kagablog

by stacy hardy

South African film maker Aryan Kaganof shot his new film SMS Sugar Man entirely with a cell phone. That the media is the message is old news, so it’s hardly surprising that most readings of the film have focused on its presentation of the superficiality of our hyper-real late capitalist society. And indeed Kaganof’s film is a relentless presentation of error, bad taste, artifice and a lack of truth or reasonableness, chronicling with zeal the hyper-violent banality of South Africa as a cell phone society where media image replaces reality and texting replaces language as a means of communication.

What these readings fail to consider however is SMS Sugar Man’s textuality and intertextuality, and how Kaganof employs these strategies as a radical alternative to the banality of “sms society”.

Once upon a time, that’s the first clue. SMS Sugar Man opens with that fairy tale promise. Once, yes, but also now and forever - always. One night: Christmas Eve. From hotel to hotel the Sugarman (played by Kaganof) and his girls journey like Joseph and Mary looking for a manger. Only this Christmas things are fucked up.

“Women are sugars. Men are wallets. Money is God. Life is very simple.” Like God, Sugarman is emblematic and exemplary; he is reduced to sign, the cellphone he carries - at once a communication and a surveillance device. Omniscient, all seeing and all knowing; male authority - yes, but also the author, the film maker: Kaganof.

Emblems proliferate. Mary is three in one, an unholy trinity: the mother, the virgin and the whore. Sugar man plays the carpenter: Capital as Coffin Maker, Grim Reaper, Time’s Passing. His raptures lead not to Heaven but to Hell. He is the assassin and the undertaker and the hearse. A Valiant ’66. What else? It cruises. The road is black. A liquorice lick. Everything slo-mo so you can almost feel the sides melt off like chocolate. Like the Fred/ Pete character on his drives down David Lynch’s Lost Highway. The road ahead, everything is concrete and light, there nothing else. No getting off, there’s no truck stop, no rest room, no rest for the wicked….

And Sugar man is wicked, or so it seems, the amoral pimp, peddling his girls in the underbelly of Joburg where sex is a commodity and violence a form of communication. His customers are automatons, “Wallets”, the sins of lust, gluttony, sloth, envy, pride personified. Out to buy their salvation for Christmas, they rotate around the dark hole of Sugar man’s greed in a spiralling orbit.

Here time is money, and both spell Death. The promise of salvation, the immaculate conception of the Christ Child, cast into question by Sugar man’s growing paranoia. “Who is the father? Who is the father?” The question punctuates the film like a litany that creates a snarling vortex, a cingulum of sorts, a noose. In a way it’s almost as if time had stopped, looping back upon itself as the car cruises in order to intensify, by a sort of positive feedback, the film’s overall sense of apocalyptic imminence - of something catastrophic not so much happening, as always being about to happen. Like teetering on a precipice without actually falling over; or better, falling over but never finishing falling over, never quite hitting the ground.

The narrative is filled with plots and schemes that go nowhere, that implode on the plotters themselves, and with paranoid, apocalyptic premonitions that are significant precisely as premonitions, not because of what they actually really foresee. Motions are started, but not completed. “The son shall inherit the sins of the father,” predicts Sugar man after a father orders a “sugar” for his son in a twisted urban initiation ritual that never transpires. Phones ring and ring. Smoke from a cigarette spirals eternally upward. Loaded glocks are locked against temples… but never fire. It’s too dark to make things out clearly.

The sinking that permeates the film manifests in strange poetic interludes that intercut the action. The camera twists and swirls. Up-side-down. Inside-out. Sugar man suffers peculiar spells, curious lapses of consciousness when his mind misses a beat. Pause. Rewind. Again. Again. The ground is swept out from under our feet, literally as the image inverts. Sugar man underwater. Drowning? Or swimming against the tide? The eye submerged and displaced, in that liminal space between things, continually transgressing the distinctions difference between the seen and the unseen - the periphery, blind spots, what is underneath the surface, invisible, or below, or to the side of, or just out of sight from the visual. Poetic and symbolic? Yes, but also purely pop. Remember the toilet scene in Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting?

The Trainspotting doesn’t stop. Lynchian surrealism blurs into Godardian Nouvelle Vague. Sadeian Woman rubs shoulders with Red Riding Hood. Chaucer is intercut with scenes that recall low-budget British Carry On films. Fellinni trades secrets with the Brothers Grim. The unholy Mary trinity morphs into Charlie’s Angels and Thelma and Louise are reinvented via classic mythology. Genders morph and change (“This is Grace….she thinks she’s a man…..”) as Cat People bleeds into Bram Stoker (“I’m not a woman, I’m a cat…..”). Over and over this threat to the symbolic order, as if this promiscuously jarring mixture of styles and media were the only way Kaganof could express the actuality of life in the 21st Century.

