The biggest mistake the black world ever made was to assume that whoever opposed apartheid was an ally. –Steven Biko.iii

I. Black Recognition? When I first arrived in South Africa in 1989, I was a Marxist. Toward the end of 1996, two and one half years after Nelson Mandela came to power, I left not knowing what I was. This is not to say that I, like so many repentant Marxists had come around to what policy wonks and highly placed notables within the ANC National Executive Committee called for then, a so-called “mixed economy;” a phrase that explained less than nothing but was catchy and saturated with common sense, thus making it unassailable. No, I had not been converted to the “ethics” of the “free” market, but I was convinced the rubric of exploitation and alienation (or a grammar of suffering predicated on the intensification of work and the extraction of surplus value) was not up to the task of (a) describing the structure of the antagonism, (b) delineating a proper revolutionary subject, or (c) elaborating a trajectory of institutional iconoclasm comprehensive enough to start, “the only thing in the world that’s worth the effort of starting: the end of the world, by God!”iv In June 1992, not long after the massacre at Biopatong, Ronnie Kasrils co-chaired a Tripartite Alliance Rolling Mass Action meeting with a COSATU central committer member and an ANC NEC member. They sat together at a long table on the stage in the basement auditorium of the Allied Bank Building in Jo’burg. One hundred delegates of the Tripartite Alliance had been sent there to plan a series of civil actions designed to paralyze the urban nerve centers of South African cities (“the Leipzig Option” as some called it). I was one of the delegates. Out of 100 people it seemed as though no more than 5 to 10 were White or Indian. There were a few Coloureds. One Black American—me; and eighty to ninety Black South Africans. We began with songs that lasted so long and were so loud and so pointed in their message (Chris Hani is our shield! Socialism is our shield! Kill the Farmer Kill the Boer!), that by the time the meeting finally got underway one sensed a quiet tension in the faces of Kasrils and his co-chairs. An expression I’d seen time and again since 1991 on the faces of Charterist notables; faces contorted by smiling teeth and knitted brow, solidarity and anxiety; faces pulled by opposing needs—the need to bring the state to heel and the need to manage the Blacks, and it was this need which was looking unmanageable. Planning for a mass excursion was on the table: an armada of busses filled with demonstrators was to ride to the border of the “homeland” of the Ciskei, which was ruled by the notorious General Joshua Oupa Gqozo. We would disembark, hold a rally, then a march, then, at one moment in the march, we would crash through the fence, thus liberating the people of the “homeland” by the sheer volume of our presence. Kasrils and his co-chairs looked one to the other. Yes, things were indeed getting out of hand. As a round of singing and chanting ensued, they leaned their heads together and whispered.
2
Comrade Kasrils rises. He exits, stage right. He returns with a small piece of paper. An important intelligence report, comrades, news that should give us pause. Reading from the slip of paper, he says he has just received word that, were we to actually pass the motion on the floor to cross the Ciskei border en masse, to flood the “homeland” with out belligerent mass, General Joshua Oupa Gqozo would open fire on us with live ammunition. To Comrade Kasrils’ horror the room erupts in cheers and applause. This, I am thinking, as I join the cheering and the singing, is not the response his “intelligence” was meant to elicit. Had Comrade Kasrils been hoisted by his own petard or was there dissonance between the assumptive logic through which he and the Tripartite Alliance posed the question, What does it mean to suffer? and the way that question was posed by—or imposed upon—the mass of Black delegates? The divergence of our joy and what appeared to be his anxiety was expressed as divergent structures of feeling which I believe to be symptomatic of a contrast in conceptions of suffering and to be symptomatic of irreconcilable differences in how and where Blacks are positioned, ontologically, in relation to non-Blacks. In the last days of apartheid, we failed to imagine the fundamental difference between the worker and the Black. How we understand suffering and whether we locate its essence in economic exploitation or in anti-Blackness has a direct impact on how we imagine freedom; and on how we foment revolution.v Perhaps the bullets which were promised us did not manifest within our psyches as lethal deterrents because they manifested as gifts; rare gifts of recognition; gifts unbequeathed to Blackness; acknowledgement that we did form an ensemble of Human capacity instead of a collection of kaffirs, or a bunch of niggers. We experienced a transcendent impossibility: a moment of Blackness-as-Presence in a world overdetermined by Blackness-as-Absence. I am not saying that we welcomed the prophesy of our collective death. I am arguing that the threat of our collective death, a threat in response to the gesture of our collective—our “living”—will, made us feel as though we were alive, as though we possessed what in fact we could not possess, Human life, as opposed to Black life (which is always already “substitutively dead,” “a fatal way of being alive”vi)—we could die because we lived…

