kagablog

Caribbean Arts Movement
Kingston, Jamaica
1970 -

In 1974 Barbadian poet Kamau Braithwaite summarized the overlapping realities, the cross-cultural roots, diversity and integration of the Caribbean by declaring, “The unity is submarine.” This idea of a fluid submerged geography, a black Atlantic continuum comprised of flows, passages and displacements also encapsulates the spirit of Savacou Magazine.

Founded in 1970 by Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Andrew Salkey, and John La Rose, Savacou grew out of a Caribbean Arts Movement (1966) that was doubly concerned with Caribbean artistic production and with consolidating a broad alliance between all ‘Third World’ peoples. But Savacou was more than just an archipelago for new black voices; it sought to critically challenge Eurocentric norms through which the postcolonial nation-states in the Caribbean were being imagined and constructed. Central to this challenge was its development of a new critical vernacular, a practice of criticism that both gave form to, and spoke from within, a Caribbean cultural-political tradition.

Savacou took the first bold step in 1970, with its combined third and forth edition of New Writing. Featuring oral-based poetics, performance poetry and Creole verse, the issued exploded traditional divisions between words and music, literature and street culture, textuality and orality, exposing the colonizing presence of Standard literary formats and provoking major critical fracas in literary circles.

For the next decade Savacou continued to challenge topographical and typographical boundaries, working between continents and restoring the fluid motion of performance to the frozen-word-on-page. This culminated in its 1979 anthology New Poets from Jamaica which introduced dub poetry to the literary world and launched the careers of a new generation of poets including Bongo Jerry, Oku Onuora and Mikey Smith.

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by Anna Reckin

Anna Reckin is a Ph.D. student in the Poetics Program at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Her poems, essays, and reviews have been published in the U.S.A. and in England.

1

This paper looks at the ways in which Kamau Brathwaite draws on spatial paradigms in his work, in particular, paradigms that call attention to dynamic, sonic, and performative aspects of spatiality. I am interested in bringing together and overlaying some ideas about the key words in my title: Kamau Brathwaite’s use of the term “tidalectic” and the notion of a sound-space. Three works, “History of the Voice,” Barabajan Poems, and ConVERSations with Nathaniel Mackey, are discussed here as examples of a particular kind of sound-space, the transcribed lecture: an all-too familiar cultural space in the academy and the literary world that Brathwaite transforms into a venue for a dazzling performance on the page that encompasses drama, bibliography, autobiography, poetry, polemic, geography, literary theory, history, and much else besides.
2

Key to an understanding of this kind of space are its dynamic qualities. Brathwaite proposes “tidalectic” as “the rejection of the notion of dialectic, which is three–the resolution in the third. Now I go for a concept I call ‘tide-alectic’ which is the ripple and the two tide movement” (Naylor 145). Even the word-play between these terms, with its unsettling near-anagramming of “tida-” and “dia-,” seems to perform a tidalectic movement in microcosm. On a larger scale, Brathwaite has suggested that it describes the structure of trilogies such as Mother Poem, Sun Poem, and X/Self, and the reprise of these three in Ancestors shows the “tidalectic” as a creative process; a process that I would argue also shows up very clearly in his radical reworking of the lecture form in the three texts I discuss here.
3

The tidalectic also describes a nexus of historical process and landscape, as in the following passage in ConVERSations which provides a defining image of the Caribbean and its origins, an “on-going answer” in Brathwaite’s words (29): the image of an old woman sweeping the sand from her yard early every morning, who is

in fact performing a
very important ritual which I
couldn’t fully understand but
which I’m tirelessly tryin to .
. .
And then one morning I see her
body silhouetting against the
sparkling light that hits the
Caribbean at that early dawn
and it seems as if her feet,
which all along I thought were
walking on the sand . . . were
really . . . walking on the wa-
ter . . . and she was tra
velling across that middlepass
age, constantly coming from h
ere she had come from – in her
case Africa – to this spot in
North Coast Jamaica where she
now lives . . . (33, ellipses as in original)

“Like our grandmother’s – our nanna’s – action,” Brathwaite says a little later, “like the movement of the ocean she’s walking on, coming from one continent / continuum, touching another, and then receding (‘reading’) from the island(s) into the perhaps creative chaos of the(ir) future” (34).
4

This trans-oceanic movement-in-stasis, a to-and-fro and back again that is idealized and mythologized as well as highly particularized (”North Coast Jamaica”) and historicized (the reference to the “middlepass”) can be thought of as one aspect of something that can be termed a space–I would argue, a sound-space–with the following defining characteristics:

1. It presents a kind of recursive movement-in-stasis that is anti-progressive (the tidalectic) but also contains within it specific vectors: the westward, northward movements of the slave trade, the westward push of the harmattan, for example.

2. It is concerned with a sense of relation that is expressed in terms of connecting lines, back and forth, not only across the surface of the ocean–and there are clear parallels here with Glissant’s “poetics of relation” and the shipping routes that Paul Gilroy discusses in his Black Atlantic– but also in the form of airwaves and “bridges of sound” (radio broadcasts and sound recordings, for example) that connect colony with colony and colony with metropole, often enacting tidalectic echoes.[1]

3. It has access to something “beyond;” typical of Brathwaite’s work is a fantastical layering of New, Old, and other worlds. Vital here, and of course connected with the formal features noted in the previous item in this list, is the phenomenon of “hearing through” between layers, and between times and places, which has a particular application in Brathwaite’s work in terms of the practice of vodoun.