This fragmentation, the irresolution, the continual switching back and forth between moments or sequences that are plot-driven, and ones that are instead purely affect-driven, the insistence that genre conventions and expectations can neither be transcended and escaped, nor fulfilled: all these features of SMS Sugar Man reflect - or better, work towards, and help to construct - the vision of a world that is too far-flung to be totalised on the level of any grand phallogocentric narrative, paranoid, conspiratorial or otherwise.

But if SMS Sugar Man is both infinitely diverse and expansive, at the same time it’s oddly claustrophobic because of the way that all of its crazy tangents, detours, irrational cuts, and meta-fictional references are all enclosed within the cellphone camera’s tiny frame. This claustrophobia is what gives the film its compulsive power.

The city scenes are gorgeous, in murky chiaroscuro, the mobile camera tracking the actors close enough so all we can see are their faces, filling the screen, emerging out of, and returning to, the shadows. Sex is subtly, but powerfully, modulated throughout these chiaroscuro sequences. Scenes of abject violence and sexual consumption intertwine with poetic images and philosophical frameworks. Plots play out across the body, as if formed, deformed, reformed by culture. Close up: a woman’s face. She grits her teeth. Closes her eyes, but the closing is identical to open. The blindness of a desire beyond death.

This is a radical break from cinema’s usual divisions between porn - film as sadistic gaze male, as penis - and the more “wishy-washy” erotica reserved for the feminine. Sugar man subverts these clean distinctions. It dirties the dichotomies, the traditional lines of demarcation between romance and porn, art film and exploitation film, between spirituality and sleaze, high culture and popular trash and, perhaps most important of all, between film, literature and art world. In all these respects, the work signals the tremors of a deep cultural shift, a new relationship between avant-garde artist and popular entertainer, between esoterica and pulp, between conceptualism and narrative.

As the film proceeds, things become more and more unhinged. A sweet nativity tale about the Christmas Eve Angel soundtracks explicit imagery. Close up. Tits, like perfect champagne glasses, nipples round and hard. An opera aria underscores arse shakes. The screen is all arse, hips, mesmerizing and fluid, deep and dangerous. Flesh-quiver, dizzy spasms born of the heat of anticipation of coming events, the head rocking back, the eyes closing, lolling in their sockets. Until finally, even Sugarman is forced to concede: “I’m losing the plot, I don’t know what’s what and who is who?”

In this way, Kaganof charts the struggle between the doctrinaire impulse to control and contain and the more dynamic (albeit sometimes equally dangerous) impulse to transgress, struggle, and create; to dissolve once self in a torrent of both sexuality and textuality.

Significantly, it’s only when Sugar man “loses the plot”; loosens his grip and abandons his lust to conquer, possess and own all he touches, his desire for authorship and authority; for fatherhood, that he finds love.

In this con-text, radical texuality and inter-textuality can be read as modes of resistance, a way of subverting the control system inherent in Western society, the words of the parents, the authourised version, authoritarian text, the author itself; a way of fucking with the control system inherent in discourse, of expanding the possibilities of creation by ceaselessly creating the new out of the old; of escaping the double-binds imposed by the structures of family and society – sexual, textual, ontological. Who am I? What is the meaning of “I”?.

In proposing the magic of textuality, language as a revelation which translates into social agency, SMS envisions the possibility of love’s reconstitution and thus moves beyond a nihilistic deconstruction to point the way toward a feminist subjectivity which, like sexuality itself, is provisional, temporary, changing, fluid, and multiple.

SMS Sugar man’s visual and graphic effects editor Jurgen Meekel is quoted as saying: “(the film) will hopefully democratize filmmaking. After this film no one can say I cannot make a film because I don’t have the equipment”

But Kaganof’s film also democratises filmmaking on a level besides the technical. The figuration of SMS corresponds to what author Angela Carter has called “the slow process of decolonialising language” (Nothing Sacred: Selected Writings. Virago Press Ltd, 1992): happiness only becomes possible after the myth of the omniscient author has undergone a process of derision and corrosion; from the ruins of such an operation, salvation, “the Christmas Eve Angel” promised in the film can be conceived.

As such, SMS must be read as a tale of magic- the magic of language and memory which exposes the politics of the human condition. SMS stands for an alphabet which allows us to see that even the depth of the abyss can be inhabited by love. SMS, indeed, is the language of the voiceless and the damned who speak outside of the logic of the domination that has previously emarginated and silenced them.

In this context, Kaganof offers a reading of contemporary South Africa far more hopeful and interesting than could ever be encapsulated in the 128×128, 176×220 or 128×160 screen resolution of a cellphone.

sms sugar man will be screened during the africa in the picture festival in amsterdam on 12 september at 21:30m in bioscoop het ketelhuis. for more information click here

September 12 - October 12
Cape Town, South Africa/ Cyberspace

The Pan African Space Station (PASS) is an annual 30-day music intervention on the internet and in venues across greater Cape Town from September 12 to October 12. Now in its second year, PASS continues its cross-cultural and cyber-spatial exploration, bringing together diverse pan-African sounds from ancient grooves to future hip-hop.

