Blake’s anagrammatic wit either. I think in a century which saw Schoenberg and Webern creating such anagrammatic music, it’s interesting to see this somewhat taboo sensibility returning, but in an often explicit form. I like to fantasize an opera by Blake on themes by Douglas Hofstaedter. That would define the second platform for finding in his work every kind of contemporary automaton.

And the third way of catching Blake on the move - very briefly - is to think about the way he approaches the dialogue with African music. He has come after a cusp of great visibility in this matter and he’s exercised tact and reserve. He is not concerned with quotation, he’s not concerned with content, nor with transcription - he seems to be wholly concerned with certain procedures or habits, heuristics or mannerisms, not ways of thinking but ways of putting things together, which are the tectonic qualities of African music and which increasingly make up the tectonic or constructional qualities of his own music.

It’s very interesting to see this resonance develop between two musics as artefacts rather than as ideas or ideological toys and to see compositional procedures which, in the hands of this very literate composer becoming more and more fluent, more and more heuristic, more and more oral-seeming through this immersion. So what you see deep in the CD is a wonderful set of animations in Michael Blake - his storyboards. I believe he is working in all of these directions. It remains to the future to see which becomes strongest or whether he turns all into something we can’t yet imagine in synthesis.

the place stank of Voodoo muscle
and coiled pounce
unpronounceable contortions
and the blood of fuck

there are plenty of good reasons for feeling inadequate
and not having money isn’t one of them

Date posted: 24 November 2009

After Cape Town Mayor Dan Plato was slapped in Blikkiesdorp, the police have warned politicians not to enter the area without police backup.

Blikkiesdorp is a government built shack settlement on the barren sands of Delft, outside of Cape Town. With rows of tin shacks, razor wire fencing, invasive lighting and armoured vehicles at the gated entrance, it looks like a concentration camp. To his credit the local police chief describes Blikkiesdorp as a ‘housing time-bomb’ close to reaching ‘boiling point’. But, incredibly, Dan Plato says that he is ‘happy’ with Blikkiesdorp despite the fact that the residents are ‘ungrateful’. He intends to build more camps like it.

State officials refer to these camps as ‘temporary relocation areas’ in Cape Town, ‘transit camps’ in Durban and ‘decant areas’ in Johannesburg. All the major political parties see them as a useful way of expelling the urban poor from the cities and ending any political autonomy that they may have developed through self organised occupations without having to pay the traditional price of providing decent housing.

But, they are universally hated and widely disparaged as ‘amatins’ and ‘government shacks’. Across the country people have burnt them down, marched, thrown up burning barricades and gone to court in their attempts to avoid being dumped in these places. But despite the ubiquity of resistance, thousands of people have been forced into these camps unlawfully at gunpoint or lawfully by judges who tend to hold to the bizarre assumption that they are automatically better than shack settlements.

Although the amatins look very much like a futuristic nightmare out of District 9 they have a long history in our country. The apartheid state used them to assert white control of cities by corralling blacks into contained and easily policed peripheral spaces — and by ensuring that its officials, rather than any popular process, would allocate access to these toeholds in the cities.

The apartheid state often justified its urban planning in the international language of modernisation and slum clearance rather than an explicit racism. But, of course, the function of that technocratic language was to mask the base fears and desires that drive oppression in the guise of scientific neutrality and necessity. That mask was torn from the face of oppression by a properly political language that named and denounced segregation and forced removal for what they were.

Some of the people that have been sentenced to Blikkiesdorp for being poor used to live in centrally located Cape Town neighbourhoods like Salt River and Woodstock. The parallels with previous rounds of dispossession and exclusion from central Cape Town are obvious.

But, Lindiwe Sisulu got the idea for these camps from India and not from apartheid. This fact offers an important insight into the mind of the political elites that are driving a violent programme of class segregation that literally puts the poor, be they shack dwellers, street traders or sex workers, in their place.

In India the rich have turned on the poor, driving them out of the cities and dispossessing them of rural land in a kind of internal colonialism that has produced ‘a world class India’ with its billionaires, IPL and glamorous film stars at the direct expense of the devastation of the poor.

It has resulted in a massive popular rebellion against elites, which is sometimes, as with the Naxals, armed. But it has also produced a turn to ethnic and religious communal violence, led by various factions of the Hindu right. The state is treating the rebellion against the elites as a civil war, but is, via local politicians, often actively complicit in fermenting the communal politics that directs the desperation of the poor against other poor people.