“Hearing- / reading-through” is also one of the key mechanisms articulating the inter-generic qualities of the texts, particularly noticeable when they are produced in “video-style:” the kinds of moves that use, for example, different type-sizes for what might be identified as secondary material or explicatory notation–although these may also have independent lives as poems or songs. Such interpolated materials, Brathwaite’s version of modernist collage, are not so much interruptions or even digressions but rather add a sense of enlargement and revelation. If annotation and citation can often be seen as devices to restrict the meanings of a text by calling attention to detail, particulars, specified authorities, Brathwaite’s additions simultaneously particularize and extend. Often playful as well as deeply serious, they insist on the on-going importance of traditional academic and bibliographical tools for scholarship for West Indian history and literature–especially in the face of the neglect he considers them to have suffered, an important theme in all three texts discussed here. At the same time, they work transformatively, making creative use of typographical convention and opening up the work to new contexts, and to wider and deeper layers of signification.

In fact, the reader’s movement in amongst some of the most thickly layered parts of Barabajan Poems and ConVERSations itself resembles a tidalectic action that is very different from the straight up-and-down-the-page, or front-to-back-of-the-book reading that is required by conventional scholarly annotation. To give one example from ConVERSations, the tidalectic in the movement of an old woman sweeping (33) is embedded in the course of a long answer by Brathwaite to a question from Mackey in ConVERSations about new trends in his work since 1986 (24). Surrounding this passage are interpolations in a cursive typeface and shown in a narrow column that describe the poverty of the Jamaica North Coast, for example: “is not a Jamaica North Coast bikini situatio /(n) that you would go to tomorrow or at Thank / sgiving. This is not the North Coast of the great / hotels, James Bond, ‘GoldenEye’ and tourism. / This is a ole yard, okay? . . .” (29-30). There are also various footnotes that deal with what Brathwaite calls “the Sisyphean statement” (30), Brathwaite’s negative paradigm for Caribbean repetition which always ends, like Sisyphus’ stone, back where it started, hope and effort wasted, in stark contrast to the back-and-forth flow of the tidalectic. Brathwaite’s notes at this point become more and more scholarly identifying Walcott’s phrase “the testament of poverty” as its locus classicus, providing a date for it, giving a lengthy quotation from Walcott’s poem of that title with a citation for its publication in the magazine Bim, and supplying commentary locating “this negative tra-(d)” within Anglophone rather than Hispanic Caribbean writing, this time with bibliographical references to Brathwaite’s own work (30-31)

4. It exhibits the performativity of sound: sound that reveals trans-oceanic relation (through rhyme and rhythm); sound that animates sound-space and brings the living and the dead into our presence–on the beach, under the tonnelle, through the “cool & glint & trinkle” (Ancestors 29) of water in limestone; sound as manifested in the calypso rhythm of the skipping stone that skids, arcs and blooms “into islands” (”History of the Voice” 272). For all these reasons, form is of crucial importance; the old woman’s “moment and movement and grace and terror walking on the water” described in ConVERSations cannot be caught in “imposted meters,” Brathwaite says, meaning iambic pentameters and tetrameters (35) and revisiting one of the key arguments of “History of the Voice.” The revelations that are brought about by interconnecting sound and landscape can work at many levels. For example, the very next move in the passage quoted above about the old woman in the coastal landscape is to Miles Davis, “that muse/ical who was himself creating a spine of coral sound along our archipelago. . . . singing the shadows of the clouds that move across our landscape” (35), at the same time as Davis is described as making song/ making landscape / making movement and connection in landscape, a series of combinations of c and l, often threaded with s’s, loop through the lines, and picking up key words–muse/ical, coral, archipelago, cloud, landscape.

5. It exploits the potential of typography and book design to produce a textual kinetics. This is achieved partly through the use of a layered, palimpsestic text the trace of the tidalectic on the page–which can be connected with an understanding of particular topographies as palimpsestic, as always holding the possibilities of a variety of readings, histories, levels of interpretation; and partly through what Brathwaite terms his “video style,” a mixture of typefaces and font sizes that features the distinctive Sycorax face designed by Brathwaite himself, and which is often decorated with graphics styled to look like elements from a font type. The books in the video style, which include ConVERSations and Barabajan Poems, are also very attentive to the space of the page and the way that the reader moves within the space of the book.[2] Brathwaite’s highly developed use of typographical marking, which manipulates the hierarchies of graphic design, provides stepping (and skipping?) stones for a range of intra- and inter-textual manoeuvres, including, as Cynthia James (360) and Rhonda Cobham (300) have noted, a mimicking of hypertextuality.

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The magazine Souffles made an important contribution to modern Moroccan culture in the1960s.