PASS radio, a unique freeform music radio station, is back with 30 days of cutting edge music streamed live via the internet. The station features guest DJs, themed shows, live performances and readings, tributes, debates, sound art, speeches, interviews and much, much more.

Highlights on this year’s broadcast programme include Songs for Biko, a 24-hour praise party for Steve Biko on 12 Sept (Biko Day) and Songs for Bheki, a musical tribute to the late South African philosopher and musician Bheki Mseleku, which closes the live music component on October 4. Visit www.panafricanspacestation.org.za to view last year’s programming and listen to archived “PASS Casts” including radio mixes, talks and performances by acts at last year’s festival.

Between October 1 – 4, 2009, PASS II plays host to genre-busting music outfits from global Africa dedicated to exploring new musical territory. Acclaimed Kora maestro Toumani Diabaté mediates traditions inherited from Mali’s ancient Mandé empire through globe trotting jazz, blues and electro frequencies in his first ever South African performance. Expect an equally courageous and spiritual performance from African Queen of Ndebele music, guitarist Nothembi Mkhwebane.

9-piece, Chicago-based jazz troubadours Hypnotic Brass Ensemble remap the street-music tradition that runs from jazz’s earliest days through free-jazz, dub and hip-hop into a rowdy, rousing party-music script. A collaboration with South African avant rock icons Blk Jks promises to make this a wild and inventive 12-piece sonic experience! The other big band on the bill is Cameroonian funk-master Franck Biyong and Massak the Afroletric Orchestra who reimagine Afro-Beat via fearless forays into jazz, electronica, soul and hip-hop.

L.A. native Ras G and the Afrikan Space Program bring interstellar beats and dub grooves best described as Sun Ra meets Lee “Scratch” Perry at Zanzibar’s legendary Culture Musical Club. And Ghanaian ‘afro-punk’ Wanlov the Kubulor’s “pidgin music” blends gritty Jamaican dub liquidity and socially engaged lyrics into an alternate music history.

The festival also features a series of new collaborations between South African musicians. Multi-talented jazz vocalist and trombone player Siya Makuzeni adds adventurous sonic textures to world-renowned drummer and percussionist Barry van Zyl’s southern African sound-rhythm stew, Boboti. Elsewhere, politically engaged, slamming poetic jazz upstarts Udaba are joined by Hymphatic Thabz, a Joburg MC know for his forward-thinking beats and welded-to-the-rhythm lyrical flow.

In addition, the festival will includes a collaborative, experimental chorale work based on the novella War Chorale by pioneering Chilean academic, visionary, writer and revolutionary Fernando Alegría, with composition by acclaimed composer, producer and musician Bheki Khoza.
The live music component PASS again takes place in a series of different venues across greater Cape Town, engaging diverse together audiences and provoking new forms of creative expression and social mobilization that that foregrounding history and memory as well as agency and difference. Audiences will travel from St Georges Cathedral, Michaelis/UCT and the Slave Church in the city centre to Guga S’thebe in Langa and All Nations Club in Salt River.
PASS is an initiative of the Africa Centre in partnership with Heliocentrics (Ntone Edjabe and Neo Muyanga).
For more information contact:

info@panafricanspacestation.org.za
www.panafricanspacestation.org.za

Visuele Kuns - Chimurenga Library - Kaapstadse sentrale biblioteek.

Chimurenga Magazine, ’n Pan-Afrikaanse joernaal wat in 2002 deur Ntone Edjabe gestig is, ontleen sy naam aan die Shona-woord wat losweg as “stryd” of “wroeging” vertaal kan word.

Die Chimurenga Library is ’n internet­-argiefprojek onder kuratorskap van die redakteurs en medewerkers van dié joernaal, met die doel om aandag aan Pan-Afrikaanse joernale te skenk en ­skrywers, ­lesers en kuns­tenaars aan te moedig om werke in reaksie daartoe te skep.

Die Chimurenga Library-uitstalling in die nuwe Kaapstadse sentrale biblioteek spruit uit bo­genoemde web-argief en vorm deel van die 2009 Cape Africa Platform.

Kuratorskap word aan die ­joernaal en “Chimurenga people” toegeskryf – met navorsing deur ­Stacy Hardy, uitstallingontwerp en produksie deur Douglas ­Gim- berg, asook bykomende ontwerp en ­navorsing deur vele ander.

