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Poetry keeps us safe from barbaric non-thinking

Poetry keeps us safe from barbaric non-thinking
Antjie Krog
By Antjie Krog
15 Oct 2024
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What does the landscape and climate for creative writing and freedom of expression look like in five different African countries today? Exploring some of the issues that affect writers.

This year, PEN Afrikaans is participating in the Right to Write project together with four other PEN centers, at the invitation of PEN International. 

The aim of this Unesco-funded project is to promote public dialogue on issues affecting writers in five African countries (Malawi, South Africa, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe). 

As part of this project, PEN Afrikaans asked five Afrikaans writers to reflect on pertinent topics. This is the first of a series of five articles. Here, Antjie Krog writes about the role that poetry plays in a country like South Africa. 

Poetry keeps us safe from barbaric non-thinking


Translated by Aniel Botha

Poetry is the ultimate Uncontaminated. It is victorious because it places a person in a heightened state of consciousness, always with enlightening consequences. It is akin to standing at the threshold of breath; like receiving oxygen from invigorating trees, and suddenly jolting forwards. That’s why poets write. And that’s why readers read poetry. To experience the enlightening, the intensification, to seize something from mortality.

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Poetry is the lifeblood of language, the deepest form of philosophy. It prolongs the affective experience of being human; it offers a moment of blinding and ineffable insight into daily life. 

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A good poem is an accelerator of being-conscious. Once you’ve experienced this acceleration, you’ll yearn for it and become fully dependent upon it. Those who find themselves caught in this delightful dependence upon language are called, so I think, poets and lovers of poetry.  

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Poetry nails her colours to the mast, doesn’t care if her face gets burnt, eventually scorches through the ceaseless variations of the internet mill that require no action more complex than merely a thumb up or down.  

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“A good poem helps to change the shape and significance of the universe, helps to extend everyone's knowledge of himself and the world around him.” (Dylan Thomas)

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“Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” (Shelley)

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“When society does not heed its poets, things are grotesque, eccentric, fail of their full returns. The poet is the arbiter of the diverse, he is the key. He is the equalizer of his age and land.” (Walt Whitman)

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“A great writer is one who elongates the perspective of human sensibility, who shows a man at the end of his wits an opening, a pattern to follow.” (Joseph Brodsky)

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we are the guardians of human memory

we eat the word that we speak

 

we survive on the daily bread of the word 

 

the grain of the word is a culture of grace 

 

we are the carpenters of remembrance 

we construct words

there is the human dignity of words 

the nobility of words 

the place of words in a room 

       in towns of sand and wind

 

we are masters 

in the conveyance of the soul 

 

not the word alone, but the journey of the word  

the footprint of the word 

the journey to the word

to travel with open eyes

to tell the story

 

the griot is the double shadow of man

 

the route is journey 

the wings are language

past the boundaries of customs

 

we are the birds from across Africa 

to see the world passing

to see the word passing in the hallway of language 

a place radiant with breath

to eat the word

to forge word from the rind 

to turn stifling into word 

word hailing from the entire house

       – collective godly word  

(Griots, West Africa)

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This year, we look back on 30 years of democracy in South Africa. Back in the day, the democratic government of 1994 used poems in abundance. Mandela read Ingrid Jonker’s poem in Parliament which was also abuzz with imbongis. Every year Trevor Manuel opened his budgeting speech with poetic quotes in various languages. And likewise with the speeches of Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi, Minister of Welfare. Minister of Labour Shepherd Mdladlana once recited “Ukwenziwa komkhonzi” (The making of a slave), the legendary poem by JJR Jolobe, with the audience joining in and applauding enthusiastically. In the early Thabo Mbeki, we had a poet in his own right, not only quoting Mqhayi, Shakespeare and Yeats, but also delivering a praise song or a poetic speech like “I am an African” with ease. 

While the money barons were more unyielding, there was, in the early years, a sudden abundance of prizes for poets, particularly those who created breathing moments. Poems appeared on wine bottles and buildings and in columns. 

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But eventually the ministry of arts and culture turned into the neutralising trashcan of the ANC where problem profiles were dumped. It is safe to say that the revival of the arts in this country has nothing to do with the government. Governing politicians and business enclaves ignore the fact that Nobel Prize winners from Africa were all writers or people of peace and choose to channel all energy into money-making and science, thereby dehumanising the last population who could really save the world by thinking differently about interconnectedness. Hopefully President Cyril Ramaphosa’s quote from Sandile Dikeni’s “Love Poem for My Country” in his first GNU address is pointing to a new approach. 