Souffles was a literary and cultural quarterly review published in Rabat, Morocco. Its first issue was published in February 1966, the last in December 1971. In all, there were twenty-two issues. The cover, designed by the painter Mohamed Melehi, was austere yet elegant: under a geometric square glowed a round circle, a black sun. The composition remained unchanged for the first fourteen issues. Only the cover and the circle’s color changed. On the back, “Souffles” was written in Arabic, Anfâs (“breezes,” “breath”). Up to the double issue 10–11, the magazine was only in French; it then became bilingual (French and Arabic). After the fifteenth issue, the layout, cover, and size changed. Those who have written on the history of Souffles divide it into two periods: during the first period from 1966 to 1969, its collaborators were poets, writers, artists, and intellectuals passionately working for a new Moroccan, and Maghrebi, culture. The second period, from 1969 to 1971–721 was marked by a radical ideological Marxist-Leninist turn. “Literature was no longer sufficient,” declared Abdellatif Laâbi, the founder and editor of Souffles. The literary section became less relevant than the political section, dedicated to Third World struggles for independence from colonial imperialism and to national politics. Because of its new approach, Souffles was banned in 1972 and Laâbi arrested for his political opinions. While in prison he was awarded several international poetry prizes. After a long solidarity campaign, he regained his freedom in 1980.

Toni Maraini

Historical Background

When Morocco gained independence in 1956, much needed to be done to free its culture from the burden of colonial (French and Spanish) ideology. Colonialism had imposed a patronizing, Eurocentric culture and controlled every aspect of life, outlawing political parties, associations, gatherings, and group activities. Moroccan authors and media were often censored, and even the use of Arabic language was carefully monitored. The colonial protectorate had industrialized and modernized the country mainly to control and exploit people, land, and resources for its own profit. Although fascinated by their “exotic” aspects, it had ignored the universal values of the local culture, its historical heritage, its dignity of identity. By curbing freedom of expression, it had inhibited the development of a national modernist avant-garde. Moroccan culture was mainly regarded as picturesque. Modern thought and intellectual life were not supposed to suit the Moroccans and were considered a dangerous challenge to colonialism itself. But Morocco and the Maghreb had a very rich history as well as a wealth of artistic, poetic, and intellectual traditions, and modernist ideas had spread in many circles and domains even before the arrival of the colons. The echoes of the Near East’s Nahda (renewal) had stirred the Maghreb since the beginning of the twentieth century. Although much of the intellectual elite’s energies had been absorbed by the struggle for freedom and although people’s desire for progress and development had been curbed by discriminatory policies, modernist movements were on the make. In spite of censorship and control, urban elites had their intellectuals, writers, reviews, and publications2. Some authors, like Ahmed Sefrioui, Driss Chraïbi, and the philosopher Mohamed Aziz Lahbabi, had published in French.

Yet, after independence, a petty provincial and Eurocentric culture was still dominating the scene. The salons organized for Western artists admitted only Moroccan “naive” painters as a touch of “indigenous color.” Local European poets used to gather in clubs littéraires around the foreign cultural missions “where they wrote verses on the ambassadors’ gardens.”3 They ignored the best of Western production and the daring experiments of modernity, as well as the high tradition of classical Arabic poetry, not to mention Afro-Berber and popular arts and literature. They were not interested in the productions of a Moroccan cultural avant-garde. It is important to keep all this in mind, as the Western world has not always acknowledged what colonialism really was. It might be interesting, for that matter, to read the courageous writings of the Moroccan historian Germain Ayache,4 who in the 1950s denounced the abuses of colonialism, the distress and misery of the Moroccan population, and the control over its cultural roots. To understand the impact of Souffles, one has to go back to a situation still shaped by the dramatic consequences of all this. On the other hand, after half a century of colonial propaganda and isolation, the Moroccan bourgeoisie had either lost touch with its roots or found refuge in a nostalgic, if not dogmatic, vision of the past. A modernist national culture had yet to be loudly proclaimed, its theoretical basis openly debated, its creative and visionary nature concretely expressed in terms that would correspond to the new realities of an independent Morocco.

Owing to a remarkable set of circumstances, this became possible around 1964, when, in Casablanca and in Rabat, two small groups of young artists and poets joined forces to launch a movement that impulsed profound changes and is today considered the milestone of a new era. Formulating their ideas clearly, they produced vibrant, original works of art and literature and, most important, started organizing their own independent events. The same year, 1964, intellectuals had founded, in Arabic, the important independent magazine Aqlâm, yet its contribution was mainly philosophical and theoretical rather then poetical and avant-garde. Up to then, culture had either been in the hands of foreign missions or of the state bureaucracy and conservative elites. With the exception of the writer Driss Chraïbi, the older intellectuals looked at the new groups with uneasy surprise or disdain. A handful of creative young people with daring ideas suddenly broke into the scene and galvanized the attention of the public. The so-called Casablanca Group of artists (Mohamed Melehi, Farid Belkahia, Mohamed Chebaa) engaged in innovative activities and works (paintings, exhibitions, manifestos, debates, publications).5 At the same time, in 1964 two young talented poets, Mohamed Khaïr-Eddine and Mostafa Nissaboury, published the manifesto “Poésie Toute” and the review Eaux Vives (only two issues) in Casablanca. “For Khaïr-Eddine, breaking with the existent literatures, both in French and in Arabic, was the main historical duty of the new generation.”6 When they met another young poet, Abdellatif Laâbi, the birth of Souffles was already almost a foregone conclusion. And when the Casablanca Group joined them, the movement came into being. They shared goals, hopes, and visions. They considered themselves a generation committed to building a free, just, inventive national culture. They were truly avant-garde. “We work with all our awareness for a future world […] and this review intends to be a tool for the new literary and poetic generation,” declared Laâbi in the first issue of Souffles.