The great anti-colonial philosopher, Frantz Fanon, argued that the colonial world is a world of compartments. For Fanon, the creation of different kinds of spaces for different kinds of people was a key tactic by which colonialism divided a single humanity into different ’species’. He concluded that a key measure of decolonisation would be the degree to which space was democratised.

Post-apartheid South Africa has not sought to democratise space. On the contrary ‘development’ has been all about deracialising and further modernising elite space while simultaneously expelling the poor from access to that space and firming up class segregation.

It is a simple fact that the material reality of Blikkiesdorp, as well as plenty of the peripheral RDP housing developments, is more inhuman than that of the townships built under apartheid.

And life in these new ghettoes is not only compromised by a second rate material reality. There is also a second rate political reality. It’s not at all unusual for local party structures to regulate allocation of houses and for the police to treat the poor in these new ghettoes with systematic, enthusiastic and entirely criminal sadism.

The enormous popular opposition to attempts to cloak oppression in allegedly technical processes like ‘development’ and ‘delivery’ has not been taken with anything like sufficient seriousness in elite society. This has led to a situation where political elites actually believe their own propaganda and can only see resistance as criminality or conspiracy.

Neither Julius Malema’s buffoonery that seeks to cloak the interests of a predatory elite in the language of nationalism, nor the technocratic delusion of development as post-political and delivery as a mere question of managed efficiency offer us any route out of the new forms of segregation that produce Melrose Arch and private security for some and Blikkiesdorp and police harassment for others.

We need, again, to think politically about our cities and to give things their proper names,

But there are some encouraging signs that Dan Plato’s slap in the face has done more to jolt the middle classes from their dogmatic slumbers than the whole slew of human rights reports indicting the amatins and failed court cases aimed at keeping people out of these camps.

In an editorial titled ‘Blinker’s Dorp’ The Cape Times has denounced Blikkiesdorp as “a grim place where no one should have to live, a desolate settlement of one-room huts, where families share outside toilets and water taps, with little privacy, no trees and nowhere for children to play.” This is the sort of heretical language for which organised shack dwellers have been denounced as the Third Force, accused of opposing development and subject to all kinds of violent state repression. It is quite encouraging to see it making its way into the authorised general common sense of society.

this article first published here: http://www.sacsis.org.za/site/article/388.1

His bedroom overlooks the lake. Today the lake is the color of cigarette ash, with a tiny drop of blue, like the blue was an afterthought, an accident on a paint palette.

When we fight he goes out. He goes for a walk, goes to work, the convenience store, anywhere. He can’t get away from me fast enough when we argue.

I’m not a big fan of fighting with people, but it sometimes it’s good, cause you really know where you stand no matter how much it hurts.

I didn’t realize it, but I want a relationship and an apartment and a life that feels like a home. Something that feels comfortable and permanent. Something I can get angry with, or get dark with, or lazy with, that would be still be intact no matter what.

He yelled at me, he outright said how sick he was of my outlook. He was sick of my optimism, my trying to see the best in a pile of shit. He was frustrated with his job, with his life. I kept trying to think of solutions. I kept being my annoying cheery self. Plucky can do. Lady fix it.

He told me to fuck off. He told me I see things in him that don’t really exist. I don’t know, maybe it’s true. He didn’t say anything that he saw in me, except negative stuff.

We’ve been living together for five months, but it was because of my lack of organization, the way I do things and spontaneously hope for the best. I was planning to stay a few nights, but I’ve never left.

It’s strange, when things get bad, I think maybe I should move out, and then fear hits me. What if there’s nowhere better to go? What if all men are the same? What if every situation I walk into leaves me feeling this alone?

He doesn’t understand, this being happy stuff, this ability to move countries all the time, travel, have adventures, it takes effort. I have to try hard to be this person.

Sometimes I want to kick and scream and break things- the wall, the tv, my bones.

Sometimes I’m convinced that Lukas doesn’t know the first thing about me.

He doesn’t know and doesn’t want to. Him and everybody else.

The girl I work with was being bitchy to me last night, saying how I am is too much for her. We were all tired, we’d worked late, it was after 1:00 am. I was trying to make conversation. She said she felt like shit, dead tired.

Ag, you know, it’s too much for me, she said, you’re too much. I know some people would like this kind of thing, she said, when I tried to give her a hug. She pulled me off the way you get rid of a spider. If she could’ve squashed me with the bottom of her shoe, she’d have done it in a second. It’s just not how I am at all, she said, and then walked off.

Lukas does a good imitation of her. She’s South African, but she rolls her r’s like she’s Spanish.

I don’t care. I mean, it’s better to know if we’re not friends. It’s always better to know. I don’t care at all.

