kagablog

At the Friday following (4 March), internationally acclaimed South African film-maker, artist and writer, Aryan Kaganof, gave a stimulating lecture on the genealogy of the “digital underground” illustrated with screenings of influential short films including ANTINOOS by Dionysos Andronis – Greece (1991); SUBSTITUTION No.4 by Kiki Picasso - France (2002); and POEMS THAT SHOOT by Catherine Henegan - South Africa (2004).

Kaganof concluded his presentation by showing his award winning documentary WESTERN 4.33. The documentary investigates the German concentration camps in Namibia where the indigenous Herero population were massacred in the early part of the 20th Century. Soundtrack includes music by Lamonte Young, John Cage, Friedrich Nietzsche, Macy Gray, Jesus Rodriguez and South Africa’s own extreme noise terror outfit, Virgins.

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They took her up long stone corridors, all the way to the top. She was gulping in post-traumatic shock, bare feet trailing across the stone while the blood dried across her pajamas. The higher they got, the more cluttered the passages became. Equipment and hardware had been set up everywhere. Hastily erected light-banks illuminated chugging fan units, fat cable stations and miles and miles of foil tubing. She stumbled over whirring valve casings and spaghetti braids of hot electrical wire, guided inexorably toward the zenith: a massive hydraulic airlock situated at the end of a sealed corridor. They came to a halt and one of the guards slammed a large metal button. Klaxons sounded while a red light began whirling above the door. She looked down to see her bare feet pigeon toed against a scuffed WELCOME mat. Seals ruptured with a hiss of pressurized gas and the circular vault door cracked. The astronaut reached out and pulled her into the chamber beyond without a word, slamming the airlock shut behind him. The guards regarded each other wearily, shrugged and blundered off.

Taty found herself in a claustrophobic metal space between the first airlock door and another. A red light pulsed above while metal pipes shook and throbbed around her, rattling with pressure. Each airlock door had two levers marked PURGE and RELEASE, respectively. The astronaut yanked down the RELEASE on the second lock and they emerged into the control room. Taty gazed around, stupefied, taking in all the screens, glass and consoles while he sealed the door behind them.

“I wasn’t expecting you to stab a mother figure in the windpipe,” he mentioned conversationally.

“How did you see!” she burst out hysterically. “You promised no cameras in my room!”

“That was before someone used you as a birthday cake. Come with me, I have a bathroom you can use.”

He turned abruptly, clumping down a spiral staircase. She rubbed her tearful eyes, shaking with tension, following him because there was nothing else for her to do under the circumstances. The case wound down into a luxurious, circular lounge. Long airport windows gazed down over the jungle and some illuminated portions of the roof terraces. These windows described a broad two hundred degree sweep and you could imagine it being very bright in there in the day. The curved walls and ceiling had been padded in soft cream diamonds of leather. Dense blonde shag occurred infrequently along the leather floor, collecting like pubic hair between an arc of couches. These couches were of a curious design. They blended into the leather of the walls, curling up into a long tube with open sides. You literally had to crawl in, as though you were entering a tunnel. Pale illumination lit this soft leather tube from within. He noticed her gawking and cleared his throat robotically.

“The couches have seatbelts as well,” he explained. “But, of course, you can’t see them from this angle.”

She sneered at him, kicking over a nearby light box. She wanted it to break, but the box turned out to be rubbery. It just bounced, rolling over undamaged. It made her want to cry. There seemed to be no sharp edges in the lounge. Even the large recreational monitor was oval. A door led to what she assumed was a galley, while plastic urns overflowed with enormous, tropical orchids. The strangest detail, however, was the long line of retro fridges, secured to the far wall with straps and joined by a golf bag. By the time she had recognized the function of these items, he had already begun to move down the wide, black tile corridor, which ramped downward from behind the stairs.

The seemingly endless corridor descended in zigzags, which were comprised of long stretches and asymmetrical turns. The tiling was uniform, covering walls, floor and ceiling without break or detail, creating a peculiar lack of dimension. This illusory aspect made the approaching turns unexpected after such long, unbroken sections. They manifested as optical distortions, coagulating at the end of a gleaming recession of perspective. A substance, bearing a resemblance to tooth enamel ran between these tiles. This enamel glowed strongly, emitting an even, white illumination throughout the shaft. The result was quite shadow-less, further enhancing the starkness of the corridor. Taty limped after the striding astronaut, trailing coagulated blood along the walls as she continually leaned against them for support. She felt as though she were about to collapse at any point, the stress of recent events manifesting as an inexplicable rage toward the astronaut. Perhaps she would have been angry with anyone who had been there. Thinking about it made her want to smash her head repeatedly against the tiles.

“The corridor has to be long,” The astronaut grated in the manner of a tour guide. “In case there is a breach in the hydro-system and we need to seal it off. A long, bent corridor gives us some extra seconds to maintain structural integrity.”

“What the fuck!” she shouted in fatigue.

“Of course you haven’t been briefed yet,” he mentioned.

She padded sullenly in his wake, wishing she could take a bottle of pills and just die.

The corridor terminated in a landing, emerging into the raised center of a dark, spherical vault, which was about twenty meters in diameter. The landing and walls of this globe-room were of the same tiling, except that inside the chamber the enamel was lightless. This changed quickly however when the astronaut approached a simplistic panel with four glowing buttons; red, green, yellow and white. He pressed the white button, instantly flooding the spherical vault with light from between the thousands of tiles. Taty threw a hand over her face, smudging a comical line of blood over her nose. Smiley twisted the button like a dial, adjusting the intensity to a bearable level, which allowed her to take in the details of the huge and peculiar area. The chamber was relatively featureless, except for openings at the top and bottom. The evenly spaced tile created a smooth, swirling effect, highlighting the disparity of the upper and lower regions. The top was a flat chromium grille, spanning over five meters, neatly punctured with hundreds of square holes, arranged in circles. The bottom of the chamber boasted a slightly smaller circular feature, about two meters across. This was a chrome-lined hole, which fed into a shiny, sloping pipe of equal diameter. Various objects and utilities surrounded the edge of this opening: buckle stirrups, a lever and a thin tap rising from the chrome, along with two manholes, which had been set into the curvature of the tiles. Discreet metal rungs led down from the landing down to this hole-area. The acoustics were strange in the room, lending their voices a flat, underwater sense of distance.

“This turns on the water,” the astronaut told her, indicating the green button. “It’s tuned to a heavy, slow flow to avoid excessive inhalation of water vapour – you could easily drown like that.”

“No you can’t silly!”

“Things are different in orbit,” he mentioned vaguely.

“Where’s the toilet at?” she asked, becoming disturbed by all of this.

“There’s one upstairs which doubles as an escape pod, down here you have to squat at the edge of the hole.”

“That’s like totally primal! I’m not a fucking kangaroo!”

“Its all part of the system,” he explained curtly. “Come along.”

He began to descend the rungs toward the chromium-lipped hole and she followed sulkily. The tiles leveled out and she slipped off the rungs, shuffling down the curvature to the edge, where she stood staring down the wide, shiny pipe. He clumped down in his own time and indicated the shiny lever and white rubber stirrups.

“Stirrups go around your ankles, so you don’t drift off during business. Lever activates the suction-fans. Turn them on when you want to use the toilet – it pulls waste and water down. Can’t have excrement floating around like thought bubbles, can we?”