The preceding is an excerpt from Chapter 4: “Biko and the Problematic of Presence” by Frank B. Wilderson, III. Reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan. This extract is taken from the author’s original manuscript and has not been edited. The definitive version of this piece may be found in Biko Lives! Edited by Andile Mngxitama, Amanda Alexander and Nigel Gibson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) which can be purchased from www.palgrave.com

Notes i Special thanks to Janet Neary and Anita Wilkins for their research assistance. ii Lewis Gordon, Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1995), 98. iii I Write What I Like (London: The Bowerdean Press, 1978), 63. ivAime Cesaire quoted in Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1952, 1967), 96. v To my knowledge the term anti-Blackness was first named, as a structural imperative, by Lewis Gordon in Bad Faith. vi David Marriott, On Black Men (New York: Columbia UP, 2000), 15, 19.

When the “free” elections in South Africa happened in 1994, I was a 19 year-old college freshman at a small liberal arts college in Ohio. Fortunately, I had become friends with many South Africans on my campus, and in the neighboring universities that dot the central and Southern Ohio landscape. I remember looking at a copy of the ballot, given to me by my roommate’s mother, and seeing the dozens of candidates of many political parties that made up the government of the “New” South Africa, which strangely enough, has turned out to be as new as the “new” American South. Nevertheless, we all (Africans and Blacks from the U.S. and Caribbean) assembled in front of the televisions to watch Nelson Mandela become the new President of South Africa, transforming the ANC from an insurgent revolutionary movement into the dominant political party of the neoliberal nation.

Little did I know, at 19 years old, the price that had to be paid for the “progress” that the country was undertaking. While I now know that many were skeptical, few Black Americans knew that price better than Frank Wilderson, III, one of only two American Black members of the ANC, who with several other ANC members, was labeled by Nelson Mandela “a threat to national security” in 1995.

Wilderson, author of the newly published and highly controversial memoir “Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile & Apartheid,” offers an incisive view of how a liberation movement becomes a political party. He also reckons with what happens to a revolutionary who returns to a U.S. Left, mired in the politics of gaining access to the “rights” of civil society in multi-culti California.

I met Wilderson this past Sunday at a small reading at the Salon D’Afrique, a longstanding Harlem salon hosted by writer and scholar, Dr. Rashida Ismaili Abu-bakr, who gave a reading to about 15 invited guests. We engaged in a political dialogue with the author about the book, which intentionally does not offer a “what to do next” proscription for progressive movements in the U.S. or abroad.

“The Black demand is for subjectivity,” stated Wilderson. “But progressive political movements must have a coherent goal, but the reality is that the demand cannot be met by a coherent demand, like a civil rights policy for access into civil society.”

He modeled Incognegro after the 1987 autobiography of Black revolutionary Assata Shakur (currently in exile in Cuba), with chapters alternating between South Africa and the U.S. “The organizational structure comes from Assata Shakur—how do you write about a revolutionary underground movement, anti-black racism in liberal and progressive California, and also the use of poetry,” Wilderson remarked.

Many of the guests who’d read the book were struck by the biography of his early life as the son of two academics who were the first family to integrate a Minneapolis suburb – as Dr. Ismaili noted, “not the stereotypical background of a Black revolutionary.”

Others, including myself, were struck by the places of sheet vulnerability in the work of a Black male political memoir. I am still reading the book, but I find this aspect particularly refreshing.

A central question of the book is whether any real differences exist between the U.S. and South Africa. One story illustrates this point: in a trip back to the U.S. with his South African wife, she leaves Wilderson in New York telling him that if she wanted apartheid, she could get it at home.

This notion flies in the face of what so many on the left extrapolate from Black leftist politics—people seem to love the idea that Black revolutionaries learn to transcend concerns about Black people to take on more “international” concerns. From Malcolm X’s trip to Mecca to MLK’s speech on opposing the Vietnam War, Black radicals can make it into the leftist pantheon of stars. Wilderson is drawing the conclusion that anti-Black racism is a global phenomenon and has yet to be addressed, let alone already solved, as much of the Left seems to purport.