Our fight ended late, around 3:00 am. We have one bedroom, and a living room with a fold out couch. He goes to sleep on the couch when we fight. I pretend to be sleeping, not crying, and he watches reality tv or porn until 7:00 am, when I get up to go to school. I’m taking art and psychology courses, and one ESL class at a college nearby. My English is good, I know, I work on it like crazy, but sometimes, weird things come out, weird translations, mistakes that don’t seem like mistakes.

We were fighting, and he said, you don’t get it, you don’t have a clue, do you? And I yelled back, I have a clue, which is what you say in Hebrew, if you’re fighting, and someone says Ein Lach Musag, you don’t have a clue, you say “Yesh li Musag” I have a clue. He started laughing at me, hysterically laughing, and I started screaming out of frustration, crying and screaming, and he said I was hysterical, and went out.

It’s 10:30 am and he still hasn’t been home yet.

Sometimes I know he doesn’t get me at all.

I’m a step outside of the ordinary, a deviation, a chance for him to be someone else. I’m an accidental splash of orange paint on a black and white canvas. You just know when he gets the right tools he’ll get rid of me. Everyone knows I don’t belong in this picture. It’s just a matter of time before he gets rid of me. A matter of time before I have to find my next destination.

From The Life of Henry Fuckit, 1950-2015
by Ian Martin

The streets were entirely deserted and the night clear and cold. As soon as he had turned a corner and was out of sight of the police station he stopped in a doorway and got out his Navy pullover. He thought of Joe Thompson’s generosity and it gave him a sense of comfort as well as warmth. He began to walk again, trying to get his bearings from the stars, but the buildings and the lights hid them. Only directly overhead could he discern a few pinpricks in the blackness. As they had raced away from Grunau he had wanted to see the sky. For a long time the glow of the fire showed behind them and then was lost behind the rise and fall of the country. Or maybe it had gone out. Birkin, hunched over the wheel, had driven with crazed urgency as if he expected to see a light appear in the rear view mirror. He clearly believed they were being pursued and that their only hope was to ride flatfoot all the way to Keetmanshoop. At one stage Henry had put the window down and climbed halfway out trying to get a view of the sky and the stars but Birkin had begun screaming at him and anyway it was too cold and the rushing wind had blinded him with tears.

He came to an intersection. A signpost pointed left: STASIE / BAHNHOF / STATION. This was not an instruction, just an indication, a possibility. After a kilometre at a brisk pace, so that he felt warm and the booze was clearing from his head, he came in sight of the station. There were few other buildings now and he was on the outskirts of the town.

It was a large colonial structure of the austere German kind. The waiting room was cold and cheerless with high metal ceiling and polished parquet floor. Apart from a timetable on one wall and a wooden bench beneath it, it was unfurnished. Certainly no place to spend the rest of the night, unless desperate. Maybe fatigue would induce him to lie down on those hard wooden slats but… Through the window of the ticket office, with its punched circle and rectangle, and iron grille, he could see two men in railway uniform sitting at tables under a bare yellow bulb. One had his head on his arms, asleep, and the other was reading the paper, black peaked cap pushed back. A drab scene taken with a Brownie, fixed with stale chemicals and left to fade in a dusty pigeonhole. The universal boredom of petty officials - Henry turned away in horror. Jesus, he was supposed to be on holiday from all that.

At the platform stood four coaches that immediately struck him as vintage, as if they had been mistakenly shunted off at a disused siding and forgotten for fifty years before being discovered and brought back to the station. The woodwork was dry and cracked, bleached and scoured bare of its original paintwork. The first was White, the next two non-White and the fourth the guard’s van. On impulse, checking both directions for any sign of life, he strode across the platform to the White carriage, climbed the steps and let himself into the corridor. He eased off his pack and moved along to the centre compartment. The door slid open at his touch and he entered the total darkness of the interior. Groping in his pack he located matches and lit one to dimly illuminate green leather and teak joinery. After much fumbling and several matches he had climbed into a top bunk and covered himself with his sleeping bag.

Some time later he awoke briefly to realise the coaches had been coupled to… well, probably a goods train. It began to move and gain momentum, creaking and rocking, the wheels clacking, steel on steel, from one length of rail to the next. The image of the train rolling across the empty land beneath the stars like a giant centipede with a hundred wheels instead of a hundred legs pleased him. And he drifted back to sleep happy in the knowledge that again he was moving.