She pulled a face and kicked him rather ineffectively in his heavily padded shin.

“Call this a bathroom!” she shouted.

He ignored her outburst and strolled casually around the circumference of the hole.

“Water and waste gets filtered down to the indoor forest. So every time you shower, the forest gets watered and overflow gets cycled. Waste is siphoned off and turned into fertilizer. Paradise Discothèque does hold large basement tanks if things get disastrous. We can also scavenge the Jacuzzi’s, pools and floors below for ice. After awhile though, we will need to replenish the supply from a natural source. That’s when you press the red button.”

“Why the fuck are you telling me all this! This is not school!”

She glowered at him and paced around ridiculously while he waited patiently for her to calm down. Despite her show of aggravation, he could see that she was becoming intrigued and inquisitive.

“What’s an indoor forest?” she eventually asked, fiddling around with her toes.

He crossed around and raised one of the two circular manholes. Each had a word engraved across it. The one he had just lifted sported the legend FOREST, while the closed manhole cover read LAUNDRY. She approached cautiously and stared down into the opening. A spiral staircase led down through thick stone to an unseen lower area. He beckoned to the stairs and she gingerly descended, shooting him a ‘no funny business’ look as she passed beneath the stone. The area into which she emerged was vast. It actually seemed to span an entire floor of Paradise Discothèque, receding in all directions to very distant walls and windows. She had emerged onto a small metal landing close to the high stone ceiling, gazing down upon the fantastic spectacle of thousands of evenly spaced Christmas trees and coconut palms. The trees were set out in alternating checkerboard squares, interrupted occasionally by a vine trellis holding either runner beans or dusky black grapes. The many trees grew out of a thigh-deep layer of hydroponic jelly, which rendered their root systems visible, as though viewed through clear water. Sunlamps had been embedded beneath these root networks, and the light the emitted refracted evenly throughout the glutinous jelly, saturating the massive space in a warm glow. Beside her, she could see the silver waste chute, coiling sideways, disseminating into a barrage of pipes and filtration systems, which ran all the way out to the distant walls. Various contraptions and consoles chugged at the opposite side of the landing, controlling various aspects of the filtration. Thousands of tiny sprinkler heads speckled the ceiling and she twisted at the nearest, feeling her fingertips become moist. Crusted blood dissolved, running down her wrist, filling her with wretched melancholy. No stairs or ladders led down to the trees, so she dragged herself back into the globe chamber above. The astronaut had climbed back to the mouth of the corridor and was holding up a fluffy white towel. It was a comical image, but she couldn’t imagine finding anything funny while she was covered in blood.

“Why do you have a forest in your basement?” she demanded.

“To produce oxygen and grow food, obviously,” he replied.

“How do you get down to the trees?”

“You float of course.”

“You what!”

He unexpectedly reached down and activated the green button. A heavy fall of warm water rained down from the ceiling grille in a broad circumference, instantly creating a pillow of steam. Taty was caught in the center of it and became instantly drenched. She was about to protest when she suddenly realized how soothing and welcome the warm water was to her bruised and battered body. She stood for a moment, in a drugged fashion, watching the blood wash off and skirl away. She wandered slowly to the edge of the pit, feeling as though she were walking outside in the rain.

“I’ll be up in the control booth if you want to undress,” the astronaut called, amplifying his voice to penetrate above through the rush of water. “There’s a soap tap and you can toss your clothes down the laundry hatch.”

“Well, it’s nothing you haven’t seen before Mister Cameraman!” she yelled.

He disappeared back down the corridor without comment, leaving Taty alone in the tingling downpour. All the tension of the night seemed to detonate somewhere within and she began to cry, slowly peeling her clothes off to finally lie sobbing on the tiles, feeling the water wash everything away in a steady gush of warmth. Below her, the filtration systems had activated. Gauges began to dance as pipes clanked and shook. The sprinkler system came online after an allotted processing period and a light rain began to shower down softly over the quietly rustling leaves.

7–24 April (Theatre/Teater)

Cast/Rolverdeling: Jitsvinger, Kyle Shepherd, Blaq Pearl and others/en ander
Directed by/Regie: Catherine Henegan
Dramaturg: Aryan Kaganof
Video: Dylan Valley

Hiphop poet and performer Jitsvinger, jazz pianist Kyle Shepherd and singer and poet Blaq Pearl trace the origins of Afrikaans all the way back to the 1600s and follow it through to the present day. By combining various musical styles like Ghoema and Kaapse Klopse, poetry and video, the performers set out to redefine the untold story of the language as it has developed over the years. In true hip-hop style, incorporating beats and rhymes, glitches and scratches, this cutting-edge hiphopera looks at the language of the people of the Cape and celebrates all its different influences.

Die hiphop-digter en -kunstenaar Jitsvinger, jazz-pianis Kyle Shepherd en sanger/digter Blaq Pearl gaan op soek na Afrikaans se roots en hulle stap saam die Taal van sy eerste babatreetjies in die 1600’s tot vandag. ‘n Allegaartjie van musiekstyle, soos Ghoema en Kaapse Klopse, gedigte en film, vertel die onvertelde storie van die Taal en hoe dit oor die jare ontwikkel het. In ware hiphop-styl, met ritmes en rympies, vertel dié vlymskerp hiphopera vannie Taal vannie mense affie Kaap – en vier al daai invloede wat Afrikaans Afrikaaps maak.

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you can order esse here

After the introduction of apartheid, the Afrikaans language first became a symbol of Afrikaans nationalism and then one of Afrikaans oppression. But, as Max du Preez argues in this programme, when, in June 1976, the youth of Soweto protested, it wasn’t so much against the language itself, as against its imposition as a language of instruction. This documentary takes another look at the position of Afrikaans today and, in the process, examines the different kinds of Afrikaans that exist. It starts by discussing the true origin of the language, assessing in particular the contribution made by the 19th century slave population of the Western Cape. In the Northern Cape, Afrikaans was forced upon the San people, to the extent that their own language has become almost extinct. Tsotsi-taal also incorporates elements of Afrikaans, as does Sabela, the secret language spoken in prisons. Though the Afrikaans spoken on the Cape Flats, sometimes known as Gamtaal, differs greatly from so-called official Afrikaans, it has an equal right to exist and the film makes a plea for the acceptance of all these variations, which is what makes it a living language. Besides Max du Preez, others who comment include Dr. Alan Boesak, Prof. Hein Willemse, Dianne Ferrus and Mr. Fat of Brasse Vannie Kaap.

Director of Photography: Adile Cook

Sound: Kgotso Pedi

Research: Ethel Williams-Abraamse

Online Editor: Crispin Stopforth

Offline Editor: King

Narrator: Jaqui January

Original Music: Crispiwan

Final Audio Mix: Floris Brand

Translators: Charles Leonard & Ethel Williams-Abraamse

Producers: Faizel Cook & Ethel Williams-Abraamse

Commissioning Editors: Eugene Paramoer & Linky Bierman

Cut to Black Media (for SABC)

..my skin is sweet..
to your deep
eyes
lips and teeth
..biting.

my moon
shaped face
in your
dark places,

i inhale
looking
for light
tasting
your life
flow
as you
moan
and glow

The very first time I thought I had sex
I had no knowledge of the word
nor its roaring golds of heat
nor its aqueatic shades of
after-ripple..

