By Sindiswa Busuku
Keynote address to a conference held at Sol Plaatjie University on Language.
Where to begin? Let me begin by saying I am terrified of you all, it seems at once rational and irrational. On the one hand, it is rational that I fear you all, because I respect and revere your work. On the other hand, it is irrational, because I know you will not physically bite or scratch me. But perhaps, it is important to sit with the fear, and begin with the fear. I live in fear.
For me, the crafting of this keynote is a fundamentally creative project. It is the creative imagination, the creative spirit that moves this now, and, much like the powerful Saint Lucian poet and playwright, Derek Walcott, “I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer” (1986).
I am not a particularly religious woman. However, I am a creative writer with an overpowering interest in experimenting with poetry, prose and photography. And so, in part, this work is moved by a desire to enter into prayer with you, or rather, I am wondering whether the space of a conference can be thought of as a space of communion, an act of gathering in communion. Communion is the sharing of intimate thoughts and common feelings, especially on a mental and spiritual level.
In line with this thinking, I find myself brought back to 4,33. 4,33, a silent piece of music that lasts for four minutes and thirty-three minutes. The piece was written by the American, experimental composer, John Cage in 1952. And, as we find ourselves at a conference so deeply rooted in and concerned with language, how could we not also contemplate silence? Jorge Luis Borges, the towering Argentine poet and playwright, once famously said, ‘Don’t talk or speak unless you can improve the silence.’
As a creative writer who is invested in the archive and the loss that it represents, I find myself banging my head against so many walls of silence, daily. These walls are hard and tall, interconnected and intersecting. I wrestle with the living legacies of silence, which is to say that I wrestle with the heavy silence of those who have been silenced, and disappeared, that I wrestle with absences, exclusions, foreclosures, erasures, and gaps. I wrestle with discerning the right words and offering a language to improve the silence. And so, I have tried to craft a paper that offers that to us. I will begin with a short reading from my forthcoming experimental manuscript, titled And, In Those Honeyed Regions of Darkness.
[PAUSE FOR 4’33 MINUTE SILENCE]
***
Sometimes, I think about the journey we took.
We sat on a train, seated in the middle of an overcrowded carriage, alone. Outside, it’s drizzling. The reading lamp does not work. The moon is still. A red tealight candle ignites of its own free will. The passengers, pinched, are silent. The train rattles and chugs along the sharp curve of its steel tracks, rags of smoke tatter from its blackened chimney, as ceramic plates of food and glassware tip and topple over. For three days and three nights, the radio plays the same old crackled tune, over and over again.[1]Yesterday, like today, I pressed my copper head hard against the rattling window.
The old Blue Train, salt-rusted, pushes along the steel tracks, pulls us further and further away from petrol bombed towns and cities, hot steam hissing out, as the sound of roasting baritones spills out the boiler room.From beyond the dirty window, along the harbour of the bluff, the old Millennium Tower plays hide-and-seek behind a chalking curtain of fog. The yellow collar of her spire rises and falls with the tide. Rain taps against the glass. The sky is steel-plated, muscular and charged, high above hardened industrial landscapes of grey which pass in the backdrop. There are certain things that vanished years ago, like the sound of children riding the carousel, the Cableway, Bumper Cars, Swing Boat and Tilt a Whirl at Fun World along the beachfront promenade. Out there, thousands of abandoned trucks pile up, turning pavements and parking lots into metal graveyards. There came a blur of moving shapes and colours, dockyards and ships, factories and warehouses, all deserted beyond large volumes of gas belching out bodies of water.
A little girl, found a few rows away, towards the back of the train, sits and waits and watches the sea for the bubbly build-up, for the pressure, for the high columns of steam to blast through the surface, like a hot bursting pipe. Every now and then, with each piping blast, she claps her hands and makes big whooshing sounds. Her older brother tugs her away from the window. He sat her down, smoothing out her afro-puffs, which softly sprouted out either side of her head like the flowering of baby’s breath. After that, they sat close together. She begged him to give her his half of his green Fizzer. He says no, and tells her one day she will rot her teeth.
***
Most of the libraries, schools and hospitals outside The Capital were shut down, one after the other. Squinting into the distance, I saw a trail of oil refinery towers and smoking chimneys impaling the night sky with burning flames. Beyond that, beyond the scrapyards, I saw corroded loading cranes topple back and forth, turn their backs on us, and collapse in the dust, out there, in The Killing Fields.
The windows are misty. Out there is a place, long gone. The fabric of the world is wet and heavy. I have fraying memories of the day we left, of what we left behind, five days’ worth of thread. Night after night, it feels as though I did not witness any of it with my own eyes. I watched skyscrapers and pavements burning beyond the harbour lights, beyond the heavy sea. I know now what I didn’t know then, as salt and petrol burnt through the air.
***
The train whistle sounded.
The train travels down the main line. Beside me, Mother sits in her long Shweshwe dress, and in her leather boots muddied from rain. She wears two silver teardrop earrings, and her blue Seanamarena wrapped around her body and fastened with a pin across her chest. Behind her left ear, the two small cuts are still bleeding down her neck. Father sits, across from us, in his long black coat and well-pressed pants, camera hanging loosely around his neck, reading a newspaper, in silence. He always reads newspapers backwards. And, head lilting over, he sees Mother’s neck, and, with jaws clenched, he very carefully folds his paper up to meet her eye-to-eye. Mother, looking back, chooses not to turn her eyes away from him, as Grandmother hands her a small handkerchief. Eyes red, Mother dabs at her neck and forehead, and carries on slowly eating her apple slices – pushing her glasses back up the ridge of her nose.
My little brother, cheeks punctured by dimples, head on her thighs, opens his eyes and whispers to her: ‘Are we there yet?’
