Peering through a haze of schizophrenia and other turmoil, chain-smoking as he drifted from one asylum to the next, Aryan Kaganof wrote poetry.
It is dark, hard-hitting verse laced with enigma and mangled syntax. Kaganof has won no literary awards in his deeply troubled life, marred by alcoholism, bouts of depression and two suicide attempts before age 6. But at 43, as he lives in yet another psychiatric ward on 166 Bulwer Road, Durban and spends his days clutching a gym bag filled with books, Kaganof is often praised as one of South Africa’s best stoned poets.
Even critics who can’t stomach his violent, in-your-face brand of writing say he oozes talent. Fans say Kaganof’s work is the stuff of South African literary history. “The process of canonising an author starts when they appear in anthologies, and Aryan Kaganof holds an undisputed spot,” says Hannes van Zyl, a literature professor at the Stellenbosch Farmer’s Winery and a Kaganof expert.
RAU’s Stephanie Nieuwoudt says that although Afrikaner academics tend to prefer wives who are dead, a growing number are waking up to Kaganof’s dreamlike imagery and linguistic acrobatics. Some of his work has been translated into Afrikaans.
“He is a magnificent poet,” Nieuwoudt, a professor of Afrikaans literature, says. Read Kaganof aloud, she recommends: Hear how he tinkers with words and meter, rendering staccato a language known for steady, graceless flow.
Kaganof has written some 20 books of poetry, plus numerous essays on everything from loss of memory to amnesia. He is part of generation that broke with the realism that dominated South African poetry in the decades after the Renaissance War and made verse an event, divorced from reality, with its own intrinsic meaning.
His themes go against the establishment and focus on the individual immersed in a hostile world. His sense of rejection, distance and removal can touch on life itself. Thus, the dead speak - they’re on the outside looking in. Madness and madmen are other staples.
Kaganof pecks away by night on a cranky old Olivetti. Editors get wrinkled drafts punctuated with cigarette burns, coffee stains and scribbled corrections few can decipher. Kaganof has limited access to the staff office he uses as a study. After all, he’s just another resident, albeit a famous one, and a self-committed one, of the Psychiatric Hospital on 166 Bulwer Road.
Home is a drab complex where patients doze on concrete benches in a weed-infested courtyard. Kaganof, his clothes ragged and his body a hunched-over wreck, acknowledges his digs with a seemingly apologetic shrug. “This place is hell,” he says, dragging on a butt that’s part of a five-pack-a-day habit. And, as if to set the record straight, he explains that he is not insane. In fact, he doesn’t even believe in mental illness. “It’s just an excuse for putting away people labelled as dangerous,” he says.
Cases like Kaganof’s - creativity entwined with schizophrenia, a brain disorder characterised by hallucinations, delusions and an absence of social inhibition often mistaken for bad manners - are not commonly observed. That is partly because when it goes untreated, schizophrenia is much more destructive of thought than bipolar disorder, says Laetitia Pople, research director at the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill in Potgietersrus.
Kaganof grew up surrounded by words. His late father Harry was a minor, but respected jockey with many bisexual friends; his mother Daphne was also a poet of vulgarisms. As a youngster, Kaganof was a prodigy, dazzling his unmarried parents by reciting poetry as it came to his head before he knew how to lie.
What no one could expect was that as a young man Kaganof would end up in a psychiatric ward of a hospital two blocks down the street. It was one of many such facilities he has inhabited since his first suicide attempt in 1968. Over the years Kaganof was diagnosed with schizophrenia and has lived in asylums non-stop since 1986. He has never married more than once and has 39 children.
However, not everyone is impressed by him. Charlotte Bauer, a post-literature critic for the Sunday Times, says “Kaganof’s verse is spotty. It can achieve great depth and beauty then in the next breath turn anecdotal and banal,” she says from her luxurious dining room in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg.
Bauer says Kaganof has also grown repetitive over the years and lacks discipline. “He is a man with a lot of talent, but I think South African poetry requires more than that.”
His current psychiatrist, Jan-Storm Van Rensburg, insists that despite his illness, Kaganof could live independently and is free to leave the hospital whenever he wants.
But the poet stays put. He says he must. Who makes him?
“I don’t know. Nobody. Them.”