In order to answer the question, “Who are we after the impact of colonialism?” they had to look back at the roots that had been most depreciated both by colonialism and by the national bourgeoisie, that is, oral traditions, Afro-Berber and popular Arabic poetry, arts, and culture. The first to focus on this heritage in Morocco were the abstract artists of the Casablanca Group, who claimed that popular traditional arts were modern ante litteram in spirit and aesthetics. Colonial ethnography had considered them minor arts, but for the Casablanca Group, as for Paul Klee and Walter Gropius, a rural carpet was a painting, and the artisan an artist. The poets of Souffles could not but agree. In the meantime they were all determined to fully participate in the twentieth century, experimenting with new languages and ideas and sharing universal values with all the poets and artists of the world. When they stood up and said “Enough!” to provincial salons and clubs littéraires, they expressed deep expectations of change. Their artistic and poetical revolt spread like a hot wind in summer. Those artists and intellectuals who had up to then worked in solitude were encouraged to join. Thus, when, in 1966, Abdellatif Laâbi concretely started the project of Souffles in Rabat, he could count on the support of some talented and committed poets, painters, and intellectuals. The project was heralded and carried on by means of fervid and visionary discussions in cafés and studios. The Casablanca Group designed the cover and illustrations. Getting on one of the old buses that once crossed the country, the painter Melehi took the magazine to Tangier, where it was printed at a lower price than in Rabat. Such was the birth of Souffles.

The role of Souffles and the impact of its literary, artistic, and cultural production were of the greatest importance. Souffles figures in the annals of Maghrebi modern history as a bold, innovative experience. Besides Eaux Vives, it was the first independent literary magazine in French. Since its inception, it attracted some of the best young poets, artists, and intellectuals, whose support and contributions significantly shaped modern Moroccan and Maghrebi culture. It was not only a literary magazine; it also published notes and comments on the sociocultural situation, cinema, theater, and art, as well as critical texts, manifestos, and historical essays. By demasking neocolonial ideology, it stirred up the stagnant literary and intellectual situation in the country. Some of its comments and notes were audacious, clear-sighted pamphlets on highly urgent matters. For a magazine that had started with a slim publication of thirty-six pages, it was a remarkable achievement to become the cultural reference for a whole generation.

The first issue was thin, but it responded “to an imperative demand” (Laâbi). Soon it reached 100 pages. Khaïr-Eddine had by then migrated to France and his name does not figure in the comité d’action, but his presence was assured by his poems. Haunted and solitary, Khaïr-Eddine (whose mother tongue was Berber) had fueled new Moroccan poetry (and literature) with the concepts of the “linguistic guerrillas”7. To finish with the garden verses and the classical elegies, someone had to dare to break the rules of literary French. He did so and opened the way to language experimentation. Widely debated by Maghrebi writers in French, through Souffles the topic reached the young generation of Moroccan writers both in French and in Arabic. At the core of the debate was the question, in which language would the new independent Moroccan writers write?8 The answer given by Laâbi in the first issue of Souffles is still valuable today: “The language of a poet,” he wrote, “is above all [his own language,] the one that he creates.” By encouraging translations and collaborations, Souffles had the great merit not to divide literary production into Francophone and Arabophone, as creation and culture in both languages were considered (and are) a complementary historical reality rooted in a common ground.

Souffles would not have come into existence without Laâbi’s steadfast work. His poetical gift and passion were matched by his rigorous intellect. He was aware of his mission. Souffles opened with a severe “j’accuse. . .” regarding the cultural situation in Morocco and focused on the question of national identity and culture, but did not forget to write that “Our writer friends, Maghrebi, Africans, Europeans, and of other nationalities are fraternally invited to participate in our modest enterprise.” He was farsighted. And he soon received letters from Europe and the Maghreb. The Tunisian writer Albert Memmi wrote “I was waiting for this publication, I was hoping it would exist”; Driss Chraïbi affirmed “your magazine is fantastic!”; and the Algerian writer Mouloud Mammeri welcomed the “young” review. Such encouragement from three great writers of the older generation was important. As the mouthpiece of a new generation, the review took a stand in the defense of those Maghrebi writers—like Chraïbi or Kateb Yacine (Algeria)—whose work had expressed the revolt against both local feudalism and foreign occupation. What the authors who were published by Souffles meant to young readers was of great importance. Paralyzed by the language problem (literary French? classical Arabic? Berber oral tradition?), they had long repressed their anguishes, rages, emotions, and hopes. Now each of them could create their language, use vernacular terms, experiment, “scream.” Nissaboury has called it “poésie chacaliste”: the screaming of the jackal. Soon, however, la poésie chacaliste would be a juvenile joke and each poet—Laâbi was the first—would reach poetical maturity.
In the third issue we find mention of a comité d’action. It included Ahmed Bouanani, Souffles-cover,no.6,Rabat1967Nissaboury, Abdallah Stouky, the Algerian poet Malek Alloula and the French poets Bernard Jakobiak and André Laude. Bouanani, a fine intellectual and a wonderful storyteller, was the author of beautiful poems later collected in the anthology Les Persiennes. His articles on popular poetry were remarkable at a time when that subject had been studied only by ethnologists. The names in the committee were to change somewhat over the years. One of the first to give support to Laâbi, Nissaboury, the amazing author of the book La mille et deuxième nuit, remained a member until 1969. So did the painters of the Casablanca Group. In the course of time, among the various collaborators we find distinguished authors like Mostafa Lacheraf (Algeria); Azeddine Madani and Mohamed Aziza (Tunisia); Abdallah Laroui and Abdelkhébir Khatibi (Morocco). Except for a long poem by Etel Adnan (Lebanon) and few other critical contributions (by Jeanne-Paule Fabre and myself), women were barely present in Souffles. However, when women poets and writers came on the scene with their own books, magazines, and actions, they looked back at Souffles as an experience that had prepared the ground for new ideas.
Every issue of Souffles opened with a note by Laâbi. The “urgent matters” were innumerable. Significantly, religion was not an issue: fundamentalism had not yet troubled the old and wise Maghrebi Islam, which was open to changes and secularity. In 1967, besides poetry readings, Laâbi and his poet friends, with the support of Melehi, created the Collection Atlantes, which published booklets by Jakobiak, Laâbi, Nissaboury, Alloula, and Laâbi’s book L’oeil et la nuit. In 1968 Souffles participated in the birth of the national cultural association ARC (Action et Recherche Culturelle), created—as Laâbi wrote—by “some artists, university researchers, scientific and technical professionals, students. . . .” It was an important and ambitious project that also involved political parties.