“The world needs the Black position,” Wilderson said.

And though my friends, in 1994, watched the elections in South Africa with some level of pride and relief, we knew that being Black, whether from Soweto or St. Louis, Mombassa or Montego Bay, is what brought us into that room in the student center, shut away from the rest of the campus. But the hope we had is exposed as a fraud both in Incognegro and by the realities of where South Africa is headed. One of those friends, who was instrumental in my political growth, was killed in Soweto sometime around 2001. South Africa continues to expand its prison system much like the U.S., and HIV/AIDS rates in American Black communities rival those of Africans on the continent.

Incognegro, as a book, and Wilderson’s incessant and unrelenting look at the failure of the integration of Black concerns and liberation into “civil society” makes me highly recommend this book.

this review first appeared on www.indypendent.org

How we understand suffering and whether we locate its essence in economic exploitation or in anti-Blackness has a direct impact on how we imagine freedom: and on how we foment revolution.

Frank B. Wilderson III
Biko and the Problematic of Presence
in Biko Lives!, 2008

this article first published by one small seed

that moment in the hotel room in new york
when you showed me your breasts
was all i could remember
of the 1990s

am i that much older?
even a whiskey
these days

is too much bother
now it’s time to
logout again

INTRODUCTION TO THE BOOK BY PETER MOROE

In September this year (2009) the Mangaung Local Municipality (MLM) in conjunction with the Bloemfontein Public Library did a remarkable thing. They orchestrated an Awards ceremony wherefore black writers in the Free State were honoured. Nor were these awards limited to “established, published” authors – virtually all recognized writers who had made their mark in the society were lauded and honoured.

Writers honoured thus included the “luminaries” like Omoseye Bolaji, Flaxman Qoopane, Thabo Mafike, Lebohang Thaisi, Pule Lechesa, Saint George Vis; others like Seleke Botsime, Richard “Skietreker” Seape, Bareng Dichabe, Raselebeli Khotseng, Jah Rose were also honoured, among others. They were all presented with special certificates; and illuminating speeches were delivered by key speakers.

It was an occasion that spoke volumes of the fact that Free State Black writing continues to thrive. This year (2009) a lot of progress continues to be made. New writers continue to emerge, others who were fairly established before, published books. Poetry in particular continues to grow by leaps and bounds.

In this wise the likes of Neo Mvubu, Richard “Skietreker” Seape, Magic Khotseng, and the exciting Tiisetso M Thiba are doing very well. Tiisetso in particular has impressed so many lovers of poetry this year, and two of his poems are published in this edition of The Growth of Free State Black Writing.

Saint George Vis made waves with the publication of Indaba with Free State writers this year. This important work follows on the early Free State Writers Talking (2002). The new book has been favourably received and two of the reviews of the work are published here. Writers interviewed in Vis’ book include Pule Lechesa, Charmaine Kolwane, Teboho Masakala, Neo Mvubu, Richard Skietreker Seape, Thabo Mafike, among others.

Young writer, Teboho Masakala has also impressed many literary observers this year, with his sudden emergence. His forte at the moment seems to be short stories – and a sample of his work is published here. Much is expected in future from this young man.

Another writer of short fiction – Maxwell Perkins Kanemanyanga (based in Bloemfontein) published his debut work this year: Enemy of the State. The book comprises some ten short stories which are enthralling in their own way. Pule Lechesa’s superb review of the new book is published here.

As for the multiple award-winning Omoseye Bolaji, another full length work was added to the many studies (books) published on his literary work, this year. The new book is called: Omoseye Bolaji: Further perspectives; edited by Julia Mooi. Because of this new book, there is hardly any need to publish the recent shorter articles on the works of Bolaji here – though one impressive article is published here (“Folksiness in Tebogo and the epithalamion”)

In conclusion let me just state that this is the EIGHTH edition of this series! We are all proud of it, and the fact that burgeoning and established writers from our beloved Province continue to make this publication worthwhile. See you next time around!
- Peter Moroe (Editor)

this article first appeared here

“Look at her my little kitties,” Mister Sister sang to the Sugar Twins.