I knew only
some abstract scent
of stink-gogga
- a burst which
dismayed my bumble-berried mouth -
I had lifted her into the tree
awkward,
desperately swooned her into secret branches
dripping
with shiny blacks
and lustrous purple

Snorting and violently shaking my
head I
realised
the stink-gogga had sacrificed itself
to alarm my senses to her naked belly

She too had a belly-button
gentler
it soft-sloped inward

pretty complement to my gently
vulgar one, jutting out shily and
proud all at once

We once, standing tall and awkward
in a miniature forest of grass
me bow-legged, her flushed on tip-toe
fit them into tickling couplet
mine in hers
bellies blushing with foreign hungers

That night strange colours kept peaced sleep at bay,
‘One day’, they whispered in
queer scapes and boiling shades,
‘You will taste the violence of magic..’

a cat barks
a mouse farts

the sound of awakening
the buddha meditates

In Memoriam Surendran Reddy (1962-2010)

Surendran Reddy, died on Monday night in Germany, at the age of 47. He had been ill for two years and was in hospital for the last few days. He is survived by his devoted parents Leela and Y.G. Reddy, his brother Rajen, and his daughter Leela, He is also mourned by many close friends, especially Heike and Florian in Konstanz, and I am sure he will be mourned by fans who loved his music, his indomitable spirit, and his larger-than-life creativity and originality.

I first met Surendran at the University of Durban-Westville Music Department in 1983. We had just joined the department as young lecturers: Surendran much younger than me at a mere 21 years old. We bonded immediately, dealing with our shared abhorrence at the apartheid hegemony still reigning over a black institution such as this by transforming it into a surreal artwork. I do not know how I would have survived UDW at that time, without him. I also grew to know and love his family at this time, and spent many hours in their home in Reservoir Hills. We played the piano together, we talked endlessly about music, literature, philosophy, and from him I learned more about the pain of being black in South Africa than I have from anyone before or since. We were once about to enter an empty restaurant in Amanzimtoti together for a cup of tea when the waiter met us at the door, surveyed the empty room and said, “I’m sorry, but we are full”. We did not know whether to be angry, to laugh, or to cry. I think that on the drive back to Durban we did all three.

Surendran (or “Sir Rendran” as he liked to call himself, using that super-upper-class British accent he sported) was a child prodigy as a pianist, winning an Associated Board overseas scholarship at the age of 15 that enabled him to study at the Royal College of Music in London. His piano teacher was Yonty Solomon and he had a wonderful harpsichord teacher (whose name I cannot recall). He majored in harpsichord for the ARCM (Associateship of the Royal College of Music) that he obtained at the age of 16, having already achieved his FTCT (Fellowship of Trinity College, London) in piano, the year before. He graduated with a BMus (Hons.) in Musicology when he was still only 18. Surendran then began post-graduate student at King’s College (London University), where his teachers included Brian Trowell, Reinhard Strom, Pierluigi Petrobelli, Rosamund McGuinness, and Thomas Walker. Visa problems obliged him to return to South Africa, however (it had never really been his home; he was brought up in Zimbabwe) in 1983, without completing the masters degree he so much coveted. He took up a lectureship in theory of music (I think it was still called “harmony and counterpoint” at that stage) at UDW, and held it for two years.

In London before this, he had won many awards, prizes, competitions, and scholarships, and had opportunities to perform at the Wigmore Hall, St Martin-in-the-Fields, and Queen Elizabeth Hall. (His website www.surendranreddy.com gives more information.) But although his outstanding talent was recognised in South Africa by some people, the climate in 1983 was not always helpful to taking him to further heights. He was a finalist in the SABC Competition for Keyboard players at the end of 1983, for example, in both the piano and harpsichord categories – an unheard of achievement – but, much to his and many other people’s surprise, was not the overall winner. This was a deep disappointment which he took in a highly professional spirit, but the kind of shadows such experiences cast over his life deepened over the years, and it is my personal viewpoint that it is what eventually drove him into what one might call exile, in Konstanz, Germany. He loathed German bureaucracy but he made good friends there, eventually became a German citizen, and had a reasonably successful free-lance career. He also made frequent trips back to South Africa, to performed, and to see his family.

Surendran worked with many great artists, recorded two solo CDs (Reddy Steady Go and Rough’n Reddy) and was a fabulous rock-classical-jazz pianist. He was also a composer. His earliest pieces were pastiches of 18th and 19th-century music, sometimes collected into “suites” that brilliantly combined historic chordal and contrapuntal gestures with his contemporary taste for jazz’. Sometimes his music was pure sentimentality, sometimes, pure irony. This ability to understand musical style inside out made him a great teacher, at UDW in Durban, at Fuba in Johannesburg, and privately wherever he happened to be. One of the last times I saw him he was giving one of his completely wacky and lovable lectures of “Clazz” (his term for the cross-over jazz-classical style he perfected) to an almost empty hall at Pretoria University, along with his brilliant tabla- player friend and colleague from Konstanz, Florian.

His fusion band Channel 18 (Surendran on piano and keyboards, Bruce Cassidy on EVI, Denis Lalouette on bass, and Rob Watson on drums) performed all over South Africa. One of his latest projects in Germany was a duo called “Campaign for Real Time” in which he collaborated with German composer / keyboardist Andreas Apitz in a programme featuring their own works.

One of my best memories of Surendran the artist is the complete cycle of Bach’s 48 Preludes and Fugues that he played to a small audience at UDW in (I think) 1983, on harpsichord and clavichord. It was spread over four days and he grouped the works together into four collections, not playing them in the usual chronological order, but approaching them with the insight of someone who has powers of understanding as a performer that one rarely experiences.

It is hard to imagine the world without him. Farewell, dear friend.

christine lucia

The fiasco at Eskom has been oscillating between tragedy and farce at such a rate that it’s become difficult to tell them apart. No one in their right mind is likely to disagree that Eskom, an institution that should serve the public good, has been captured by an avaricious elite and turned into a vampiric excrescence on our society. In the wake of Jacob Maroga’s incredible demand for an R85 million golden handshake even parliament has felt the need to pressurise the cabinet to end the ‘looting’ at parastatals.

But whatever steps are taken to address the fiasco it seems clear enough that much of the price for the extravagant folly at Megawatt Park will be paid by ordinary people. And ordinary people will, of course, have no say in how the deal goes down.

The National Energy Regulator of SA (Nersa) public hearings into tariff increases were, as mandated public participation exercises usually are in South Africa, entirely closed to any meaningful public engagement. At the Midrand hearings representatives from Earthlife and the Anti-Privatisation Forum were locked out of the venue by security guards and then assaulted and arrested by the police. The charges of public violence were dropped the next day in what has become a standard practice across the country in which the state misuses the power of arrest as an instant punishment for taking democracy seriously.

Already there are many people who have a legal electricity connection but have to get up at four in morning to chop wood to heat water and cook food because they just can’t afford to pay for electricity along with schools fees, transport, medical costs and all the rest. Under these conditions unlawful reconnections are a popular strategy to sustain access to electricity. The practice is ubiquitous, but the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee (SECC) first organised it and give it a public political expression.

Shack dwellers, many of whom have not been connected to the grid by the state, also appropriate electricity. This is not, at all, unique to South Africa. On the contrary it is one of the universal features of shack life linking up Lagos, Istanbul, Bombay, Rio and Johannesburg as nodes in a decidedly international mode of urban life.