Hierdie uitstalling behels ’n subtiele indruising teen die biblioteek se klassifikasie- en navigasiestelsels deur die plasing van lees­roetes, aanhalings en luisterposte wat biblioteekgangers aanmoedig om inhoud wat met Pan-Afrikaanse joernale en die Pan African ­Space Station(PASS Radio)-projek verband hou in die biblioteek op te spoor. Die “nuwe” klassifikasiestelsel is doelbewus subjektief en lig uit juis die onvoldoende en subjektiewe aard van heersende sisteme waarvolgens inligting verdeel word. Aanwysingsborde vir kategorieë soos “Apathy”, “High Prices”, “Corruption”, “Paranoia” en “Study Quietly” is bakens vir ’n reeks komplekse leesroetes waarvoor plekaanwysers op die vloere van die biblioteek aangebring is.

’n Installasie getiteld Why Must a Black Writer Write About Sex bied onder meer fotogekopieërde uittreksels uit sekere swart skrywers se werk, ’n skyn-graffitistuk deur Aryan Kaganof van ’n aan­haling uit Njabulo Ndebele se The Cry Of Winnie Mandela, en ’n innoverende animasie deur Hardy en Francois Naude, dis.grace. In dis.grace word J.M. Coetzee se ­Disgrace woordeliks “vertaal” deur Google se “Image Search” te gebruik om die boek deur die oë van populêre kultuur oor te vertel.

Die Chimurenga Library-uitstalling het die potensiaal om gesaghebbende klassifikasiestelsels uit te daag en biblioteekgangers aan te moedig om die konsep van ’n post-koloniale Afrika-identiteit te deurdink.

Tog is dit ongelukkig, soos met ander kunswerke wat staat maak op die publiek se toevallige ontmoeting daarmee, juis die gebrek aan publieke interaksie wat dié projek straks laat platval. Ná ’n ­hele middag in die biblioteek (wat verblydend besig was), het ek ­niemand opgemerk wat enigsins aandag gee aan die aweregse ­aanwysings of na die luisterposte gaan nie. Selfs die skyn-graffiti­stuk is grootliks geïgnoreer. Biblio­teekgangers moet dalk op ’n veel meer opsetlike wyse van die projek bewus gemaak moet word.

Desnieteenstaande word die “Chimurenga Sessions”, wat ­sekere aande vir die duur van die uitstalling aangebied word, goed bygewoon en bied dit ’n brood­nodige platform vir musiek, digkuns en gesprekke rondom kontemporêre kulturele vraagstukke.

ADRIENNE VAN EEDEN-WHARTON

Besoek www.chimurengalibrary. co.za

this review first appeared on dieburger.com

dis.grace is a hybrid art project that digitally re-appropriates South African author JM Coetzee’s controversial Booker Prize-winning 1999 novel, Disgrace in order to explore the failure of language to maintain its authority in a complex global, postcolonial world.

The work literally translates the full text of Coetzee’s novel into images using the Google Search Engine’s “Image Search” functionality. It matches each word in the book with its equivalent No.1 Google search image to create a new book, a visual text that is rewritten through the eyes of a global, digital popular culture.

Situated consciously within the context of a post-apartheid South Africa, dis.grace exposes the struggle for primacy between the written word and the image, the page and the screen. It questions the disgraced Western literary parameters of “white writing” considering its history of ideologically objectification and predation, while at the same time exploring the amnesia and historical self-invention that seem to form the basis of the decolonized, post-apartheid mind.

the disgrace website is here

BOOK SA’s Ben Williams chaired a panel of what he termed “web artists”, writers who use the web in wierd interesting, and sometimes just brilliant ways, at the FLF today. Out of the session, Williams drew three words, one from each writer which can be used to describe the effect of the internet on writers and writing: violation, communication, and introspection.

Aryan Kaganof, whose blog Kagablog is packed with material from all over identified the ability of the internet to create writers out of readers. Lauren Beukes, whose book Moxyland has been “translated” into Ebook format by Electric Book Works, furthered this with a description of the kind of reciprocity/mutual feedback that the internet is able to facilitate.

Finally, the audience was wowed by a presentation by the writer and artist Stacy Hardy. Hardy, who is involved in the production of the literary magazine Chimurenga, has “translated” JM Coetzee’s Disgrace into images word-for-word using Google Image Search. Does Google not then allow us to be more clever?

BOOK SA will follow-up with Hardy to bring you a more in-depth treatment of her conceptually brilliant work.

this article by sophy first appeared on book.co.za

stacy hardy and abraxas caelan kaganof

**************************************************
***
Liberated Zones(1): re:visionary inter-textuality in South Africa

The mail arrives in my inbox at 9:35. My mouse reflexes towards the delete button. I pause. The words catch my eyes - “Chimurenga: Cape Town Now! Politics, Music, Culture: An interview with Ntone Edjabe”(2) Cape Town, now? I’m compelled to click, like the millions of computer users who fell into the Lovebug virus’ infamous romantic trap; the personal reference has seduced me.