“So many Symbs and still no hump… She must be antidote-girl!”

He burst into high-pitched, somewhat maniacal giggles. Taty glared at him. She threw the cigarette into the pool, grabbed her machine gun and stormed off. She passed through ruined rooms and halls, stopping in the courtyard where she had found Cherry Cola handcuffed all those weeks ago. It was hard thinking of Cherry Cola after what had happened. She could still her screaming when they cut her head off. She tried not to think about it anymore. Baby crocodiles frolicked in the water of the fountain, tangling themselves in the large, half-dead lotus blossoms. She could hear music in the distance, old Les Baxter records trailing out from Alphonse’s high room, a memory of better days. A Symb lurched over the terracotta roofing, dislodging some tiles, which crashed through the shattered skylights. It stopped to leer at her and she recognized it instantly. The symbiotes were all unique, containing the seed of their host’s facial and bodily characteristics. This one she knew and hated. She glared at it until it clambered off like a massive tree frog, disappearing over an antiquated storm gutter. Taty sat down on the edge of the fountain and unclipped the walkie-talkie from her bikini briefs. She switched it on and tuned up with a warble of static.

“Where are you now?” she spoke into it, swinging her legs.

Somewhere in the middle of the ocean, the half-destroyed torso of Number Nun drifted. Sunny tropical blues dappled her. Some tiny fish flickered in her chest cavity while monstrous jellyfish the size of houses wafted below, glittering with refracted light.

“My navigational array is broken,” Number Nun pointed out, vaguely irritated. “I’ve told you this before.”

Taty fiddled with her nails.

“Oh. Yeah. Forgot bout that.”

There was a hiss of open ended static and she could hear the low-fidelity churn of the sea outside Number Nun’s cracked head.

“Whatcha doin?” she asked.

“Childbride, you know very well that I am doing absolutely nothing! Now leave me alone to pray. Go bother somebody else!”

The call cut off abruptly and white noise erupted from the speaker. Taty stared at it for a moment before switching it off. She clipped it back to her briefs and gazed listlessly down at the baby crocodiles. After awhile she wandered off, humming along to the distant music.

Taty owned a stretched tape cassette of ‘Hotel California’. She had edited the song with nail scissors, so that the voiceless intro ran directly into the long guitar solo, creating an instrumental mix. She would listen to this every afternoon in her massive radar earphones, around sunset, when it was time to retreat to the bell tower. A white washed spiral staircase ran up to the belfry, and many small windows had been poked into the walls along its length. These apertures gazed out onto vistas of the steaming jungle, which stretched endlessly out beyond the house. Towering palm trees swayed drunkenly against the galactic cheese-melt of sunset and the silhouettes of monkeys gamboled in the highest branches. Taty was a creature of habit and discovered that some form of routine soothed her immensely. So every afternoon she would scavenge candy bars, green coconuts and bottles of fizz-pop, which she would then carry up to the top of the bell tower. The spiral stairs opened up into an airy space cluttered with junk. She had hidden a foldng ladder behind some crates and used it gain entrance to a trapdoor in the ceiling. This trap led directly into the belfry, a domed chamber which had over the weeks become her lair. She would shoulder her machine-gun and take the packets in her teeth while she climbed, pulling the ladder in after her. The large brass bell had long since fallen, cracking the boards. She would painstakingly roll this gigantic device over the trapdoor to further ensure her privacy. Each of the four walls of the belfry had a large hole cut out of it. These balcony windows afforded expansive views of the house and jungle. From this elevated perspective, Taty could see almost anything coming and the height gave her a sense of security. A sleeping bag lay crumpled in the corner, beside a pile of old fashion magazines and holiday brochures which she had discovered in drawers throughout the house. A bowl of green mangoes lay on the ancient wooden boards. Coconut shells covered the floor, picked clean and filled with bric-a-brac. Candy bar wrappers clustered in one corner, skirled around by the hot breezes. A large box of lollipops took pride of place near the sleeping bag. A picnic hamper of ammunition lay within easy reach.