Neither Eskom’s ‘izinyoka’ campaign that tried to present the people who install self organised electricity connections as snakes or the often violent raids of police and the private security companies contracted to municipalities have had any success in teaching people to accept that they do not deserve to have electricity. The police raids often extend beyond ripping out self organised electricity connections and it’s not unusual for them to include the confiscation of all electrical appliances, with DVD players seeming to be most at risk, on the grounds that they must be stolen.

But as the police disconnect, people reconnect and as the police steal people’s equipment they replace it. In some cases the police go through periods of disconnecting daily and so people disconnect themselves every morning and reconnect themselves every evening.

When middle class residents inform on their poor neighbours it has become common for shack dwellers to respond to police raids by disconnecting their middle class neighbours en masse – usually at suppertime. Sometimes an explanatory note is left at the electricity box. Once this has been done three or four times an understanding is usually reached to live and let live.

The reality is that the attempt to stop unlawful connections has about as much chance of success as influx control had in the 1980s or, for that matter, as attempts to stop middle class people sharing music and software.

In some cases self-organised connections are arranged in a haphazard and individualised way and while some people are careful to use and to bury properly insulated wire, others are not. There are real risks when open wires are left dangling in dense settlements and people have been killed. But people are also killed in shack fires and when connections are arranged in a carefully organised and safe way by a well organised community organisation or social movement they can be done very safely and keep whole communities safe from fire.

Following the pioneering struggle of the SECC, popular organisations and movements around the country refer to the work of organising the appropriation of electricity collectively, safely and without profit as ‘Operation Khanyisa’.

It is not unusual for the media to respond to self-organised electricity connections with a sometimes racialised hostility and paranoia bordering on hysteria. Following propagandistic statements from the police and politicians, cable theft and self-organised electricity connections are routinely conflated even though it is quite obvious that these are two entirely different practices organised by different people for different purposes.

Deaths from shack fires are routinely ascribed to drunkenness rather than an absence of electricity. And when connections are made recklessly, this is seized upon to delegitimize all self organised connections - including those undertaken with exemplary care. It is regularly, asserted, as if it were a fact, that all self organised connections are made for payment. And, predictably, when Eskom’s executive looting, poor planning and massive subsidies to smelters leads to load shedding some newspapers are quick to blame ‘theft’ by the poor for the crisis.

A life without electricity is one in which shack fires are a constant threat, cell phones can’t be charged and basic daily tasks become time consuming, repetitive and dangerous. It also leaves people feeling structurally excluded from access to a modern life. There is no doubt that a critical mass of people are not willing to accept that they should be consigned to systemic exclusion and that they see the activity of appropriating electricity as a fundamentally necessary, decent and social activity.

The social definition of theft is something that changes over time and that is understood differently from different perspectives. In the words of a famous old English poem “The law locks up the man or woman/ Who steals the goose from off the common/ But leaves the greater villain loose/ Who steals the common from off the goose.” Who is really at fault when the boss of a public utility has entirely fatuous personal expenses that run into the millions and some of the ‘snakes’ who have connected themselves up to the wires that carry the means to heat and light past them have nothing more than a couple of slices of white bread and a cup of sweet tea to cook up for supper?

In its original sense privatisation was about the process of social exclusion via private appropriation rather than the question of whether or not an institution was owned by the state or private power. In contemporary South Africa, state ownership of key organisations is producing a degree of social exclusion and private enrichment every bit as perverse as that produced by private ownership. It makes perfect sense to hold Eskom and MTN in the same contempt.

As exclusion deepens in the wake of the Eskom crisis, people will respond with increasing popular appropriation.

For as long as Eskom continues to see public utilities as an opportunity for private profit, and electricity as a commodity for private consumption rather than a common good, civil society should invoke the tradition of civil disobedience and support communities and popular movements to resist state repression while they organise to appropriate electricity on a non-commodified, safe and carefully disciplined basis.

this article first published online here: http://www.sacsis.org.za/site/article/418.1

cleansing
deeper..

a little
..sun

moving like a poem
whispered
or sung.

a dream,
unread
endless.

reaching
the apex,
the sign reads
‘the mortal failures
of long lost dreams”..
.

looking for
the sun’s
edge..
i burn
fall
wailing
an moaning .

my mind is blank
fixed on nothing.
god is on my mind

Moeder ving de sneetjes op die uit de broodrooster sprongen en smeerde er een voor vader en een voor haarzelf met appelstroop. En wel op zo’n manier dat vader, terwijl hij met verbazing kennis nam van de inhoud van de brief die zojuist bezorgd was, onwillekeurig moest denken aan een langvergeten droom om percussionist te worden in een Salsaband.

Aan het eind van de brief gekomen draaide hij het papier om en staarde voor een moment streng richting de eindeloosheid van de blanco achterzijde. Alsof die onbeschreven zijde medeplichtig was aan de verbijsterende tekst die hij zojuist gelezen had.
Hij liet zijn oog nog eens vluchtig over de tekst glijden en mompelde: “Zo, zo.”
Moeder had inmiddels vaders geroosterde boterham in vieren gesneden en zette het bordje voor hem neer. Ze keek oplettend naar zijn gezicht.
“En? Wat is het voor brief?”
Vader leek uit diepe gedachten wakker te schrikken: “Hm?… zeg je? Oh.. van de Gemeente.”
“Van de Gemeente? Waarom zouden die ons een brief sturen? Wat staat er in?”
Vader vouwde de brief op en stopte hem weer terug in de enveloppe.
“We moeten ons huis uit. De subsidie wordt gestopt.”
Moeders mes zweefde een seconde of twee in dromerig vacuum, waarna hij zacht werd neergelegd op de rand van het bord. Fijne appelstroop¬vlekjes aan de punt van het mes glansden zacht in het warme ochtendlicht.
“Werden wij gesubsidieerd dan?” vroeg moeder verbaasd.
“Blijkbaar.”

Een onwerkelijke stilte nam bezit van de propere en zonovergoten eetkamer in het huis aan de Beukenlaan nummer 42. En zoals altijd in dit soort situaties zag de wandklok zijn kans schoon om de seconden er eens extra hard uit te rammen: TIK!TAK!!! TIK! TAK!! TIK!!!
“En wat nu?” vroeg moeder. “Wat gaat er met ons gebeuren? Waar moeten we naartoe?”
“Dat staat er niet bij.”
Moeder keek haar man strak aan. “Laat zien,” zei ze en wees naar de brief.
Vader pakte de enveloppe en stopte die in zijn binnenzak.
“Em,” zei hij zacht, “deze brief hebben wij nooit ontvangen.”
“Mag dat?”
“Hoe kan men je verbieden iets niet te ontvangen?”
Moeder schudde haar hoofd.
“Maar wat een rare brief!” zei ze. “En per wanneer zou het eigenlijk in moeten gaan?”
“Nou ja, zo’n beetje nu, geloof ik,” zei Vader.

Hoewel hij een paar kilometer verderop werkte was het die ochtend alsof ze hem uitzwaaide voor een veel langere reis. Naar een andere wereld misschien wel. Voor het eerst sinds jaren liep ze met Vader mee tot aan het hek. Draaide zijn sjawl nog even goed. Keek hem ernstig en onderzoekend aan. Toen ze zei: “Wees voorzichtig,” was het de stem van de moeder die sprak met de mond van de vrouw Ze keek hem na terwijl hij krachtig en bijna jongensachtig enthousisast, met kleine rukjes aan het stuur, wegfietste. Bel me als er iets is, dacht ze. Toen ze terug door de tuin liep en links en rechts de straat inkeek leek het wel zondag. Liep de klok misschien een uur voor?
Binnengekomen belde ze de tijd, maar die kwam nagenoeg overeen met wat de klok in de keuken aangaf. .