Yes, I am in Cape Town now. And I am surprised to find my home city mentioned in an email update from Canadian journal Ctheory.net. Not that I should be surprised. Ctheory, “an international journal of theory, technology, and culture” regularly engages with the digital divide between the technologically enabled “virtual class” and it’s “unpluggged” counterparts. It’s just that, all too often, comments and analysis from African writers are mentioned as footnotes, as quotes, as references - rarely as headlines.

This is a headline. Headlining a full interview with Ntone Edjabe, editor-in-chief of Chimurenga. The book-sized arts.culture.politics magazine, that “provides takes on various eish-ues from ‘black secret technology’ to Bantu education and Fela Kuti’s reading habits, plus poetry, interviews, reviews and visuals by writers and artists at the frontlines”, needs very little introduction in Cape Town, South Africa. But to Ctheory’s international readership Edjabe describes it like this: “Chimurenga was created as a platform to end the ‘noise control’ by media monopolies in South Africa.”(3)

It isn’t long before the interview turns away from print. “I am quite interested in the possibilities of new media tools, the ways in which digital resistance such as the blocking of commercial or government websites can begin to factor in bringing about concrete change,” says Ctheory. Before the inevitable: “But, are there such initiatives in South Africa at all?”(4)

Edjabe’s response? “Exchanging revolutionary thought in a tiny circle of net junkies is not my idea of communication,” says Edjabe. “We still use the spoken word, not writing, to articulate our struggles,” says Edjabe. “Many have suggested ‘bringing’ the new tech communication -Web and all - to the people like they ‘brought civilization’ to some of us a few centuries ago,” says Edjabe. “In South Africa, the internet is still mostly used to communicate with the ‘Other,’” says Edjabe.(5)

The words bounce up against the utopian perception of the internet as a “liberated zone” of customised knowledge and demassified engagement and resonate with a low, repetitive clang in an age when the “digital divide” is the topic de rigeur amongst the virtual class.

Don’t we already have far more accessible mediums for tackling hegemonic power in South Africa? Hasn’t South African art and literature historically taken the lead in promoting cultural change? Isn’t there something uncomfortably colonial in the desire to “push”(6) the digital resistance into the African cultural landscape?

A few months later, the questions are still taunting me. Niggling guiltily at my cyber-self as I log online (to talk to the “other”?). A few random clicks lead me www.chimurenga.co.za. Chimurenga’s “free online sibling”, “featuring more takes & talks not published in the print issue. mo’ fiya: water no get enemy.” I stare at my screen. Hit the refresh button, a reflexive digital blink, wondering: have I misunderstood Edjabe’s outspoken stance on digital media?

“Yes, I’ve heard quiet a bit about that Ctheory interview, especially my comments around the development of the internet. Here. Now.” Edjabe smiles. His lips shooting me an ironic twist, “but let’s be realistic. We use computers to publish Chimurenga. We’ll use whatever mediums we can get our hands on. We’ll use whatever tools are available to us. Because we can. And in many ways, many more people have heard about Chimurenga through the internet.”

Mo’ fiya! More fire. And in the ongoing struggle against the hegemony of narrative the frontline has crept stealthily online. Creating blazing pockets of parallel, counter-narratives that rebel against both the flat-line of print and the hype of hypertextuality; licking away at the shock of the “virtual-visceral banal”(7) and burning holes in the utopia of code-language that dominates literary online production amongst the “virtual class.”(8)

Surely it’s no coincidence that Chimurenga - the name is derived from the spoken word traditions of the music that fuelled the struggle against the white supremacist regime in Zimbabwe(9) - has an online sibling that manifests itself as an interactive space for discussion and comment? A space for diverse voices - speaking on topics that span everything from Indian racism and branding, to African filmmakers’ strategies - and bouncing against each other with the unpredictability of street-side interactions.

It’s also no coincidence that the print version of Chimurenga is built on strategies of direct interaction and reader participation normally reserved for online communities. “The idea is for people to actually go out of their way to find this thing, this Chimurenga,” explains Edjabe. “We’re so used to things just landing in our laps here. Some NGO buying all the copies, then dropping them on our doorsteps and force feeding us knowledge. The idea here is that we print 1000 copies, and if you’re late, you have to go out of your way to find it. There is a contribution, an act of participation involved in obtaining a Chimurenga. Going to get it requires a conscious mental effort.”

Finding donga.co.za is easier. A click on Chimurenga’s links page leads me directly there. But defining exactly what donga is, and why it has become so important in the South African literary and critical landscape is not so easy. A quick glance presents a sparse online journal that relies on stark html to display an array of local voices: poets, critics, prose writers and the in-between and undercover.

