kagablog

For three years South African writer, Pravasan Pillay, documented the songs and stories of unknown ninety-one year old South African-Indian folklorist, Sivakami Chetty. Last year after her death, Pillay dedicated an article to her in Unsigned. We speak to him as part of our Contributor Notes Series.

Unsigned: Do you consider yourself an ethnomusicologist/folklorist?

Pravasan Pillay: No. I’m not a trained musicologist or folklorist and I have no interest in academic research or its methods. It was something I fell into after a friend introduced me to Sivakami. I had no experience of field recording before then.

U: Tell us about Sivakami.

PP: She was born in 1916, lost her husband relatively early, and worked as a market gardener until her late seventies. In most respects she was a traditional older Indian woman. It was only when she was singing or telling a story that her personality changed. She’d go into a trance-like state and would barely acknowledge my presence. Her music and stories were concerned with, what I would call, bad men – either human or supernatural.

U: Do you plan on publishing any of these stories or songs?

PP: They’re not mine to publish. My feeling is that they should be out there but Sivakami’s family don’t agree. Our dispute, if you want to call it that, revolves on their request to cut the so-called occult passages from the transcripts. This would mean destroying around eighty per cent of the recordings. I don’t see the point of releasing them in that heavily edited form.

U: Two issues ago (Unsigned#23) you contributed an article, ‘Some Plantation Creatures’, which you dedicated to Sivakami , whose content – complete with diagrams – seemed to suggest that you take the existence of supernatural beings seriously.

PP: I never stated that I believed. It was an investigation.

U: I suppose what I’m getting at is whether the article was in jest. At one point you discuss an albino that rides a giant rat from the canefields. Are you being ironic?

PP: I don’t think that’s what I’m trying to do.

U: Any plans for future recordings?

PP: There are a few story threads that Sivakami left unfinished. I would like to find out how they end, but I’m not sure who could finish them.

Unsigned is a culture journal based in Nijmegen in The Netherlands. Sivakami’s surname has been changed in accordance with her family’s wishes.

his hand on her ass
like a ribcage

she’d rather go down
on the ocean

tangles, binds, and knots
is all he gots

got her beeswax
on my mind

a century is too
long

she built a gas-chamber
for wallets

her swamp need a
thing

her vibrator’s got a
better car than me

she opposes
cumming

her fireworks burn black
in the nightsky

i don’t believe one
should have experiences

no-one, these days, is vulgar
in the right way

Renishaw folklorist and singer Sivakami Chetty* died of a heart attack on Monday. She was 91. Chetty was well known in the Renishaw and Park Rynie districts for her moving devotional singing and for her skilled storytelling. Her youngest daughter, Priya Paul, said her mother died soon after returning home from a prayer service. Paul said that despite her mother’s age it had nevertheless come as a shock to the family. “She was healthier than people half her age, and walked every afternoon.” Paul said. Born in the barracks of Esperanza in 1916, Chetty moved to Renishaw with her husband, Jayaseelan, a sugarcane labourer, at the age of 14. She worked her entire life as a vegetable hawker and was a mother to seven children. When Jayaseelan died of liver failure in 1985, Chetty moved in with her son, Devan. Though illiterate, Chetty amassed an impressive oral store of sugarcane plantation and barracks folklore.According to Paul, her mother regarded these stories not as fiction but as part of the history of the region. Paul said her mother often went into a trance-like state while reciting the stories. “If you didn’t know her you might be scared by what you saw, but it was no different from the typical trance-state seen at any temple.”
Pravasan Pillay, a Durban writer, who, for the last three years, has recorded Chetty’s stories, songs, and trances said that her death was a huge loss for occult and folklore archivists. “There is a shortage of sustained accounts of plantation creatures, demons and, for lack of better phrase, badmen. For instance, Sivakami’s story of Tumbi - Tamil for little brother - a devil, who dressed in sugarcane leaves, and murdered young girls, is essentially a spoken novella.” Pillay has recorded fourteen tapes of Chetty,but has no immediate plans for them: “The tapes are bedfellows to books like Fort’s The Book of the Damned, the Lesser Key of Solomon and Dictionnaire Infernal - as well as numerous universally found folktales and traditional songs. Sivakami has been the central intellectual influence in my life and I hope that her parallel history of the south coast and her occult ontology reaches a wider audience.” Brahmin Kasey Naidoo, of Beach Road Temple, said Chetty was a devote Hindu who rarely missed a service or prayer. He added that her fine voice would be missed during services. A service will be held for heron 22 October at the Beach Road Temple.
James Moodley, Park Rynie Gazette (12 October 2007)
*Sivakami’s family were unhappy with the occult characterisations I made in the above article. At their request and with journalist “James Moodley’s” permission I have changed the all relevant names and locations.

house was the grenade
mama was the pin

her abortionist retired
young

goat married goose
it was loose

boss got a sweet
tooth

she stuck rhinestones
around her vomit

girl, why you
tripping