Het bleef de hele dag stil en heiig. De wereld was ondiep in een grijs egaal licht. “Wanneer het mistig is zoals vandaag, gaan de minuten op elkaar lijken en klontert de tijd samen tot een zachte stuiterbal,” dacht ze. Vroeger dan normaal kreeg ze trek. Haar lichaam hunkerde er naar om inwendig omhelst te worden door de alcohol. Ze kon heel mooi drinken. Ze werd nooit straalbezopen, maar bleef, hoeveel ze ook dronk altijd een beetje tipsy. Verbaasd over zichzelf en aanverwante zaken.

Nog voor het echt begon te schemeren stond ze in de keuken. Gedienstig aan de wens een prachtige Béchamelsaus te maken. Een twee-literpan vol. Ze smolt de boter en plaatste met een eetlepel een miniatuurgebergte van bloem in die sissende oceaan. Met vlugge gymnastische bewegingen duwde ze de boter door de bloem en liet de pan boven het vuur zweven terwijl ze het tot een pasta kneedde. Ze voegde de melk, boullion en peper toe en klopte de eerst onwillige brokstukken van het pasta-continent tot een dromerige, zelfvoldane saus.
Tenslotte klopte ze er een eigeel doorheen en doopte toen haar vinger in de warme oppervlak dat prachtig zacht glansde als de huid van een vormeloos wezen. Ze wist niet van een andere chemische reactie die de schoonheid van een perfect gemaakte Béchamelsaus kon overtreffen. De volmaakte eenvoud van het gerecht. De gulzigheid waarmee de verschillende ingredienten zich in elkaars armen storten en versmelten tot een nieuwe entiteit. En die versmelting dat is liefde, dacht moeder. Maar de schoonheid van een Béchamelsaus in rust is kortstondig. Afhankelijk van de buitentemperatuur is zij slechts enkele seconden op haar mooist. Wanneer de saus voorbij een kritisch punt is afgekoeld verliest ze haar glans, en trekt er een doffe zween van waterchocola over het oppervlak.
Voor het zover kon komen stak moeder de vinger in haar mond en liet die langs haar gesloten lippen weer naar buiten glijden.

Toen hij om zes uur nog niet thuis was belde ze zijn werk.
“Raar,” dacht ze, “dat het me eigenlijk niet verbaasd dat het nummer afgesloten blijkt te zijn.”
Een aluminium schaal die enkele weken geleden schijnbaar onder een kritische hoek tegen de wand van de kast was geplaats schoof, zonder dat daar enige aanleiding toe leek, plotseling met veel kabaal onderuit. Misschien was-ie ziek van wekenlang op de rand van het toelaatbare te balanceren.
“En toch is het vreemd dat het net nu moet gebeuren. Op deze dag, bedoeld ik,” dacht moeder. .

Ze trok een knisperende regenjas aan en liep naar buiten de straat in. Het was inmiddels al bijna donker, maar in geen van de andere huizen brandde licht. Ze keek bij de buren aan weerszijden naar binnen. Het was niet duidelijk te zien in welke staat de interieurs waren, maar alles leek intact.

Ze wist dat hij nooit meer terug zou komen, en hoe ze ook zocht op de kanalen: alle televisiezenders bleven dezelfde ruis uitzenden.

Soms kan het, wanneer het mistig is, kort voordat het donker wordt heel even weer iets lichter worden. Of het nu een laatst stuiptrekking van de dag of een overspannen correctie van de ogen is; het gebeurd. En die middag ook weer. Alleen zette het deze keer door. Terwijl het nu toch al ruim zeven uur was en normaal rond deze tijd van het jaar echt donker, werd het lichter.
Maar het was niet het licht van een zon die opkwam, maar een uitbleking van het zwart. Kleur en contrast verdwenen uit het beeld dat zij waarnam van de wereld. Alles verdronk langzaam in een witte waas.

Ze ademde tegen het raam en schreef, zonder speciale bijgedachte, de letter o in de condens. Kort daarop begon de letter te druipen, en wanneer de condens verdampte zou hij nog als vetspoor enigzins zichtbaar zijn.

Plotseling openbaarde zich in haar een duizelingwekkend inzicht. Haar gedachten schoten langs planeten en reisden de langste reis voorstelbaar – van de oerknal naar haar eigen primal-scream – in minder dan een zucht. Ze doorzag de monumentale onbevattelijkheid van het heelal. De uitbundige maskerade van het Niets door ontelbare bezielde atomen. Alles leeft, dacht ze. En alles is op de een of andere manier hetzelfde, alleen op een andere schaal. Wat was de oerknal anders dan een geboorte-schreeuw? Het heelal werd geboren uit de kut van God, dacht ze. Maar waar was de vader? Haar gedachten schoten terug naar veertig jaar geleden toen niet Vader, maar een tien jaar oudere jongen haar op veertien-jarige leeftijd had ontmaagd. Heel even zag ze hem haarscherp in de verte zijn linker mondhoek optrekken en met tegenzin lachen.
Ze keek uit het raam en het viel haar op dat zelfs de horizon nu aan het vervagen was. Zodat ook het laatste landschappelijke element van het uitzicht langzaam opging in een zacht glinsterende mist.
De wereld is feitelijk niet te begrijpen, dacht ze.
We kunnen haar enkel ondergaan.
“Kijk,” dacht ze, “een regendruppel.”

We walk twenty minutes, north on Queen til we get to his side street. It’s a Tuesday night in February, and it’s funeral dead, even though it’s only 12:00. Even the homeless people aren’t out.

Ice and salt crunch under our shoes. I’m not wearing gloves my hands are turning red.

After a few blocks I grab his hand, and he surprises me by squeezing mine back and tucking it into his pocket. I feel my face break out into a smile, my cheeks cracking in the cold. It’s a perfect moment.

His house is bigger than I expect, not huge, but comfortable, with three floors.

I rent my basement out to friends, he says. They have a separate entrance, on the side.

He gives me a quick mini tour of the main floor, then takes me up to his bedroom.

His sheets are black and his blinds are lipstick red. We sit down on the bed.

There are books piled up on the sides of his bed, business textbooks and bestsellers. He is taking a business course two mornings a week at George Brown, one night, Wednesdays.

I like to highlight, he says, pointing to a pile of neon pink and yellow pens. You’re cute, I say, and he kisses me. I had no idea, this is a whole different side of you. You’re so serious.

There’s a lot you don’t know about me, he says, and I can’t tell if he’s joking.

I like those post it note things, marking what pages I have to read in different colors, I say.

He laughs. Who’s the serious student now?

I sigh. I’m trying. It’s hard, but I’m trying. I’m trying to get something out of it. It’s just, I can’t believe I’m here sometimes, you know? Here in Canada, at university, studying things I never wanted to study, not dancing. And it’s so frustrating- I hate my classes, they’re huge, I never know what’s going on, no one cares if I go or not. If I don’t understand, I mean, you think I’m going to put my hand up in a class of three hundred people? Or if I disagree with a point, which by the way, I do all the time in my communications class. That professor is a doos, or as they say in Canada, a douche.