“I wanted to create an open, white space for the poems, where the poem could look comfortable. I wasn’t happy with a lot of the representations of poems I had seen online,”(10) explains Allan Finlay, who - together with Paul Wessels - edits donga. But then:

“Donga itself has got something to say, over and above all the submissions, all the parts put together that make up the ‘hole’. The submissions we get change and refine that space we call ‘donga’. And you can’t predict it. But there is some overall tangible feeling, something you can almost hold in your hands. Maybe a donga’s a place that collects things. Things we chuck away. Or others chuck away, the other publications.”(11)

The metaphor is apt. As a child growing up in the rural far-North, dongas (”deep-ridged gulley commons in open veld or near new industrial and residential developments”(12)) were an everyday part of the landscape. They broke the flat, even bushveld and provided hidey-holes, “a good place to go shoot tin cans” and no-go areas where unwanted rubbish collected. And as donga.co.za suggests, and our mothers warned: “dongas are dangerous to people and animals. They undermine houses.”

And yes, donga.co.za does undermine the fixed walls and halls of the current literary structures and conventions in South Africa. But how? The presentation is simple - no flashy code-work or code-drive flash-work here. No playing link-ity-link or leading the reader on elaborate hypertextual wild-meaning chases. Alan’s answer?

“I’ve been thinking about John Cage’s 4′33″, a nice thought. - it’s partly a composition using space only, filled by presumptions and expectations (of the audience), which are entirely subverted. Suddenly the listener stands inside the piece, and finds he/she is part of ‘the music’; is in fact, the content. Or their muffled coughs and expectations become the content, and so on. For me the underlying publishing space created by donga is similar. And of course, it’s also just about publishing writing. But the internet can be an interesting medium.”(13)

And the internet in South Africa is fast becoming a interesting medium for new writing. Unlike much international online writing, which remains tangled in a web of hypertext fiction, flash poetry and code-work - which all too often fails to subvert anything but our material habits of literary consumption - the South African writerly web has succeeded in using the technology available without been seduced by it. “The internet has allowed us to reach into a lot more spaces. And for that we give blessings to Bill Gates!” Laughs Edjabe. Adding, “we’ll curse him in the print issue and bless him in the internet issue.”

Rather than obsess over how the medium can challenge the content, South Africa’s online journals have focussed on how content can use a medium to create new pockets of resistance, flow, rupture, all seamlessly bound together, all utterly malleable. Paul Wessels, explains it like this:

“The trick will be to keep cool calm and collected. Like men in white coats driving an unmarked van, slipping into apartments and with deft precision removing vital organs from unsuspecting television viewers, and before anyone has time to say, ‘hey! that’s my liver!’ we’re out the door, organ on ice, engine purring to the next stop.”(14)

Notes:

1 In Cape Town, the term “liberated zone” has been cut loose from its direct
political and revolutionary referents; it’s any space that opens the
possibilities of engaging in fiery discourse, cultural exchange and more often
than not good music.
2 Trebor Scholz, “Chimurenga: Cape Town Now! Politics, Music, Culture,” CTHEORY
(June, 19, 2002), online: http://www.ctheory.net/text_file.asp?pick=341.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
6 See Songok Han Thornton, “Let Them Eat IT: The Myth of the Global Village as
an Interactive Utopia,” CTHEORY (January, 1, 2002), online:
http://www.ctheory.net/text_file.asp?pick=327
7 See John Cayley, “The Code is not the Text,” Electronic Book Review (August,
9, 2002) online:
http://www.electronicbookreview.com/v3/servlet/ebr?essay_id=cayleyele&command=vi
ew_essay
8 See Arthur Kroker and Michael A. Weinstein, Data Trash: The Theory of the
Virtual Class: New World Perspectives, CultureTexts Series, 1994.
9 See http://www.chimurenga.co.za
10 Joan Metelerkamp, via email for New Coin, December 2002 issue.
11 Ibid.
12 See http://www.donga.co.za
13 Joan Metelerkamp, via email for New Coin, December 2002 issue.
14 Ibid.

this article first published here

Blind Man’s Bluff

When I look in the mirror I wrinkle up my nose and squint my eyes into thin slits. I like how I look that way more than with my eyes wide open — through my slit eyes, my face appears blurry, a ghosted image with wavy dark patches instead of eyes or a mouth. “Expressionistic,” is how my painting teacher would describe the image, “a rejection of refined pictorial naturalism in favour of bold distortions of form and exaggerated imagery.” It’s the kind of face I’d like to have, a Munch Face rather than the round nose and soft chin I was born with.

One day Miles walks into the bathroom while I’m brushing my hair and catches me squinting into the mirror. “What’s wrong?” he asks.

I want to tell him about the Munch me, about the Expressionistic visage that lurks behind my plain features, about the vivid, jarring, violent me. But Miles is staring with a face that I know means he doesn’t approve, so instead I snap the brush through my hair and say, “I don’t know, I can’t see things this close unless I squint.”

The next day Miles takes me to the Eye Doctor. The offices are crisp and white with charts displaying dislocated letters hanging on the walls. I’m to look into the machine, not to blink at the tiny torch shining in my eyes, estimate the distance between two green dots, read the tiny print half way across the room.