Taty sat on the whitewashed balustrades of the belfry as she did every evening, bathed in red-gold light, swigging from a bottle of fizz-pop. She would sit watching the sun set behind the jungle and observe the large flocks of flamingoes and parrots squall screaming across the Western skies. She was busy doing this one eve when she spotted the Symb from the rooftop inching slowly up the tower like some monstrous gecko. She hated how it followed her around, like it had some claim to her. She unhitched her machine gun and fired a short burst at it, shattering the silence of dusk. The bullets dislodged the creature and it dropped to the trees below. Michelle, who was poolside, almost directly below the opposite side of the bell tower nearly jumped out of her skin. She turned in exasperation to Mister Sister, who still floated upon his lilo throne, attended to by young male slaves.

“What the fuck does she do up there all night!”

“Oh, who gives a kidney what that little cockroach does,” Mister Sister muttered. “Even the Symb’s won’t touch her anymore – little miss pariah.”

He leaned up off the lilo in a sudden fit of childish anger.

“Pariah!” he bellowed up to the tower. “I should feed you to the crocs! You hear me you little brat?”

Taty heard, but paid no mind, making faces at them when they weren’t looking.

The night was always full of bats, swarming past the tower in high-frequency clouds. Giant, clumsy moths would also always tumble in, like origami constructions, sucking back out into the darkness before she had time to study their ornate wings. The raftered ceiling of the belfry was awash with golden orb spiders. The creatures had decorated the old bell supports with a fairy lace of webs, giving her something magical to gaze at before she fell asleep. She would light candles in glass jars and watch the flames flicker drowsily in the moist breezes rising off the jungle. Sometimes it would rain for days and she would snuggle up in a battered fur jacket, scrounged from the walk-in closets. The white fur had been in a pristine state when she had found it, but after weeks of continuous use, the garment had grown grungy and pelted, like the skin of a stray Persian cat. Now it was the hot season and she would always be in her bikini, day or night. It seemed pointless to wear anything else it was so hot. She sat cross-legged on her sleeping bag gnawing green mangoes, hideously bored, watching the flytraps in her hair eat mosquitoes. Her mind was a blank and she would accentuate this blankness by smoking cigarettes, one after the other. She found she liked tobacco, the way it cured her brain like a hock of smoked ham. She missed marijuana, but was too paranoid to get stoned. Every now and then her mind would drift back to the nightmare of what had happened and she would wake in a shaking sweat, clutching for her machine gun. There had been weird rituals she could barely remember. They had dosed her with drugs and she had woken up in the basement, covered in alien slime. She told herself that she had been too drugged to remember what had happened, but she could still feel the carapace scraping against her back when she slept. The interlocking shells of the Symb had felt like rough, glazed ceramics on her skin, it’s jointed form making creaky bamboo noises when it moved. The sibilant chittering it had made now filled her dreams like an ocean of toads, and she could never completely erase the burned electric wire stench of its body. At least now she could say she lost her virginity to an alien, but who was there to impress? The world was one long heat spell of bad memories and scavenged ammunition. The punks had left her alone after the first rape, waiting for her to change, laughing and teaching her how to smoke cigarettes to ease the pain. She had cried a lot then, but stopped dead when Cherry Cola was executed for spitting Mister Sister’s milk back into his face. She remembered getting very sick the day after having sex with the symbiote. A fever descended and she became delirious, seeing kaleidoscopic visions and glimpsing people’s sno-globes against a backdrop of thrashing energy. They put her in a hammock by the pool and made fun of her while she passed in and out of consciousness. At one point she suffered from severe diarrhea and voided herself every few hours in one of the outside bathrooms. After one of these episodes she found herself feeling inexplicably better. She looked back into the toilet bowl and saw the dead, baby Symb, staring sightlessly up from the soiled water, wearing a mockery of her own face. The second time they tied her to a bed and stood watching, grumbling over their cigarettes, making sure the Symb impregnated her properly. Another fever descended, though this time not so bad. She was rid of the baby symbiote within a day. The Buddhist punks didn’t touch her after that. They thought she was cursed, or somehow special. They stayed out of her way and she was not manhandled like the other girls who had the misfortune of finding themselves trapped in the fallen house of the imp. She kept a low profile and was eventually ignored, the silent household pet with a secret. The symbiotes with whom she had spawned began to follow her around like retarded animals. Their behavior was out of keeping with the general mindlessness of the other Symb’s, and the sight of them disgusted her. When she found the machine gun, some of the punks even gave her ammunition, trying to tempt her into coming out looting with them. But she kept her massive radar headphones on and listened to tapes at full volume, ignoring their calls, keeping out of everyone’s way and stealing candy bars whenever she could.