He laughs. God, I hated school when I was younger. I couldn’t wait to be done, to get out, to live life. I nod. I’m taking these courses because I have to now, but between you and me, An, I wish I didn’t.

I wish I just knew all this stuff naturally, you know? I hate having to work this hard. He gets up, walks over to his vinyl player, pulls out a Ramones album. I grin, close my eyes as the chords to I Don’t Want To Grow Up starts to play.

I pull him close to me, start kissing him. You’re perfect I tell him, as he starts unbuttoning my shirt.

He kisses my neck, unbuckles my belt, unzips my jeans, then stops, looks up at me.

I almost never bring girls here, he says. He looks nervous. All I hear in my head is the word almost.

I wonder who else he’s had here, but I try not to think about it. I feel special, I say, try to kiss him again.

He moves away. I don’t know if I’m ready for this, he says. I haven’t had a girlfriend in years.

Soon you’ll want to come over all the time, be together all the time, be official, and I don’t know if I want that. I see the way you look at me, An. I see what you want sometimes, and I don’t know if I want it.

I look at him. I’m sick of lying, to him and to myself.

I think I do want to see you everyday, Dez. I love talking to you and being with you. I think you might be the best person I’ve met here.

Why do you like me so much, he spits, I don’t like it, I don’t want you to, it adds this extra level of stress that I don’t want, that I never wanted to my life. I was trying to avoid all of this, he says, gesturing wildly to himself, to me, in circles to the air around us.

I do up my jeans, get up to leave, grab my jacket from the floor. I like you, and I pause for second, try to organize my thoughts, try to get it out. I like you because sometimes when we connect, when I say something weird or we’re talking about something we both know about it, and you understand me, I mean really understand, it makes me feel less alone for a second. I stare at my hands, at the thin curving lines in my palms. I say the next part quietly, not sure if he hears me. It makes me feel like it’s possible for me to be happy, does that make sense?

I don’t look up at him, just grab my bag, slip into my shoes, and close the door behind me.

It’s just this kind of understanding that he spends his life trying to avoid.

I understand now.

I’m crying as I walk down his driveway, nearly tripping on my heels, on the black ice.

I slide and try not to fall. When I get to my street, I reach into my pocket for my keys and realize that I’ve left my keys on his bedside table. I didn’t want to get jabbed in the thigh when we fooled around.

I don’t want to, but I don’t know if my roommate’s home, so I call him.

He apologizes as soon as I say hello. I just don’t know what I want, if I’m ready for this, he says.

I like you though. I like you, and it scares me.

He says he’ll bring my keys in a few minutes, and I stand outside, shivering.

He puts his arms around me, when he sees me, says he’s worried I’ll get frost bite, offers to come in and make me tea. I smile, show him how to make rooibos, South African tea, and he says he’ll have some too. I like it, he says, and I’m sorry. He kisses me, tells me he likes me, and he’s sorry, and asks me if I can give him more time. I’ll try, I say, and I mean it, because I want to, I want to understand him, I want to try to give him what he needs. Waiting is the worst thing though. I wonder how long I’ll be able to wait, how long he’ll want me to, how long I’ll want to. He falls asleep right after, with his arm around me.

I sleep badly, watch him sleep, stare at the ceiling.

I really do like you, he tells me, when he leaves the next morning. I want to believe him. I decide to try to, at least for now. I’m going to try accept everything the way it is, this week.

Nicki keeps asking me about my views on politics. She brings me newspaper articles, reads things online that she tries to get me to read. Today she showed me a translated article from Ha’aretz, her country’s leftist paper. Look at the way we’ve mistreated them, she says, passion making her voice crack. It’s all very confusing. I don’t have the background, even a basic understanding of it. I can tell I’m frustrating her, standing there, shrugging, saying nothing. She’s always trying to extract my opinion, get to what I really think about things. I don’t know how to tell her this, but politics don’t mean a whole lot to me.

My family never discussed politics, they just all voted separately, and that was that.

My mom used to vote Liberal, as far as I remember. It was just the easy thing to do, if you were going to vote, the most neutral choice. My stepdad voted Conservative, because they always promised to spend the most on the military. Good solid values, he’d say, the day after. They’re the only ones with their priorities in order. My brother, when he studied at NSCC, the technical college down in Halifax, voted NDP cause they promised to lower tuition fees. He started voting for the Green Party when he graduated. He has his own landscaping company, all the work he does is earth friendly. Recycling is his politics now. It’s all so ridiculous and boring and self serving. Some of Nicki’s artist friends that she met at work talked to her about how bad the Conservative government is, how they want to cancel arts funding and how they want to protest. She thinks it’s fantastic. Why can’t you care that much, she asks me. What would it take to get you to enter this world with me?

I shrug, I don’t say anything. I don’t want to lie to her. I don’t want to pretend to believe in anything more than I really do, especially something that feels so out of my control. You put your name on a piece of paper, you check a box or put an x next to something, you put time and thought into your choice, and it doesn’t turn out the way it’s supposed to anyway. It never does. Protests seem like a waste of time to me too, more about looking like and acting like you care than making any kind of difference.

I know that when Nicki goes to these protests, like the one about Gaza the other day, that she’s sincere.

Nicki’s heart is always in the right place- it’s just that it all seems like an incredible waste of energy. She looks deflated when I say this, looks like she’s going to cry. She says I’m not being supportive when I refuse to go to these things with her, even though I listen to her talk about it for hours. It’s not that I don’t care about what’s important to her- I do.

It’s just that I don’t get why being in a relationship means not being able to be yourself anymore-why it means letting go of what you really believe or feel in the name of taking care of someone else.

I could be supportive, and a liar, or myself, and an asshole. What do I choose? I have no idea.

All I know is I’m tired of letting her down, I’m tired of walking around feeling like shit, feeling like, in every way I’m not good enough for her. She’s got a heart big enough to want to save the world- this huge, generous beating organ. Mine is tiny and shrivelled and barely beating, just focused on survival.

We’re not the same her and me, and she’s only beginning to see it now.

Last night she came home from work talking about Anika, the South African girl she works with.

She was telling her all about the corrupt government there-how millions of their currency there, Rands they’re called apparently- disappear each year, and then the politicians appear, driving fancy cars, wearing designer clothes. The crime gets worse, she told her. They have the highest murder rates in the world, not to mention rape and HIV. She told Nicki about the time she was attacked in her own house, how guys broke in and tied her up and raped her. It was like 7:00 at night or something. Her parents didn’t know what to do with her after that, so they bundled her up, packaged her and sent her here.

Nicki hadn’t known about any of this before. I don’t understand, she said, tears forming in her eyes, what’s wrong with the world. I don’t know what to tell her. It’s fucked, I tell her. The world is fucked.

I don’t know what else to say. People just fucking live their lives here, she said. They go to Queen st, go to work, go home, go to work, get laid, worry about stupid shit like whether their partner actually loves them- meantime the world is fucking falling apart- and their lives just go on. You know? People like Anika get raped, her friend gets gang raped by three guys just for going to a party on a Saturday night, her friend gets mugged and beaten up just for using a bank machine- and the world just keeps on turning. Soldiers in Israel get tortured and killed, innocent Israeli and Palestinian kids get blown to shit for eating pizza on the patio of a restaurant, or going to the fucking market, or walking down the street, and we’re here in Toronto, she’s hysterical now, crying, shaking- trying to decide between buying a Black Flag or Joy Division t shirt at an overpriced music store, between a soy latte or a fucking bubble tea.