The Eye Doctor tells me I have Macular Degeneration, a degenerative condition caused by the deterioration of the central portion of the retina, the inside back layer of the eye that records the images we see and sends them via the optic nerve from the eye to the brain. Symptoms can include: blurry or fuzzy vision, straight lines — such as sentences on a page, telephone poles, and sides of buildings — appearing wavy; an empty dark area that appears in the centre of vision.

The Eye Doctor tells me that there is no current cure for Macular Degeneration but that glasses or out-patient laser therapy may stabilise the condition.

Bobbing for Apples
I order an Iced Coffee and drink it all in one go, sucking up the flecks of cream through my straw and running my finger around the foamy rim. After that I dig around in my bag, light a cigarette and draw doodles on my note pad. I try to look busy, but everyone can see I’ve been stood up.

Hide and Seek
Finally home, I run to our room, shedding my jacket on the floor. I find Miles on our bed, the muscles in his face are still and beautiful. For a moment I think that he’s asleep … or dead? I throw my body down beside him. But he opens his eyes, grins, just joking. Then with a strength that jars my breath, he pulls me to him, nestling my head beneath his chin. It’s our little game — playing dead, pretending to be asleep. The thrill of getting caught in the act.

Spin the Bottle
Miles asks what everyone would like. Jesse and Ramon have popped in for a visit and we’re sitting in the lounge. Jesse says she wants Bourbon and Ramon says he would like some red wine. I say I want a gun because it’s the only thing I can think of that will hit hard enough, that might really blast through my awkwardness. We don’t have a gun, so Miles brings me a knife instead. It’s a big chopping knife with a stainless steel blade and a lifetime guarantee. He carries it in on the drink tray along with the Bourbon and red wine and everyone laughs. I spend the rest of the evening nursing the knife on my lap, wondering if I’d get more attention if I plunged it into my stomach or slit my throat. In the end I don’t need to do either because the way Miles and Jesse spend the evening staring at each other cuts deeper than any knife possibly could.

Kissing Catches
Miles says I have breasts like a fourteen year old, teenage breasts. He licks at each nipple, lapping until they stand hard and erect, then he puts my whole right breast in his mouth, his tongue still fingering the tip, sucking until it aches and I’m wet and dripping and dying to fuck. “Not a handful, a mouthful!” Miles says, “Teenage breasts!” He buys me teenage magazines that he gets from the kilo-shop down the road. He chooses ones with names like Bliss, Just17 and More that carry tips on dating and endless fashion shoots with thin limbed teenagers pouting their half-formed tits at the camera. We’re lying in bed together doing a quiz called “Love Him or Shove Him” that we find in Bliss. It’s meant to determine if you’re seeing the right guy or not.

1. Tick three words that best describe the boy you’re mad about:
Childish
Bossy
Shy
Quiet
Creative
Mature
Loud
Funny

2. Where is he most likely to spend his free time?
With his mates
Watching TV
In a bar
At home reading

3. What’s he most likely to say in the first few moments of a date?
“Sorry I’m late.”
“You look nice.”
“What shall we do?”
“Is it okay if one of my mates comes along?”

4. Tick the topic you and your boy usually find yourselves talking about:
Friends
The future
Your relationship
Problems

5. Tick three words your friends use to describe him:
Sweet
Childish
Funny
Selfish
Bossy
Laddy

According to Bliss my answers mean: “You may have thought everything was fine, but it’s time to question those feelings. It’s crucial that you don’t stay with him just because you want a boyfriend. After all you could be missing out on somebody loads better or having a great time with your mates.” The verdict worries me, but only for a few seconds, because Miles is already licking at my breasts, suckling and teasing until I moan.

Doctor, Doctor
Miles inspects my fingers, rolling each of them over in his hands. He holds them just above the first knuckle, tight, so the tip goes white and twists them to examine every angle. Normally he starts with the pinkie — moves on to the ring, middle, index and then thumb — but today he starts on my thumb. I’ve just made supper and my fingernails are strained with the black of mushrooms, tiny flecks of white cheese and blue ballpoint pen. It’s not the dirt that bothers Miles though; it’s the way I chew my nails.

At age ten, my mother had my habit diagnosed as a form of tension release/reduction. Our family doctor suggested she discourage the behaviour by having me wear cotton mittens or gloves. I liked the gloves, they made everything feel very far away, like there was a thin barrier between the world and me. Everything felt the same: smooth and soft like strong cotton.

Miles holds my thumb in his hands and shakes his head. The nail is chewed down to the quick and the skin around the sides has been bitten into. “I don’t mind the chewing on your nails, but why do you have to do it until you bleed? You’re hurting yourself. I just don’t want you to hurt yourself.” Miles is using his stern but sensitive voice.

