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Thembeka’s Laduma and Rampolokeng’s blackheart offer modernist epics—personal or tribal encyclopedias of the everyday—founded in the rubble of modern perception or consciousness. But Laduma and blackheart share similarities not only in scope, but also in prosody. Thembeka and Rampolokeng used a serial form of intricately developed individual cells to better reflect in form the harsh and disjunctive edges of the South African 21st century condition. Through a fragmented modernist style, they rejected the poetic style of the late 19th century that sought beauty for its own sake. They cut away the inflated rhetorical dross of conventional and sentimental romanticism and aestheticism and shifted the reader’s attention to the everyday image, perceived in all its potent meaning or fact. Thembeka did this in his writing by presenting piercing moments of perception. Rampolokeng accomplished similar aims through the shifting internal monologues of his main characters.
Rampolokeng especially traced the choppy montage-like quality of perception or consciousness among everyday things and during everyday experiences, though both Thembeka and Rampolokeng replicate in their writing abrupt mental shifts and sudden digressions prompted by chance occurrence and/or evocative people or objects. For example, in blackheart, Rampolokeng abruptly switches from stating that his poetics has “the corpselike living essence of a deathblank page” to “WORD incarnate” (102-103). Likewise, in Laduma, as Laduma is asked by the magistrate for a comment on the charges against him, a non-Black lady climbing into her carriage across the street attracts Laduma’s attention. This launches Laduma into a string of thoughts about the lady and her non-Black type even though on the surface he continues to listen to the magistrate speak of Bo-Ann Kitty Yum Yum’s charges. Both of these examples, picked out at random from countless others, point to the method by which Rampolokeng and Thembeka represent consciousness or perception as a disjunctive series of images, as a swiftly shifting array of perspectives and focal points.
Like George Oppen’s “Discrete Series,” Rampolokeng and Thembeka enveloped the fragmentary essence of perception or consciousness in the structural framework of the finite series. Differing from infinite series, traditional sequential narratives, and predetermined forms such as the sonnet, the finite series gives the writer freedom to group either unrelated and/or thematically cohesive fragments. Finite series thereby avoid the necessity for totality or logical cause and effect. Neither subscribing to a linearity that requires meaning to travel in a chronological succession of causality, nor a diffuse, unbounded formlessness, the finite series displays a sinuosity capable of unifying fragments seemingly contingent and tangential. Rampolokeng and Thembeka used the finite series to encounter the jumbled multiplicity of fragmented images in 21st century South Africa.
Coinciding with the movement away from centripetal and totalized systems that stress the predictability of phenomena toward centrifugal and fluctuating systems that recognize the capacity for contingency to disrupt patterns of occurrence, blackheart and Laduma use serialization on the grammatical level. Instead of promoting logical completeness through limpid, hypotactic phraseology or interdependent word chains, both works dissuade totality by forwarding an oscillating, protruding parataxis. Both works feature to varying degrees a concise modernist minimalism that strips language of causal connectives. In blackheart, the clipped short sentences of the VERSION GENERAL’s interior monologue on the terminated mains in particular displays the paratactic disjunctive. For example:
chorus season
sewermen hewer-men of semen
venereal parasites
broken aerial combatants
verbal penitents
official-slime-snout slug-genital
putrid-orificial human mains terminal
the generals walk free (61)
Thembeka put a similar paratactic aesthetic to use, though his is less pronounced than Rampolokeng’s. For example:
mpontsho
blakkk lightning
flash an ‘im weak heart
drop
in my blakkkitude
with the magnitude
of a mamba blakkk
messiah blakkk
murder i write
my blakkk pages
turn themselves over
the white house of
language pronouncing
blakkk sin takkktiks
rekkkwesting my blakkk
ori
gin
ation
in the eye of the blakkk
sun’s anus (122)
By means of this broken syntax, blackheart and Laduma veer away from the expectations of normal speech patterns toward a sort of modernist aesthetic. Take another example from Laduma:
Laduma drained his glass of dry red wine and then slipped off into the Gents toilet. The Rabbit-hole went straight on like a tunnel for some way, and then dipped suddenly down, so suddenly that Laduma had not a moment to think about stopping himself before he found himself falling down what seemed to be a very deep well. Laduma landed on lucky seven. He looked up, the non-black Rabbit winked at him, Bra’ Daniel whispered, “smile, you’re a winner!” Laduma was on a winning streak. His first ten rand bet had turned into three hundred and fifty rand. There was no stopping him now. But even plastic chips were more real than the playground of ersatz signs that is Monte Casino. Instead of jubilation, when Laduma won money at the roulette table he experienced dread. (28)
Constantly in medias res, in the midst of a plot but also in the middle of commonplace things, never reaching the grand resolution or denouement plotted into a traditional epic, everyman Laduma is depicted here roving amidst quotidian things and happenings in a fragment of his hypothetical life. Fragmentary rather than complete, flipping through memories and associations evoked by an object, Laduma’s stream of consciousness shifts back and forth from outward observation to the internal dialogue perception compels. This section finds Laduma consulting the non-Black Rabbit for an answer to the question, “And what is the use of a life without pictures or conversations?” Before receiving an answer, though, his mind is diverted by the novelty of an advertisement plastered on a boat. His mind then jumps to wonder if the agent who placed the advertisement pays the city government for the privilege of mooring the boat in the river. This in turn promotes a string of philosophical ruminations akin to Heraclitus that end in a Burroughsian (William) or Nietzschean platitude. Next, after telling himself to think about something other than advertising, Laduma notices a “timebomb,” Laduma contemplates asking a passing car guard to elucidate the meaning of the word “parallax” in Montecasino. However, a phrase from an earlier conversation with his girlfriend Dorothy jumps into his mind. In response to Laduma’s use of the word “democracy,” Dorothy had stated “You must not say such things to me, I told you that before.”(28). Here “democracy” operates as more than just emotive rhetoric—it also alludes to Dorothy’s place of origin. This is an example of how Thembeka’s language frequently evokes layers of meaning that extend beyond the simple surface meaning of the word. In this manner Thembeka’s approach to language differs from Rampolokeng’s, which focused less on the symbolic and more on converting images into entities not unlike tangible objects.