Souffles took part with enthusiasm in the first cultural activities that were boldly extended to the rest of the Maghreb. The collaboration of Abraham Serfaty, a notable Moroccan intellectual, became more relevant than the one with Tahar Ben Jelloun. Convicted with Laâbi in 1972 and later imprisoned, Serfaty was set free in 1991. After the fifteenth issue, dedicated to Palestine (“Pour la Révolution Palestinienne”), Souffles changed its layout, cover, and format. Laâbi’s review had become “the organ of the revolutionary Moroccan movement” (Gontard). This was a radical change. A decision, recalls Jakobiak, of “idealistic generosity,” “one that pushes you [however] to all kinds of ruptures and divides the world into two halves: the good and the bad. [. . .] Once the euphoria faded there were those who converted to dialectic materialism and those who did not.” Painters and poets of the first period of Souffles did not follow the new course (or were not accepted in the new comité d’action). In a climate of painful debates, the creative group split from the political group. It was the normal outcome for a cultural movement. The same had happened to other groups in the history of modern avant-gardism. Those who believe in free independent creation resist the diktat and jargon of political parties. On the other hand, ideology needs intellectuals and poets to renew its views on the world. Souffles had generously offered its contribution. It then issued consistent documents on the main revolutionary struggles of the time (Angola, South Africa, Mozambique, etc.) as well as on the political situation in Morocco. In a troubled time of “betrayed independence” (Laâbi) Souffles’ new course was important for the nation’s political awareness. Yet when art and poetry had spoken aloud, they had also set in motion a change that was revolutionary and good for the nation’s awareness. If the Souffles of the first period Souffles-coverfirstedition,Rabat,1/1966graphicsbyM.Melehiand its collaboration with the Casablanca Group had never been, Morocco and the Maghreb would have felt its absence. That is why, when the younger Moroccan generation writes today about Souffles, it looks back with admiration at its artists and poets, who had the courage to create and invent, as well as at its intellectuals, who had the courage to defy injustice.9

Appendix
Toni Maraini, poet, writer, art critic, and a specialist on Maghrebi art and culture, is founding member of Souffles. She now lives in Rome.

1

Marc Gontard, “La Littérature marocaine de langue française,” and Bernard Jakobiak, “Souffles de 1966 à 1969,” in Europe (June–July 1979), p. 107f. and pp. 117–23.

2

Abderrahmane Tenkoul, “Les Revues Culturelles,” in Regards sur la Culture Marocaine, no. 1 (1988), pp. 8–13.

3

Gontard, “La Littérature,” p. 107.

4

Germain Ayache, Les écrits d’avant l’Indépendance (Casablanca, 1990).

5

I was myself a member of this group, and have been writing about their experiences since 1964; see, for example: Toni Maraini, Écrits sur l’Art, 1964–1989 (Rabat, 1990).

6

Lahsen Mouzouni, Le Roman marocain de langue française, (Paris, 1987), p. 71.

7

The term guerilla linguistique was introduced by Mohamed Khaïr-Eddine in his autobiographical novel Moi l’Aigre (1970).

8

After gaining independence from French colonialism Arabic was declared the official language in 1956.

9

“Revue : Souffles Coupés” [editorial note], in Tel Quel (Casablanca), no. 148 (2004), p. 23.

this article first appeared in documenta magazines online journal

Ravan Press
Johannesburg, South Africa
1978-1993 (1996)

Borrowing its name and image from township slang for black youth who rode the overcrowded African sections of the racially segregated commuter trains by hanging onto the outside or sitting on the roofs, Staffrider had two main objectives: to provide publishing opportunities for community-based organizations and young writers, graphic artists and photographers; and to oppose officially sanctioned state and establishment culture.