The nights were rarely quiet. From her tower she would hear the screams and pistol shots. The ruckus of debauched celebration rose up like the stench of the many bodies, choking the night and making it impossible to sleep. Most nights she would stay up smoking, eating coconuts and paging mindlessly through fashion magazines while the world went mad around her. Sometimes she would lean on the balustrade facing the house and look out across the courtyards to the lighted bedchamber of Alphonse Guava. She watched him through binoculars, moving like a green ghost in his ruined room. The chamber was by now an unholy mess. Shattered aquarium glass and the rotting corpses of many reptile pets had destroyed the white shag. A lava lamp threw psychedelic patterns on the walls, illuminating the destruction and decay in twisting enchantments of light. Alphonse himself stood at his desk, gaunt and withered, bent and broken. His skin was a minty shade of green and he had been fighting off transformation for an ungodly amount of time. Yet, even with his impish constitution, the battle for preservation had taken its toll. Antennae drooped over his blackening eyes and his pale hair was a lank and tangled mess. He wore a soiled suit and operated a juicer with slow movements. He was dicing carrots and placing them into the mixer flask. When it was full to capacity he juiced the roots to a frothy orange gunk and withdrew a massive syringe. Taty watched as he filled the syringe up with freshly squeezed carrot juice and tied a silk tie around his arm. He injected the contents of the syringe into his veins and shuddered horribly, grabbing at the desk. His skin flickered like a cuttlefish, shifting from green to orange to ivory. It settled on this pale tint for a few moments before gradually washing back to green again. He would always sit on the edge of the bed after one of these episodes, exuding an air of terrible defeat. It was a painful thing to watch, and Taty would often set down her binoculars at this point, anaesthetizing herself with a barrage of cigarettes.

It was very late and the peculiar stillness of the night hung about the jungle. Some candles still guttered in the belfry, creating swarms of weird shadows, which leapt about playfully. Taty was curled in her sleeping bag staring out at the stars. At some point she lifted her walkie-talkie to her lips.

“Hello?” she whispered.

She waited awhile, just listening to the sea of crackling static and the monumental quietness of the jungle.

“Come in Number Nun…”

She eventually gave up and fell asleep. She woke in the night, as she often did, holding the communications device to her breast and speaking in her sleep.

“Mommy…mommy…”

One day she was sitting in the cinema, watching old cartoons and eating leftover scraps of jungle chicken. She was still wearing the puffy fur jacket and bikini, machine gun across her lap, the walkie-talkie jutting from a pocket. Despite the deafening volume of the maniacal cartoons, she had on her enormous headphones and was frying her brain with witchcraft guitar solos. The cinema had also suffered much abuse. Seats were uprooted and broken champagne bottles lay smashed everywhere. A huge boa constrictor had slithered in from the jungle and was exploring the projectionist’s booth. Michelle suddenly appeared in the doorway. She stared down at Taty for a moment before calling down to her.

“Hay little girl,” she called.

She called another time, louder this time and Taty turned her head. She stared blankly at Michelle.

“Little girl!”

Taty pulled her headphones down around her neck and glared at the crucified girl.

“Yeah you,” Michelle scowled. “Listen, Alphonse told me he wants to see you.”

Taty continued to stare unresponsively.

“Now, you little brat! This is still his house you know.”

Taty slouched up, shouldering her machine gun. She plodded up to the door, kicking debris out of the way.

“Do you have to carry that fucking popgun around everywhere with you?” Michelle muttered. “Mister Sister and his punks might find it cute, but I think its ridiculous the way you shoot at bugs and shit all the time.”

“It’s mine I found it.”

“Oh, whatever.”

Taty brushed past her and headed down the hall. Michelle suddenly hesitated as an idea occurred to her. She turned and called after Taty.

“Listen, little girl…”

Taty glanced over her shoulder to witness Michelle suddenly put on what she considered to be a friendly, how-to-talk-to-a-child-face.

“Listen little girl,” she smiled in a sort of horrific fashion. “I have a whole box of candy, really special candy in my room… And I’ll give it ALL to you if you just tell me what Alphonse says.”