Thembeka employed in the above excerpt a concise, jagged syntax devoid of the connectives that would streamline the flow of his sentences. Each word shoulders a compressed weight. Due to Thembeka’s syntax, an angular accumulation of words occurs at the tail end of the sentence. This syntax defamiliarizes language, though in a way that—as in the broken syntax of Rampolokeng—motives clarity. In other words, through its use of a novel rather than bromidic grammatical structure, Thembeka’s syntax actively engages the reader in the task of reading or constructing meaning. Perhaps stemming from the human tendency to value what is earned over what is handed to them, after a certain amount of attention the reader encounters in an immediate manner—as if for the first time—the image of a man gambling for his life.
As in Thembeka, the language of Rampolokeng’s blakcheart dwells perpetually in medias res, shifting from fragment to fragment, addressing an existence in the midst of everyday things and occurrence. Rampolokeng isolated on the page piercing moments of clear empirical perception extracted from the rapid flux of existence. For example:
ROOTS FOR JAHVA
(fecund senses where mind-seed will grow fertile thought
dead brain is necro-feed consciousness a style conscience bought)
medical fraudulence disease is profit-generation
prophet prone to science-fictitious-bio-tech attack
the dying human-stack
flesh-drawn lost cause warrior scuttle-line
war-zone the line to emanciation’s rattle spine
marrow extraction cut throat pipes itself ‘fine’
dice in stunted life-wheel roll
collared mid-spin from march to crawl
skin & flesh born-lost thin cash is corn-cost
sick/deranged world strange manners held
currency rustle a death groan warrior-hard bone
bears the score-settle brunt economic battle-front
doctrine insemination organics’ extermination
synthetics domination life suckles on plastic
red X calls for swinging
red necks vexed bawl out singing
death long wrath song
in) lead-poisoned bloodstreams
milk thru chrome-
free-fallen mud-dreams -
head & foot it home
arse is mouth lies true south-paw contaminated udder
innocence is suckling chainsaw reach-for-rusted-rudder
(cancel jim’s subscription can’t sell him resuscitation
yell hymn the resurrection watch life-fluid rise as lucifer steam
ancients sprawled on don/dawn-gorgon /
flame/lame/fame’s lie-way gone spy-stray…)
mother power-plants in gross-pollination
the cross the righteous last stand
blood-wet dividend
pharmaceutical the best undollared green harvest
satellite broken wish scarred white powder collared median
copulate in satan light beacon -sewer-jammed
logged in a crab-site… (72)
This section begins with an incitement toward multiplicity, a multiplicity soon enacted through counterposed fragments that mimic the polyphonic Bach fugue. Typically an unfinished composition that contains a number of voices who state different themes, the fugue contrasts harmonious unity with varied and sometimes opposing melodies. Such contrasts are apparent in the leaps between fragments in the excerpt above. Although disguised by the quotation marks that frame the third through seventh lines, a more than visual leap occurs between lines three and four, which veers the passage into an episode when Rampolokeng cleaved the first two lines of the above passage so that they sound angular and run counter to typical grammatical anticipation. The outcome of this approach reminds one of the “sculpture not proceeded with” that Rampolokeng mentioned in his essay entitled, “An Objective” (Horns For Hondo 20-21). This is because Rampolokeng esteemed a choppy, unrefined effect as capable of capturing more truthfully and precisely the roughly hewn quiddity of sense perception.
Through the estrangement produced by his jagged syntax, Rampolokeng transformed his words into direct portals to experience. Rather than operate as diffuse symbols or portmanteau words that evoke multiple references, like some of Thembeka’s language, Rampolokeng’s words access as immediately as possible the simple “objectivity” of the phenomena perceived. They render the nearest possible allegiance between signifier and what is being signified. Rampolokeng stated, ” i’m a god killing the characters i create” (154) and “how sweet i avenge your grandfather’s rape of my grandmother. black consciousness ends above waist level. it would be such a waste and a shame to let all that chicken flesh slip through the clutches of my lechery. ” (152). Instead of operating in the diffuse manner of a symbol, a manner that, by suggesting multiple interpretations, participates in doubling or duplicity, Rampolokeng believed the infinity axe and bavino’s reaction to it to be a truthful and exact presentation of experience.
Rampolokeng’s word choice in blackheart stemmed from his belief that greater truth resides in particulars rather than in the generalized. “unlike god, i die with them.” he stated. “for, out of the dark of infinity axe bright a mirror comes reflecting me sitting here writing about someone sitting here writing about a woman sitting and writing and refusing to acknowledge that characters sometimes exist outside book pages and do what she says they do with the axe hacking its way through the pages of its own story and sitting and writing she is the someone that is the man that is me sitting and writing about the axe”(154). For Rampolokeng, words—neither transparent nor artifice distanced from their referent—spring into consciousness during privileged moments of clarity to musically accompany and define the details of perception. In essence Rampolokeng’s image offers a sincere, unmediated experience to the reader.