There is a snot bubble forming in her nose as she says this, and I try not to laugh, I try but I fail, and she is angry, she’s still crying, she starts flailing her arms, screaming, swearing, don’t laugh at me, don’t fucking laugh at me, you never understand anything, she’s yelling, yelling in Hebrew now, I don’t know what she’s saying, but she’s so angry, she pushes me, she’s surprisingly strong, she pushes me, and her leg makes contact with my shin. She kicked me, she kicked me, and it hurts, pushes me again, kicks me again, slaps me near my face, and that’s it, I’ve had it. I hit her back, I aim for her shoulder, want to get a good punch in, but she ducks, and I miss, I sock her in the jaw. She crumples on the floor, she’s quiet, holding her face, looking at me with huge eyes, and all I can think is, I hit my girlfriend, dear god, I hit my girlfriend. She is backing away from me, into the kitchen, I’m standing dazed in the living room. She has an ice pack held up to her chin, the skin is already getting darker. When I hit her it didn’t feel that hard, I mean, I’m capable of a lot more, it dawns on me as I watch her, but I guess you never know.

We don’t talk for what feels like hours. Later that night, she gets into bed with me, she talks to me again, I put my arms around her, I say I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry, a million times. It’s ok, she says. I deserve it, I hit you first. You don’t deserve it, I say, but she looks me in the eye, all serious, like she means it.

Today, she stared into the mirror, saw the purple lines forming on her chin, and said,

I saw this movie, at work on a Tuesday, you know how they show movies sometimes, upstairs, about a guy who hits a girl, during, you know, and she likes it, she asks for it, it could be kind of fun, maybe?

Maybe later, tonight, when we’re messing around, you could hit me, maybe somewhere people can’t see, but it could be fun. Her eyes are all lit up, she’s staring at me, smiling a little, she’s serious I think.

I can’t answer her. I’m backing away, walking backwards til I reach the door, til I reach my coat. I grab it, check my wallet’s in my back pocket, and run, run, run, up the street, down Queen, away from her.

She’s not following me. I keep running though, finding it hard to breathe, sweating. When I get to the corner of Queen and Bathurst I collapse, sit down in the dirty snow that’s piled up.

I put my hand on my face and realize that I’ve been crying. She has no idea who she’s dealing with.

She has no idea that I once hit someone so hard that I paralyzed him, put him in a chair, ruined his life.

I’m a fucking psychopath, I want to tell her. You don’t even know what I’m capable of. You want to share my world so badly you’ll even let me hit you during sex, for fuck’s sake, you’ll even ask me to. I don’t deserve you, I shouldn’t be anywhere near you, unless violence and fucked up shit really does turn you on, unless you could hear the terrible things I’ve done and accept them, and forgive me. Cause that’s what I want more than anything, you know? To be forgiven. To tell you what I did, and for it to be ok. For it to be all be in the fucking past. That’s what I want more than anything.

I think later, tonight, or tomorrow, I’m going to tell her. I think I have to now, when I can face her again. When I can look her in the eye. I hope she can forgive me. I hope more than anything that she’ll still want to be with me, knowing what kind of person I really am.

remembering
this
.. only this,
you cannot outpace,
what you have been
to people
(in minds)
when they encounter
you again
after a
gap in time.

The devastation of Haiti is not a simple matter of bad luck. Earthquakes, like storms and epidemics, hit the poor with vastly more force than the rich. Much of the press coverage of the catastrophe in Haiti has wilfully disregarded the history of how Haiti was made poor and kept poor by, above all, the same American elites that are now dispensing charity, soldiers and advice. Racism has often been close to the surface or even grinning hideously far above it.

In London Sky News reported that the most urgent need was for ‘security’ to prevent ‘looting’. It’s worth recalling that when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans white people taking food from supermarkets were described as what they were — people searching for food for their families. At the same time black people doing the same were presented as dangerous looters amidst hysterical calls to send in soldiers.

Sunday’s Washington Post, declared, with a lofty patrician distance from the intense discussions within Haitian politics, and without any recognition that the US government simply does not allow the Haitian people to determine their own future that “Policymakers in Washington and around the world are grappling with how a destitute, corrupt and now devastated country might be transformed into a self-sustaining nation.” Nothing was said about how almost a century of American dominance over Haiti has continuously supported corrupt and violent Haitian elites against their own people. Nothing was said about how American corporations like Disney wrench super-profits from the enforced destitution that has turned the country into a giant sweatshop.

In Johannesburg the coverage in the Sunday Independent was just as grotesque. More than 15 years after the defeat of apartheid, a newspaper that publishes articles on subjects as refined as the meditations of a poet on walking or the views of a hip British artist on the meaning of Warhol in the age of Photoshop, opened its pages to the most lurid racism and rabid support for American imperialism.

The newspaper syndicated an article from the Daily Mail in London titled The Island of the damned. It condemned the ‘successive dictators’ in Haiti as culturally perverse while saying nothing at all about their backing from Washington or the American strategy of supporting dictators like Botha in South Africa, Marcos in the Philippines and the Duvaliers in Haiti as a bulwark against communism. British rescue workers and US soldiers appear as a dutiful force for good while Haitians appear, in an orgy of racism, as looters, cannibals and participants in Voodoo rituals involving stolen corpses.

The Sunday Independent also ran a piece by Fiona Forde, who, not for the first time, recycled the spin of the Bush administration on Haiti without critique or counter-point. She quotes the opinions of Gerard Latortue on the liberation theologian and former Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide as if Latortue is in a position to provide neutral and credible comment on Aristide. In fact Latortue’s family were key financial backers of the violent US backed coup against Aristide, and he, a neo-liberal economist who has been described as having the “chief virtue” of “irreproachable loyalty to Haiti’s main imperial patron” (the USA), was made Prime Minister after the coup with the full approval of George Bush. He has admitted that after the coup pro-Aristide marches were fired on and he has been accused of ordering “massive and repeated” attacks on pro-Aristide neighbourhoods in the shack settlements of Port-au-Prince as well as the incorporation of former death squads into the police and the detention of large numbers of political prisoners.

The newspaper’s editorial is just as propagandistic as Forde’s piece. It declares that Aristide was ousted from office due to ‘fierce opposition’ but says nothing at all about the nature of that opposition. The fact is that Aristide was democratically elected and ousted by a violent US backed coup supported by local elites. Aristide has his critics along with many passionate supporters but that hardly means that George Bush, rather than the Haitian people, should have determined his fate.

The Sunday Independent did also run a much more decent piece by Patrick Cockburn that pointed to how, as in New Orleans after Katrina, the first ‘help’ to arrive in Haiti has been armed troops. Cockburn also noted the domination of Haiti by the US since 1915 and that Bill Clinton had kept Aristide on a tight leash, while George Bush systematically undermined him. But neither racism nor support for violent and entirely anti-democratic forms of neo-colonialism are ‘balanced’ by the inclusion of a lone moderately critical voice.