Taty stared blankly at her.

“Well, what do you say huh?” Michelle pushed, struggling to maintain her smile.

“Ok,” Taty answered flatly.

“Good girl,” Michelle beamed, showing all her un-brushed teeth. “You just come up to my room after and I’ll be waiting with all that candy, ok?”

Taty continued to stare at her in suspicious non-comprehension. In the end she simply walked off without a word.

“Ok! Great!” Michelle called after her with all the vim and vigour of a cheerleader.

Alphonse Guava sat at his desk in a ruined white suit and deco pattern breeches. His skin was a sort of pea green, split by intricate patterns. His eyes had swelled to bulbous, globular proportions and were filmed over with silvery cataracts. Feathery antennae sprouted from his forehead like peacock feathers, and these fluttered about of their own accord, touching things. His pointed ears had finally fallen off. The desk at which he sat was a mess of papers and carrot stubs. His well-worn juicer was close at hand. Orange stained syringes overflowed out of a massive black garbage bin, spilling over into the smashed ruin of his precious ‘PERM BANK’. Mister Sister had long since raided it, using the pearly contents of the many glass capsules to butter the croissants he had delivered every day from a baker in Namanga Mori. Upon Alphonse’s bed was placed a veritable mountain of carrots. He never slept anymore anyway. He had thrown the reptile corpses out of the window in order to make the room semi-presentable for visitors, but the stains remained, irreparable and dark, lacing the freshly juice smells of the chamber with an underlying stench of prehistoric morbidity. Alphonse held before him a small card of paper. He pivoted a geometry compass between thumb and forefinger, using the needle to print something across the card in Braille. He had to write in reverse and it took him several minutes, even though it was only one word. When he was finished he placed the card inside a small satchel, within which could be glimpsed neatly folded papers, a brick of cash and a pink tape cassette in a box. It wasn’t long before his private doorbell tinkled, announcing Taty’s arrival. He pressed a small glass button and watched the heavy doors swing open. She stood at the threshold and for a moment they regarded each other in silence. The last time they had exchanged words, the symbiotes had not even existed in their reality. Now they themselves were trapped in another reality, a dimension corrupted by the insinuations of another world. She entered barefoot, glancing at the carrots, avoiding shards of glass.

“That’s one big salad,” she said, leaning her machine gun against a battered filtration system.

Alphonse smiled broadly, despite his wretched state.

“If I take my time it’ll last me to the week-end,” he quipped.

She sidestepped the rotting leg of an iguana, which Alphonse had somehow managed to overlook and slouched on the edge of the bed, spilling a small avalanche of carrots down to the shag.

“So, what’s up Doc?”

She met his gaze evenly and he eventually stood up, hobbling over to the window. He leaned on the sill and lit a slim white cigarette.

“You can’t stay here anymore cupcake,” he finally said.

She stared blankly at him.

“I’m ok,” she mumbled after a few moments of pregnant silence.

He blew a thin cloud and gazed down at the wreckage of his house, still smiling like a jester when he spoke.

“It’s going all the way down baby. And you need to scram before something comes along and eats you up.”

“I tried to run away a few weeks ago, but they stopped me.”

“Don’t worry about that, I’ll help you to get out. Anyway, I want you to do something for me.”

He was perhaps expecting rebellion, but she answered without hesitation, clear-eyed and sincere.

“Ok.”

“I’m going to give you a card,” he explained carefully. “I want you take this card to the Outer Necropolis and deliver it to a secret postbox within the floating pyramids.”

“You want me to be a postman?”

“Yes, exactly that.”

There was a pause and he examined her expressionless face, unsure, yet somehow sure of her answer.

“Ok,” she answered quietly. “Is that it?”

He regarded her with a sardonic smile, unable to help himself from picking at her passivity as one would pick at a scab.

“You seem angry with me,” he teased.

She looked away, slouched like a bedraggled bird in her mangy fur.

“You let the monsters do things to me,” she eventually said, speaking in an extremely low voice.

“Was it fun?” he grinned.

She blinked at him, unable to grasp his reaction for a moment.

“No, it was horrible,” she replied darkly. “You let Number Nun get shot, everybody is dead because of you.”