Produced by the same Durban “moment” that saw Steve Biko begin the South African Students Association, Staffrider had a view of literature with a small “I”: it’s base was popular rather than elite and it sought to provide an autobiography of experience in its witness of daily black life in South Africa. The magazine’s nonracial policy and choice of English as a non-ethnic mode of communication attracted a cross-section of writers, artists and other contributors to the magazine. Debates around Staffrider’s “self-editing” editorial policy were ongoing and the magazine eventually adopted quality control measures under the editorship of Chris van Wyk. But the magazine’s early flexibility ensured that the work of previously unpublished writers and artists appeared alongside that of many South African notables including Nadine Gordimer, Lionel Abrahams, Rose Zwi, and Mtutuzeli Matshoba.

the complete chimurenga library is here

London, UK
1988 -

Named after Thelonious Monk’s classic, Straight No Chaser was a fiercely independent British magazine aimed at the global jazz, jive and soul aficionado. Published under the banner of “Interplanetary Sounds - Ancient to Future” (partly stolen from Art Ensemble of Chicago) it combined the jazz spirit, the “Freedom Principle” that its founder, journalist and jazz head Paul Bradshaw, defined as the “spirit of improvisation embodied in the music of John Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders and Rahsaan Roland Kirk” with the urban edge of hip hop, drum n bass, deep house and nu-jazz. Emerging from the thriving late 80s British jazz dance community, its in-depth artist features, interviews and global reports on the sounds and philosophies of diverse scenes - from Brazil’s AfroReggae scene and Ethiopia Mulatu Astatke, to South Africa’s Busi Mhlongo and the death-jazz scene in Japan - made it a seminal hub around which the “jazz thing” evolved globally.

Its “acid jazz” design is equally important. Inspired by typographic legend Swifty it employed sampling and remixing strategies to radically redefine the relationship between music and the visual world of photography, illustration/fine art and typo-graffix. In 2007 the magazine responded to “the continued digitalisation of the industry and the expectations of the Myspace generation” by ceasing print production to focus on developing a substantial archive reflecting the magazines the journey so far.

the complete chimurenga library is here

2008

DESCRIPTION

The guiding concept behind The Book of Tongues is the impossible. In it, founding editor-at-large Rustum Kozain undertakes a journey through illusion and disillusion, secret desire and the wilderness of the imagination that includes a detour into landscape, encounter, memory, and history - among other diversions. Part philosophical prank, part fantasy parable, part meta-textual myth and part wishful thinking, itís a personal quest that ultimately seeks to find the correct distance between the eyes and the book.

If you know where to look, there is a steel trap door on one of the city streets that opens with double panels, such as those leading to the basements of many shops. There is no secret code, but if you know where to look and you find the trapdoor, all you need to do is knock and Maalik, a scrawny man with an ascetic aspect and dressed in robes of light shades, will open and let you in. Past a shelf of cabbages, onions and tomatoes, he will lead you into an opening that has a few armchairs, a couch, a gas burner sporting a brass pot brewing sweet coffee, and a sparse assortment of books and magazines. You might see a few people standing around or browsing the books or sipping coffee.

Furthest away from the entrance, the basement gives way to rock and the walls curve in a dome down to the floor. At that end is a low doorway carved from the rock. If you more or less know what you are looking for, Maalik will lead you through this door, stooping ahead of you through a low passage of twenty metres.

On the other side of this passage you will be astounded to find another, bigger cavern, with a few benches and a few newspapers of the day. But, more astoundingly, you will see a canal with a small boat floating on the water and tethered to an iron post. The canal runs through an archway and disappears into darkness. Next to the post is an old switchboard. Maalik will plug and unplug a few wires, throw one or two switches and Jibreel, a tall, muscular woman with dreadlocks down to her waist and dressed in fatigues, will appear through a door situated just left of the low passage way. Wordlessly, she will gesture towards the boat.

It will become clear that through the switchboard, Maalik has communicated your request to Jibreel. Through the archway then, Jibreel will steer the boat for about 200 speedy metres as the canal drops fast. Then, when the boat slows, you will find yourself in an enormous cavern with several hundred archways leading off it.

As you float into this vast cavern underneath Cape Town, you might hear faint chanting. For a moment you might even see numerous boats bobbing on the far side of the cavern, the boatmen aft standing upright and sometimes looking like the heavy downstroke of the Alif. But they will soon disappear down one of the tunnels. If she deigns to answer your queries, Jibreel will mumble that the boatmen are souls of dead slaves. “Because they died as slaves, they are considered murdered. And so their souls will not find rest, like mine,” she will add.

Above each tunnel leading off this cavern is a signboard. You might see “The Seven Fears” or “The Histories”. Another reads “The Alphabets”. Jibreel will steer your boat in the required direction and next to “The numbers of the many downfalls”, you will enter the tunnel named “The Mirrors”.

keep reading here

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New York, United States
1980s -

Greg Tate has spent the last two decades formulating a critical language that has redefined African American cultural theory and writing. An essayist and longtime staff writer for The Village Voice, Tate has published widely, with writings on art, music, and culture appearing in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Washington Post, Spin, Artforum, The Nation, and DownBeat, and Africa-based magazines such as Glendora Review and Chimurenga. Taken together these uncollected works constitute a virtual nomadic periodical that pushes the limits of African-American culture.

The impact of Tate’s writing lies in the seminal productive tensions he navigates between post structural theory and black cultural nationalism; academia and street culture. Taking his cue from black innovators such as Miles Davis, Hendrix, Sly Stone, George Clinton and the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat who fused the “superbad Stagolee tradition” with an intellectual sophistication, he defies fixed notions about what constitutes “authentic” black culture, inscribing a new radical trajectory that throbs with the rebellious rage of Nirvana, flows with the swank of a Bootsy bassline and bristles with the verbal acrobatics - puns, quibbles, equivocations, neologisms, subterfuges, conflations, allusions and playful digressions - of a deconstructionist.