In the morning he woke and lay listening to the double beat of the wheels on the line, warm and comfortable, savouring the rocking motion of the coach. After a while he roused himself and dressed hurriedly. Raising the cover of the stainless steel basin he washed in the trickle of water that was so cold it seemed to burn his skin. Then he dropped and opened the folding table and sat down to breakfast - half a packet of digestive biscuits. Now that it was light he was as greatly pleased with the interior as he had been with the exterior of the carriage in the night. It was all green upholstery and rich brown woodwork, even wooden shutters at the window. On the walls, attached to the underside of the folded back middle bunks were black and white photographs behind glass. Typically rugged landscapes with aloes, acacias, baobabs. One scene of a steam locomotive pulling its long load across an arid plain, puffs of smoke rising above a line of hills to join the clouds.

The train was slowing. He pulled down the window and tasted the crisp cold air smelling of dry veld. The sun was just up in the east to the rear, weak and wintry. Behind them? It should have been on the right warming the corridor side of the coaches. Strange. Maybe the line was negotiating its way around a hill. They stopped, moved forward a few metres and halted alongside the tracks of a siding. Further up a raised water tank stood before windmill and house. Some distance from the house was a tin shack, alone in the flinty waste. GOAGEB, proclaimed the concrete sign in black lettering. He had never heard of Goageb. The train began to move again and he went into the corridor and walked up and down to counter the chill in the air. He did several turns and discovered that the only other occupied compartment was at the front and furthest from the non-Whites. The low voices of two men conversing in German, desultory and muffled.

He returned to his compartment and watched the slowly passing countryside as the sun rose higher behind the train. He felt carefree and light. This was a marvellous way to travel, solitary and undisturbed, through sparse, uncluttered country, big and empty. Midmorning the train stopped in the middle of nowhere. There was no immediately apparent reason for the halt. He leaned out, looking up and down the line for signs of habitation but the low hills, patchy expanses of yellow grass and outcrops of boulders showed no evidence of human interference or organisation. It was quiet too and he became aware of the wind, bending the grass and nudging the carriage so that the shutter knocked and was still and a cross draught from somewhere sighed and ceased, sighed and expired.

There was a shudder and the train began to move again. He realised now that the track was taking a gentle curve and the diesel unit up front had been hidden from view. The cause of delay became apparent as a gang of some thirty or forty black men came into sight, leaning on picks and koevoets and shovels. Two white men stood against a bakkie parked in the low scrub and further on were tents and a truck. The expressions were stolid, uninterested. A pair of eyes met his and slid away and one man called out, “Sigaret.” It was odd, this fleeting encounter, the closeness of the upturned faces and yet the great divide between those who remained and the passing traveller. He thought of spitting, or making a gesture, something to rouse an emotion and spark contact but the train was gathering speed and they had slipped by. He was about to pull up the window when, glancing back, he was shocked to see a transformation take place. A passenger form one of the rear coaches had called out and the faces lit up in an instant, arms waved, there was a chorus of shouts and laughter and one of the gangers trotted a few paces alongside before dropping back, then they were gone from his view.

The bottle of Bols he had bought in Vanrhynsdorp was just under half full. He poured a generous tot into his enamel mug and topped it up with water. He looked out at the yellow savannah and the isolated clumps of scrub that formed islands of darkest green, almost black. Beyond the low hills to the southwest he sensed a great openness, an expanse falling away into an immense wasteland. There was something different about this emptiness. Maybe it was the sheer width of the landscape that he had not previously encountered. And there was a kind of diffidence that said yes, that’s right, there’s nothing here, just dusty weeds growing in stony rubbish as far as the eye can see. There was a self-effacement, an absence of feature that belied a quality, both familiar and alien, that eluded him.

Henry spread a sheet of greaseproof brown paper on the table before him and worked a small quantity of dagga into a handful of Balkan Special, before filling his pipe and tidying away the rest of the mix in the brown paper. Then with the aid of five or six matches he lit up and soon filled the compartment with a blue haze of Turkish Delight. Once the pipe was drawing well he took a sip of brandy and then a puff and a sniff. It was this sniff that was so rewarding, so gratifying, a nasal inhalation supremely satisfying in its effect on his state of mind. He had learnt to reserve this dagga indulgence for the appropriate moment, when his mood was calm and receptive, his feelings buoyant, and depression and anxiety banished to distant realms.

Outside the morning wore on and the train kept a slow but steady pace. Colours diminished and there were dark shadows beside boulders and in the folds of hills. The sky stretched out and got bigger, clear and pale, almost white towards the sun.