He sniggered without the slightest hint of reproach. And it was at times like this that one could clearly understand that he wasn’t at all human, not even in the slightest.

“I suppose,” he admitted. “But at least I had a ball doing it!”

“Look at you!” Taty snapped. “You’re turning green! You have bug-lashes!”

“Yes. I’m en-route to a slimy alien hell. I’m trapped in this decaying body, imprisoned in my own house by my own worst enemy, forced to degrade myself daily with root vegetables. But…My God, you have no idea how pleasurable it all is! Even my worst nightmare is absolute, unquantifiable ecstasy. You just can’t understand. You’re only a little stray.”

“I suppose.”

He hobbled back to the desk and tossed her the satchel. She caught it clumsily, spilling more carrots.

“There’s a secret tunnel that will get you off the grounds,” he told her. “Everything you need to know is on the pink tape – Leave maybe an hour or so before dawn.”

“Ok.”

“And put some clothes on, you won’t be coming back.”

He turned dismissively, busying himself with papers on his desk and she rose. She picked up her machine gun and lingered for a moment beside the door.

“You don’t really care about me, do you?” she asked quietly. “You’re just saving me so I can deliver your letter.”

He burst into raucous chuckles, swinging round madly in his chair.

“Why on earth should I care about you?” he laughed gaily.

She stared uselessly at him, before finally giving up and drifting back down the hall. His eerie laughter followed her through the passages, poking in at her through open windows.

Michelle was waiting for her in one of the courtyards. She loped after her, struggling to balance under the weight of her cross.

“Little girl!” she called.

Taty took one look at her and scampered down the nearest corridor. Michelle raced after her, her cross bobbing hilariously.

“Come back here! Come back you little bitch!”

Taty turned and sprayed machine gun fire along the walls and ceiling, scaring a pair of toucans who flew screaming down the passages. Michelle dove for cover, landing badly because she was unable to use her arms. She wriggled on the tiles like a clubbed seal, thrashing about in a cluster of pot plants.

“Traitor!” she screeched, her round face red and distorted with rage. “Traitorous little skag! I’ll have your head you little cunt! You just wait till my boyfriend hears about this! I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you! I’ll fucking kill you!”

The screams receded as Taty fled to her tower. She ran and ran, and didn’t stop running, until the big brass bell had been rolled safely over the trap and she could collapse panting.

Nicola’s first orgasm
Aryan Kaganof | 2003 | 5 min. | video | geen dialoog
“We cannot abstain from watching the revelation of a being that would be an object neither for herself nor for any other gaze and yet which would effect, in the mystery of her own invisibility, the condensation of all objectivity.”

watch it on www.filmbanktv.nl

(image by rachel kendall)

Well now….even if I have to say so myself….remember you saw it
here FIRST. Nowhere else. Not in any fashion magazine, not in any film show, not in any stage show, not anywhere else in the WORLD but right here! NOW.
the date: 06:10:09
You would think that even with something as simple as fashion, they would get it?

Right? Wrong!

Outside of that they just cannot think, or SEE, now can they?

I have never apologised for being ahead, and am not about to do that now!!

About knowing a subject well
Let’s look at the example of ourselves
What subject could we possibly know better
Than the self
Since we are that self
And yet who knows themselves well enough
To say “I know myself”
Anybody who says that is a liar
Or a fool

A satisfying alternative to trusting one’s own opinion
Is to have no opinion
I prefer to trust my intuition
It is best to have no motivation
To allow the Youniversal mind to guide one always

You write “There is not much clarity in communicating
with the confused.”
On the contrary, this is the only clarity

I cannot imagine you as a person in a wheelchair
Unless it were your wolves
Who hauled you through the snow

I would like to appeal to others,
But how one has to stoop in order to do so!
I could not stomach the debasement
For this reason I have no money
And no prospects for the future
But, I do sleep well,
And, I am able to confront myself in the mirror
Every morning without having to gnash my teeth

Merciless love is not a concept
It really is nothing other than itself
It is an onotological experience of being
Incomparable with other states
Certainly not to be dissected linguistically

One should never have to strive for anything
Merely being the thing is always best
Striving is for losers

Which coloured poem are you playing?

I kiss you good night
It is a very slow, very long kiss
We are both dreaming of…

“I saw that you were something,
but what it was I wasn’t sure…”