Now in his 50s, Tate continues to challenge cultural hegemony, writing on everything from hip-hop to Youtube. His books include Flyboy in the Buttermilk, Midnight Lightning: Jimi Hendrix and the Black Experience, and Everything But the Burden: What White People Are Taking From Black Culture. He is also a founding member of the Black Rock Coalition and the conductor and music director of Burnt Sugar, a band that, like his writing, binds jazz, rock, funk, and African music in a lyrical, exploratory and improvisational manner.

FAMILY TREE

* Discovering his literary talents as a performance poet in his native, Washington, D.C., where he grew up going to nationalist meetings and passing out fliers exploring ideas crucial to racial discourse with his parents, Tate was guided by the auspices of political activists H. Rap Brown and Stokely Carmicheal, writers Ntozake Shange and Thulani Davis, and lesbian poet /filmmaker Michele Parkinson.

His writing is attributed as “setting it off” for a generation of “freaky-deke cult-nat” journalists, essayists, painters, screenwriters, directors working the Black Atlantic connection. As “Blackadelic Pop” wordsmith Michael Gonzales writes, “if it were not for Greg Tate, there would be no Bonz Malone, Harry Allen, Joan Morgan, Kris Ex, Scott Poulson Bryant, Toure, Danyel Smith, Michael Eric Dyson, Karen R. Goode, Selwyn Seyfu Hinds, Smokey Fontaine, John Caramanica, Jeff Chang, Amy Linden, Tom Terrell, Mark Anthony Neal, Tricia Rose, Sasha Jenkins, DJ Spooky (aka Paul Miller), Dream Hampton, Miles Marshall Lewis, Aliya King, SekouWrites, Kenji Jasper, Oliver Wang, Cheo Hodari Coker, Keith Murphy or myself… to paraphrase a line from the gangster rappers interview handbook, if it wasn’t for Greg ‘Ironman’ Tate, I might be robbing your house right now.”

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Routledge
London, UK
1987 -

Third Text is a bimonthly international scholarly journal on art in global context. Since its inception in 1987, it set out to challenge the West’s position as the ultimate arbiter within arts and culture. Under the editorship of London-based artist and cultural theorist Rasheed Araeen, Third Text challenges the boundaries of the visual arts and the confines of the Western academy, featuring leading critics alongside new voices and advanced scholarship interspersed with radical interdisciplinary work that goes beyond the confines of eurocentricity. Published in London, but designed to raise the critical temperature and the political stakes for art and cultural practice in the age of globalization, its regional focuses give voice to writers and artists outside the Western academic canon. In this respect the journal has played an important role not only in liberating already colonized discourses but also in prompting the coloniser to “decolonise his/her mind”, as the editors put it.

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Tsotso
Harare, Zimbabwe
1990 - 2001

Described as “a magazine of new writing in Zimbabwe,” Tsotso’s mandate was to undermine the continued colonial domination of literature. It sought to create a platform where a new generation of Zimbabwean writers could give expression to their experiences through writing and create new contexts for the discussion, criticism and dissemination of their work.

Bypassing traditional channels such as academies and foreign institutes, Tsotso’s editorial team - T.O. Mcloughlin, F.R. Mhonyera, M.Mahiri, S. Nondo and H. Lewis - put out a call for submissions in popular mass media publications such as Parade and the Herald in 1990. The result was a flood of submissions, many by first time writers with little or no experience. “This is encouraging,” read the editorial response in the second issue of Tsotso, “but a note of caution or at least advice is necessary to the young writer.” This statement set the tone for what would become the magazine’s strong pedagogic praxis.

Publishing poetry and prose in English and Shona but also in Ndebele, Tonga and Shangaan, Tsotso sought to rupture the separatist conceptions of black and white writing, oral and print poetry, Western academic and traditional forms that continued to dominate post-independence Zimbabwean literature. A culture of critical reading was advanced through regular reviews and analyses of contemporary and historical Zimbabwean writing, and editorial content was focused on encouraging writers to craft alternative kinds of expression that went beyond surface meaning, dominant myths and traditional clichés. The magazine also actively engaged new writers through regular workshops and writing competitions, the results of which often became the focus of the content.

Tsotso published irregularly throughout the 1990s. Its mandate was continued in the new millennium by organisations such as the BWAZ (Budding Writers association of Zimbabwe), which was founded out of a workshop organized by Tsotso and literary anthologies such as amaBooks’ Short Writings From Bulawayo and Weaver Press’ Writing Still and Writing Now.

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Harare , Zimbabwe
1954 - 1970s

Published in 1954, Two Tone a quarterly of Rhodesian poetry signified a radical break with the largely conservative Eurocentric academic traditions which until then had dominated Zimbabwean poetry. Publishing poetry by both black and white writers working, predominantly in English but also in Ndebele and Shona, it challenged divisions and created a new open field for expression in divergent poetic voices and styles.

While the magazine was published in association with the National Arts Foundation of Rhodesia and the University of Rhodesia’s English Department the selection process was left to the journal’s rotating board of editors, whose focus on “good writing,” “technical skill,” “stylistic innovation” and “authentic expression” provided a foundation for much of the groundbreaking new literature that exploded in Zimbabwe in the 1970.