In 2006 Aristide was interviewed, in Pretoria. In that article, available online in the London Review of Books he observed that:

Everything comes back, in the end, to the simple principle that tout moun se moun – every person is indeed a person, every person is capable of thinking things through for themselves. Those who don’t accept this, when they look at the nègres of Haiti – and consciously or unconsciously, that’s what they see – they see people who are too poor, too crude, too uneducated, to think for themselves. They see people who need others to make their decisions for them. It’s a colonial mentality, in fact, and still very widespread among our political class. It’s also a projection: they project onto the people a sense of their own inadequacy, their own inequality in the eyes of the master.
The London Review of Books gave Aristide a platform to make his case and has published a number of carefully researched articles that take apart the self-serving spin that the Bush administration put on the coup that they backed against Aristide. But its a sobering fact that here in South Africa our most literary newspaper prefers to recycle English racism and the views of a Haitian point man for American imperialism.

“I am bridled. Hog-tied. Naked. My arms jutting out at odd angles . . .” So says the narrator of “I Know You”, the opening story of the debut collection of 23 fictions from the editor of the experimental journal of “Expressionism, Surrealism, and Existentialism,” Sein und Werden. But wait. We have only reached the second page, and things are going to get a lot weirder before we return to our mundane daily routines, indelibly changed.

Ranging in length from two to eleven pages each, the stories and vignettes in this decadent and generous collection (published by Dog Horn Publishing in the UK) explore the seedier side of human nature and experience. Kendall’s characters–male or female, many of whom narrate their sordid tales from a first-person perspective–are murderers, drug addicts, thieves, sex addicts, philanderers, rapists, circus freaks. Occasionally, the reader is voyeuristically implicated in their messy happenings, as in the science-fiction-tinged “The Pleasure Principle”, which suggests that “you” were willing to pay for “Aphrodizia”, a virtual sex program that caters to those with somewhat, er, unconventional tastes. Read it, and you’ll know what I’m talking about.

For the most part, however, these stories are character-driven snapshots of life as seen through scratched, mud-caked lenses. Many of the narrators seem to have a strong desire to be raped, beaten, or to be made to feel some other form of pain, usually physical. The woman narrator of “Will Travel”, for example, revels in the sensation of strange bodies rubbing up against her in a crowded train; after she is raped and beaten by a man from the metro that she recognizes by his scarred middle finger, she reveals to us (her voyeuristic audience) that she will travel in order to see him again. The former trapeze artist, now mutilated stripper, of the story “Penny Whistle”, is all too happy when an admirer who comes to see her perform every night dominates her physically, calling her “the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.” And the male narrator of the tale “51 Weeks”, whose name is simply related as Mike, wants nothing more than to be involved in activities that will do him real physical damage. He gets angry with his mentor, Tuvia, for instance, when the latter will only allow him to watch a live pit bull fight behind a glass pane, and again for later assigning him a “passive role” in his own kidnapping and penile piercing. (I won’t give away the understated, yet utterly shocking, ending, for to do so would be a criminal act in itself.)

Whereas the freakshow elements in stories such as “Penny Whistle” recall Katherine Dunn’s seminal Geek Love, and the sadomasochistic themes in other of Kendall’s stories echo those found in some of the transgressive writings of Elfriede Jelinek and Kôno Taeko, it may be stated more definitely that the fable-like “Eat Me, Eat Me” is an intentional homage / response to Angela Carter’s short story “The Company of Wolves” (itself a revision of the “Little Red Riding Hood” fable). In Kendall’s version of the well-known fairy tale, as in Carter’s, the sexual, decidedly bestial relationship between girl and wolf is brought to the fore after granny is gobbled up. Many other creatures populate Kendall’s disturbing tales as well, such as horses, birds, and, most frequently, insects. In “Birth Control”, for example, the female narrator tells us that she ate “things with two legs, six legs, eight legs and four” (p. 78), while her husband, ironically but fittingly, is a pest control specialist. In “Fly”, the couple Raynard and Lydia find themselves among buzzing flies that have somehow made their way into their room through the plug sockets. And in “Foetus”, we encounter roaches, mites, and a plethora of glass tanks filled with insects seen in their final stages of development.

Thematically, much of the collection–approximately 1/3 by my calculation–concerns itself with pregnancy and childbirth in various manifestations. (Alas, we have found our beautiful, depraved bride!) In the aforementioned “Foetus”, as in the title story, “The Bride Stripped Bare”, the female characters give birth to bird-like creatures, while in other stories babies disappear and are apparently experimented on (”This is Not Kansas”), or are murdered by their own mothers, swayed by the influence of Mother Moon shining sinisterly through the skylight window above (”Axis”). In the vignette “The Seedy Underbelly”, a woman constructs a “gritty neonate” out of the metallic objects she has vomited up after ingesting motor oil. And in the fourth section of “Le Café Curieux”, the collection’s longest story, the pregnant character Natalie worries about slipping when she is walking down the steps because of the baby growing inside her: “Never in her life had she suffered an accident more serious than a scraped knee but now she feels like some evil entity might stick out its evil leg and send her rolling down the stairs . . .” (p. 108).

As one has perhaps already gleaned from the examples cited, these stories tend to leave one feeling unsettled, perhaps a bit nauseated, definitely overwhelmed. Kendall engages all of the senses in her work, not least of them smell, as in “Still Life”, a short fiction in which a woman tries, in vain, to recapture the decadent sense of beauty she had felt upon discovering a dead Japanese girl’s body in a park years before. Smell–or, more correctly, stench–also plays an important role in the stories “Birth Control” and “Axis”; the descriptions of body odor, of urine, and of sour breast milk in these tales are so vivid that the reader may find herself unconsciously sniffing at the air, perhaps even curling her upper lip a bit. This would seem to be the intention of these tales: to make us feel and experience what the characters are feeling and experiencing, perhaps even to re-experience some of the less pleasant memories from our own respective pasts, as Zeb does in “The Suicide Room”, and to reflect on their possible significance.

Like the films of Gaspar Noé, the images from these stories, once implanted in the mind, are quite impossible to reverse or erase. The versatile Kendall is here able, via carefully crafted language and dialogue, to make us feel at turns trapped, lonely, scared, angry, horny, disgusted. This is her gift, and it puts her in a class with writers such as Georges Bataille, William S. Burroughs, and Anaïs Nin, who were brave enough to go places that others were afraid to tread in their day. The 23 disturbing, yet often deceptively tender tales in this short but powerful collection speak to our most deeply felt desires and fears, and are well worth reading. As André Breton once said, “Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all.” In The Bride Stripped Bare, it always is.

The Bride Stripped Bare is available from Dog Horn Publishing, here: doghornpublishing.com.

this review first appeared on neonmagazine.co.uk

‘The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything.’

– Friedrich Nietzsche

On behalf of the producers of the motion picture titled Winnie, spokesperson, Dezi Rorich, stated that the producers, André Pieterse (of e’Lollipop fame) and writer/director Darrell Roodt, recently initiated a meeting with lawyers representing Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. The meeting failed to reach an agreement between the two parties. The position of the producers is that if a screenplay has to be approved by Ms Madikizela-Mandela, then the film based on that screenplay could possibly be jeopardised as the world may question the credibility of the film.

The producers of the Winnie film acquired the film rights to a book published in 2003 titled, Winnie Mandela - A Life, written by Anné Mariè du Preez Bezdrob. To their knowledge, Madikizela-Mandela has not objected to this book.

The producers of the Winnie film were advised that they do not legally require Madikizela-Mandela’s consent in order to produce the film. Nevertheless, they do not intend any disrespect towards Madikizela-Mandela or the Mandela family by not requesting such consent.