He poured some brandy and began to clean out his pipe. The scene had become more rugged and the train was descending, definitely descending. It was just after noon as the track wound down into a cutting with steep brown hills on either side. AUS - ALT 4742 FT. There was an attempt at a garden in front of the station building - a low hedge of aloes about some petunias and marigolds, and a tattered and torn piece of shrubbery that he at first took to be a heap of rubbish dumped in the garden by someone bearing the stationmaster a grudge. In the ticket office a fat official had just finished stuffing a length of sausage into his mouth and was wiping his hands on one of the signalman’s red flags when Henry entered and asked if there would be time to stretch his legs before the train continued its journey. The man eyed him suspiciously and then stated in a hostile German accent that there would be a delay of at least six hours.

“Six hours, for Christ sake! Is this your idea of Teutonic punctuality? Is this how they run the railways back in the Fatherland? Besser versputet als nie. Six hours! A fine example to set the indigenous unfortunates under your command. Poor buggers, struggling as they are to come to terms with such foreign perversities as reliability and trustworthiness. Sechs stunda! Verdammte scheisse! There’d better be a damned good explanation or I make a phone call to my uncle in Windhoek.”

Henry was quite unconcerned about the delay. Six hours, six days. It was of no consequence yet he chose a line of attack to forestall any awkward questions. Such as, Where’s your ticket? He didn’t like the way this schwein had looked at him and it was a pleasure to insult him.

“Ek tut mir leid, mein Herr.” It had worked and Henry smirked as the official became defensive and apologetic, responding to abuse with Pavlovian predictability. “Ze Luderitz train it is delay, yes. Ze two train, zey cannot cross exzepting here by Aus. Ze Keetmanshoop train it must vait. Ze Luderitz train, it…”

“Ja ja ja! Ich versteche sie. A logistical oversight. Two trains need two sets of track in order to pass each other. So we wait six hours. Dummheit uber alles. I shall report this idiocy to higher authority.” The sullen face turned pale. “Alright. Ipi lo kroeg, kraut? Ich habe durst. Where’s the hotel? Hey, and I hold you directly responsible for the safety of my luggage.”

The Bahnhof Hotel was up the hill along with the rest of the town which consisted of half a dozen shops, two garages and, further to the south, a cluster of residences. Henry strolled the dusty streets enjoying the warmth of the sun. At the Shell garage he paused. The petrol attendant was clearly of Bushman stock, short, slight of build, tight krissy hair, flat Mongoloid features creased and lined like the skin of dried fruit. He was in conversation with a family group: mother, father and three children. The woman was undeniably drunk and the two men ticking over. He could hear the speech and with the surging thrill of a tourist he realised he was overhearing the ancient language for the fist time. He knelt down, undoing his shoelace and then retying it. It was a wondrous sound comprised mostly of clicks, clacks, kisses, hisses and croaks and rasps - a type of insect talk. He could spend no more time on his laces and decided to approach them. He drew close and a heavy cloud blotted out their sun.

“Good afternoon,” he addressed the petrol jockey. “I wonder if you could give me directions on how to find the hotel?” The children stared at him openly with almost as much curiosity as he felt for them. The adults showed an initial flash of antipathy that was an unguarded and genuine display of their feelings. But after the briefest of moments their slitted eyes flicked away and down: they stood in surly muteness. There had been no mistaking it, the look was one of repugnance and hatred.

“Er, I’m looking for the hotel. Where is the hotel?”

They avoided his gaze and began to mutter between them.

“Die hotel. Ek soek die hotel. Waar is die hotel?”

At exactly the same moment the two men and the woman burst into uproarious merriment and an instant later the children had joined in, cackling and shrieking and stamping feet and bending double and clapping hands. The garage employee pointed to the hotel thirty paces away across the street and Henry turned and made a show of mortification.

“Oh gee. What a silly fellow I am. Thank you.” The laughter had stopped and the woman now came right up to him and began to importune for money, her cupped hands held out. The wizened monkey face, toothless mouth and glittering chips of stone that were her eyes made him recoil. Hastily he dug in his pocket and found some coins and once she had taken them the act was abruptly cut and she turned away as if he did not exist.

A flight of steps led up from the pavement to the stoep and he sat down at a table half in the sun, half in shade, looking north over the station and the hills through which the railway line had cut. There were no other patrons but he could hear voices coming from the public bar. Presently a waiter came out and he ordered beer and a plate of food.

After the meal he drank more beer and the afternoon wore on painlessly. Two farmers came and went; a rep, a policeman. A brand new, shiny yellow truck came up from the station, engine roaring and trailing a great tumble of dust behind it. Around four o’clock he decided to take a walk.

Ian Martin’s controversial novel Pop-splat is now available from http://www.pop-splat.co.za.

from birdlips i send this
and only this..
and
the ibis took flight