Two Tone prioritised the author of the imagination rather than the revisionist historian or political revolutionary - a position which became increasing tenuous during the oppressive years of the Smith regime. The magazine received scathing criticism from academics, political activist and many black poets who increasingly saw it as a “banal” and “pretentious outlet” for a closed minority of “White literati”, whose “patronizing approach” to black writing supported the political status quo. The antagonism was only exacerbated by the publication of defensive editorials which argued that “separatism and elitism” create the assurances of liberty to “foster imaginative literature.”

Despite the controversy, the journal’s legacy is secured through the writing of seminal contemporary Zimbabwean poets such as D. F. Middleton, Julius Chingono, Charles Mungoshi, Bonus Zimunya and John Eppel, all of whom began their literary careers on the pages of Two Tone.

two tone: an essay by barbara murray can be read here

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Saint Louis, Senegal
1973 - 2000

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DESCRIPTION

Unir Cinéma: Revue du Cinéma Africain was the first periodical entirely devoted to African cinema to come out of Francophone Africa. First published in 1973 on a tight budget, this Senegalese magazine was typewritten and duplicated through offset printing. Despite its low production values, it established itself as an essential reference tool on cinema on the continent. Written by both Senegalese and French reviewers and published by the Catholic Information Center of the diocese of Saint Louis, it provided up to date filmographies of recent motion pictures as well as more detailed entries (including credits, filmmakers’ biographies, film summaries and critiques) of the most significant cinematographic works by African filmmakers.

Its detailed reports on film festivals throughout the world revealed the exposure and appreciation of African cinema on an international level, while its listings of places where African films have been or will be commercially exhibited attested to the scope of their circulation. Carefully prepared by-country dossiers revealed both the status of cinema in different regions and the efforts undertaken by local governments to promote the production and distribution of their films. While little effort was made to offer more in-depth critical insights into the thematics, aesthetics and ethics of African cinema, Unir Cinéma did furnish its readers with bibliographies of the latest articles on African cinema in international magazines and journals as well as the names of international periodicals with a serious interest in the critique of African films.

PEOPLE

Edited by Pere Jean Vast until 1996, later edited by Pere Joseph Lambrecht (1998-2000)

FAMILY TREE

* Unir Cinéma was initially (from no. 1 to 35) a general periodical titled Unir (L’Echo de Saint-Louis). In 1973 it switched focus exclusively to film and continued as Unir Cinema: Revue Du Cinéma Africain.
* Ecrans d’Afrique (Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, 1992)
* Les 2 Ecrans: revue mensuelle de cinéma et de television (Zirout, Algiers, Algeria)

RE/SOURCES

* Pfaff, Françoise. “Researching Africa on film”, Jump Cut, no. 31, March 1986, pp. 50, 57
* Schmidt, Nancy J. “Review: Periodicals on African Film”, African Studies Review, Vol. 40, No. 1 (Apr., 1997), pp. 113-119

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PASS RADIO launches on September 12 with “Songs for Biko, and other stomps, screams and prayers:” after-tears; vigil; wake; marathon; whatever. An open party to launch PASS. At the Pan African Market (76 Long Street, Cape Town) from 1 pm on Friday 12 Sept (Biko Day) to 1pm on Saturday 13 Sept. DJs, musicians, soundists, poets, generally noise people will present music and sound inspired by Steve Biko’s work; or read from his words in I Write What I Like. Anyone wishing to contribute to this endurance session can contact PASS People at info [ at ] panafricanspacestation [ dot ] org [ dot ] za (with a 2-line description of how they wish to contribute).

more information here

SLY Media
Johannesburg, South Africa
1998 -

Born in 1998 out of a joint partnership between Studentwise, publishers of white youth targeted SL Magazine and black youth targeted Johannesburg radio station YFM, Y Magazine was conceived as the new voice of the South Africa’s recently liberated black urban youth.

Published under the pay-off “Y - because I want to know”, it aimed to tap into the same market that made YFM the biggest regional station at the time. This was the so-called Y Generation, a “freedom’s children” that got to celebrate the liberation their parents fought so hard for. As poet Lebo Mashile explained: “if we were 20 or 30 in the 70’s and 80’s we would have been using everything we had to fight Apartheid… but now we have the freedom and space to do what we want with our talent and we have the ability to really manifest our dreams…”

Under founder editors S’busiso ‘The General’ Nxumalo and Itumeleng Mahabane Y quickly came to encapsulate this spirit. Like YFM its emphasis was on urban street culture with a strong focus on the sounds of post-apartheid black South Africa especially Kwaito. Written in spoken English and drops of Scamto, it was filled with diverse youth interests without ever narrowing them down to just entertainment. From the relationship between kwaito’s apolitical, “hedonistic and flighty preoccupations” and President Thabo Mbeki’s macroeconomic ideology, to the politics of fashion and the aesthetic of struggle, Y Magazine was as one reader put it, “as rounded as Lil Kim’s ass”.

This radical challenge to the binary opposition political-apolitical placed Y a step or two ahead of other mainstream magazines, black and white. This also meant that corporate advertisers remained at arm’s length. Inevitably the magazine gave over to market pressures and changes at the radio station. Both Nxumalo and Mahabane stepped down as editors. Since then Y has continued under no less than eight different editors but it has never recaptured the idealism or attitude of those first few issues.

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an essay by Nicole Turner

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

this essay originally appeared on chimurengalibrary