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Television also chose to feed an entire nation with the raw consumerism of protein-vulgar food preparations, banking babblers and celebrity television hosts with sometimes tricycle brains. Can it truthfully be possible that television in this country doesn’t have a single book programme but, week after week, manages to dish up insolent bling of décor-obsessed chatterboxes for whom the term below-the-breadline is the latest phrase for an X-ray figure?

Thank heavens, Afrikaans radio still has the most beautiful poetry and book programmes, supported especially by the many Afrikaans reading circles, publishers, writers, funds and festivals where Afrikaans literature is created, performed and discussed. 

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It is absurd to try and answer a question like “why poetry?” as an Afrikaans poet in a country where 51% of South African households don’t own a single book, only 1% of the population buys books and only 14% reads books.  

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Why does a poem speak to you before you fully understand what it means? According to neuroscientist Giovanni Frazzetto, it relies on mirror neurons in the brain that reflects the outside into your inside. The poem enters the ear through rhythm and sound, and emerges in consciousness already experienced and ready to be recreated, intensified and sharpened… 

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The poem “Beeld van ’n jeug: Duif en perd” (“Image of a Youth: Pigeon and Horse”) by Van Wyk Louw is really one of the most truly classical poems in Afrikaans. And the poem wants to explain to us that the moment you read something poignant, you look at your own life with a vibration of ecstatic, enlightening insight and intellectual openness.   

On a late Karoo morning an adolescent lies in a yard, reading a book written in classic Latin. Everything around him shudders from the sun and is lazy from the heat. He hears the sound of hooves in the stable and notices his flock of pigeons surrounding him like “pieces of warm washing”. And then: A pigeon “tickles my toes; and I read: / the brown Roman legions trot out of Rome, all along a white path / as to Gunsfontein”.  

Within the young man, the reality of pigeons and the classic poetic text actively influence each other. All his senses are mobilised at once. Along with life surrounding him on the yard, the Roman legions are acutely seen, heard, experienced via the sound, the descriptions, the mere literary devices of text. Long-deceased legions are brought to life by his imagination as they trot down the white gravel roads of the Great Karoo to the farm of his grandparents. He is suddenly with them, jogging along; he is connected to them because the poignant literary text sharpened and enlightened his own existence. 

And thus, he is shaken out of any safe idiosyncratic perspectives that he might have cherished as a young boy from a rural background. He is transported out of himself to an imagined alternative, larger world; he gains distance from his own limited yard and starts to develop, as the poem soon reveals, the ability to think critically and the potential to change his world and his thoughts. 

The reading of this poetic text chased him out of himself to the clearings created by poetry in the forests of truth. His reading inflicted upon him insight into a layered world, in the destruction of stifling choices offered by religion and nationalism. Because he could read poetry, the young man on this ordinary yard could experience the glory of sun and gleaming pigeons as a magnificent descendance of insight. 

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In the fifties and sixties everyone wanted to be poets. Poets represented the language-proficient giftedness that could captivate souls and move mountains. In the eighties that changed. Everyone wanted to be rockstars. In the beginning of this century, it was rappers that enticed people; currently it is celebrities and influencers. Being a poet is on the periphery. We don’t look glamorous enough on social media. Our tragedies are complex. We are poor. We have no influence. We have no demands and no rights. Our poems have no fiscal value. The Dutch poet Geert van Istendael reminds us that visual art has a market value. A poem does not.   

But the more obsessed society becomes with money and profit, the more irrelevant — but therefore subversive — the work of the poet becomes. The fact that you CHOOSE to be a poet is criticism against current materially inclined societies, because a poem can’t be sold. 

Van Istendael says: Poets are the true heretics of the world.  

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Poetry exists to save us from barbaric non-thinking. 

The article was originally written and published in Afrikaans. 

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A child who reads

No matter how bare the surroundings, 

a child who reads is a privileged child.

 

No matter how neglected or abandoned, 

a child who reads is a nourished child.

 

No matter how intolerant a community, 

a child who reads has insight and understands.

 

No matter how mentally impoverished a family, 

a child who reads is an intelligent and enriched child. 

 

No matter how inhumane a community, 

a child who reads is a humane child. DM

 

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