While he gets up to look for a plaster I examine the damaged thumb. The nail itself isn’t so bad but I’ve ripped the skin to the right of it leaving the pink of exposed flesh and a smidgen of blood. It burns when I put it in my mouth. We’re out of Jungle Book plasters so Miles brings back the Elastoplast Dressing Strip and a pair of scissors. “I want you to stop doing this to yourself.”

I stare down at my bandaged thumb and then I slide my fingers across his lap, slipping them in the gap at the top of his pants: our making-up ritual. Through the thin strip of Elastoplast Dressing on my thumb his penis feels strange; half erect and smooth like strong cotton.

Pin the Tail on the Donkey
Miles says he wants to take some photographs of me, erotic photographs like Richard Kern’s. “You mean porn pictures?” I’m terrified, Miles sees me naked every night when we fuck, but the thought of posing for him terrifies me.
“Well, yes, but not like that.”
“Well, like what?”
“For starters, you have nice legs.”

The next day I go to the library and look at pictures by Richard Kern. I look at a series entitled “Submit to me, submit to me now” from 1996. In the photographs Kern has asked people to act out their fantasies for him while he acts as audience and provocateur. In one, a woman stands seductively under a shower, but something about her expression belies her total availability. In another a smirking brunette is tied with thongs to a home gym. All the girls in the photographs look tough yet beautiful; self assured and mildly amused. According to the book it is Kern’s personalised treatment of his female subjects that transcends the pornographic.

I’m posed in front of the mirror wearing the white lace panties Miles bought me for my birthday. I stare at my reflection, sliding one hand down the front elastic, my other hand resting against a cocked hip. Sexy yet blasé like the girls in the Kern shoot.

Miles tells me I look great but a little stiff. “Baby, you need to relax, stop thinking about it and just, you know, let it happen. You’re worrying too much about the camera, forget about it, just do something that turns you on, act out a fantasy or something.”

In my fantasies Miles has me tied to the bed. My hands are tied with cords to my right leg, which is folded in under me. My left leg is free, bent at the knee and my eyes are blindfolded. He has a knife in his hand, I can’t see it, but I can feel the cold of the metal against my skin, the blade just nicking the surface. In my fantasies Miles pushes my face down on the bed, his left hand slapping against my raised ass while he forces his right hand up my cunt. The heel of a boot strikes. Now both heels. In my fantasies Miles throws me against the wall, biting at my neck, spitting and chewing on bruised nipples, yanks me by the hair, shoving cheeks and lips up against his glistening cock, making me suck, suck all the while, suck, pounding on my skull with both fists, suck, while he pulls at my hair and slaps my pink, teary face.

“You ready?” says Miles.
“Sure,” I say and I smile and cock my hips, because actually I’m nowhere near to ready.

this short fiction first appeared on litnet

dis.grace is a digital project that re-appropriates JM Coetzee’s novel, Disgrace (1999) in order to explore the failure of language to maintain its authority in the postcolony.

The project translates the full text of Coetzee’s novel into images using the Google Search Engine’s “Image Search” functionality. It matches each word in the book with its equivalent No.1 Google search image* to create a new book, a visual text rewritten through the eyes of a global digital popular culture.

It combines chance, play, bad taste, incomprehension, artifice, and a lack of truth to up-end the “disgraced” Western literary parameters of “white male writing” considering its history of ideologically (and sexual) objectification and predation. It shuns the authority of the author and the omniscient narrator used in the Western novel as the equivalent to the intruding phallocentric colonizer while at the same time it questioning the amnesia and historical self-invention of post-apartheid consumer society.

*Google images search rates pages according to popularity thus creating a seemingly “democratic voice”, based on the consensus of the
majority of internet users.

Central Library, Drill Hall, c/o Darling and Parade Street, Cape Town

The Chimurenga Library is an online archive of pan African, independent periodicals. It is also the exhibition concept devised by the editors of Chimurenga for Cape Africa Platform 2009.

Presented in and around the newly launched Cape Town Central Library from May 2 - June 21, the project embodies the proposition evoked by the title by “finding oneself,” as Moses Molelekwa put it, on the shelves of the Central Library; or quietly encroaching upon its classification system; or proposing a navigation system, clearly subjective and affective, for content found both in Chimurenga and the collection of the Central Library.

The project includes a multimedia investigation into independent pan African periodicals from around the world; “Why Must A Black Writer Write About Sex”, an exhibition of sex scenes from African literature that contest cliched inscriptions of literature and sexuality; and reading routes and sound posts that re-imagine the Library as a laboratory for extended curiosity, new adventures, critical thinking, daydreaming, socio-political involvement, partying and random perusal.

In addition, weekly Chimurenga Sessions will take place inside the Library. Dissolving the boundaries between text, sound, city, culture, and media, the Chimurenga Sessions will feature music and poetry performances, dialogues, screenings, and more.

The Chimurenga Library also traverses the division between the street and the Library with Chimurenganyana a series of solos excerpted from Chimurenga that will be distributed on the streets of Cape Town.

more information here