The pressurised glass doors slide open, an old moustached vendor wheels by, bow tie crumpled beneath his wattle neck, glassy-eyes treading down the sooty blue carpet, down the dark, narrow corridor as an announcement on loudspeaker comes on:
ALL PASSENGERS, PLEASE STAND BY FOR ARRIVAL
To my right, in the opposite aisle, three Migrant Children sit, hands turned up, dangling their feet. Slowly, they bend forwards and backwards in their seats, drifting in and out of the rhythm of sleep. I looked at the people around me, all of us alone, together. Among the jostling strangers asleep with mouths wide open, with heads wobbling back and forth, a Woman in her late twenties is watching me from a corner, back pressed and pushed up straight against her seat, glancing at me with a reserved hand-drawn smile. The Young Woman wore woollen stockings and high heels. I waved at her, and, in a moment of uncertainty, she tugged her skirt over her knees and tightened her grip on the black briefcase she was handcuffed to.
Behind us, two men are speaking. One man called himself an Escapee, and the other an Exile. Nobody would sit near them. After a while, I looked over my shoulder to pick up stompies, to get a better look at the older man with the corduroyed face who was holding a yellow umbrella between his knees, talking to his bearded friend with the torn shirt pocket, who sat twisting and folding his train ticket into an awkward paper boat. On the other side, an old couple, a Minister and his Wife holding their black bags on their laps, sat frowning at the men for making too much noise. The Escapee and the Exile drank a lot. They were sharing something out of a brown paper bag. They talked until late. I heard bits and pieces of their traded stories. They talked about their homes, what they were forced to put behind them, what they hid in their carryovers, about what brought them here, all this battered way. They shook their heads and asked each other if they’d heard the news about the pipelines and the death rattle of the last Eskom power plants, the wyrd weather, and the whittled scaffolding of the Mining Ministry. And soon, a loud, playful argument broke out between them over the true meaning of the missing aeroplanes and trains that disappeared without a trace over the last few months.
***
Many of us passengers in the carriage sat cobbled together, fastening our seat belts, staring up, watching news reels on huge TV screens revealing events taking place in the world outside. All of us, passengers, sit alone together, watching the news on the TV screen, trying to make no noise, wiping tears from our eyes, watching live aerial footage from helicopters. Father snapped his fingers at us, listen, look, pointed up in the direction of the newsreel on the screen.
And so came images of beached dolphins and whales, hundreds of penguins washed up on the black sand of the seashore, rotting. Then came the bursting banks of the Umgeni River, as taxis and buses were swept away by heavy rains, with toddlers trapped inside, crying and screaming. And we watched mothers paddling, clutching at the water, reaching out to save their children. There was footage from different countries, Kinshasa, Berlin, Tokyo, Moscow, and New Dehli, debris and coal dust bellying around mercury skyscrapers, creeping through streets and alleyways, blackening and burying petrol-bombed cities beneath a dull, dark weight. It reminded me of our mother, of all things. It reminded me of a poem that she read us years ago about a Smoke King slowly moving, towering towards something, lowering, hearsing over the land.[2]
There was footage of people taking matters into their own hands with the anvil and the cleaver, factory workers, traders, and shopkeepers protesting up and down Victoria Market in shirts and jeans, carrying burning flags swinging and, spiked on metal poles, whose daily lives burnt down little by little, along with the flag. We were afraid when we saw the close-up shots of silent protesters in balaclavas fade in, when we witnessed protesters gathered in all major city centres around the world, protesters who carried signs that read:
“THE WORST IS OVER, THE WORST IS YET TO COME”[3]
***
“Are we there yet?” The child whispers to the mother.
And, In Those Honeyed Regions of Darkness is a story stalked by the crisis of Black histories and futurities within current South Africancultural imaginaries. In this paper, I am trying to find a language to speak of Black futurities precisely because we live, at least in my opinion, in a time where “we are haunted by futures that failed to happen”, as Mark Fisher writes (2014). (Again . . . I am trying to find a language to speak of Black futurities precisely because we live, at least in my opinion, in a time where “we are haunted by futures that failed to happen”.) This is perhaps the driving force of my writing over the past few years. As a creative writer and literary scholar, artistic and creative inquiries are always undertaken as forms of research, linking theory and practice.
As a writer, I often feel bereft of language and destitute of words when attempting to articulate our histories and futures. Can we craft a language that can speak of how we find ourselves living in what theorist, Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2017), once described as “cemeteries of abandoned futures”? How might we utter what it means for us to all variously bear “futures murdered at birth, or even still-born futures”?
I know this perhaps sounds terribly despairing, defeatist and fatalistic. I would like to challenge such simplistic notions. I do not desire to deliver a keynote that feels pessimistic. In fact, I placed a great deal of pressure on myself to offer a distinctly hopeful and optimistic paper – but I want to be honest about my journey as a writer. At all times, this thinking wrestles with feels and sensations that I find ineffable, that cannot be described or expressed. I am wrestling with and made restless by language.
Perhaps the French writer, philosopher, and literary theorist, Maurice Blanchot understood the unbearable restlessness of writing best. Blanchot offered a keen — if subtle — paradoxical insight when he wrote, “to write is to be absolutely distrustful of writing, while entrusting oneself to it entirely” (110). This tension rings true for me.
“Are we there yet?” The child whispers to the mother.
In And, In Those Honeyed Regions of Darkness, and in this poetic paper, this prayer, this communion, I am compelled by my concern for and about our people. I am thinking about mass surveillance, global immigration and refugee situations, and asylum, exile, and fugitive policies. I am thinking about how we, as fugitives, refuse to be conquered and dominated by what the German sociologist, Max Weber, borrowing from Friedrich Schiller describes as a grim “disenchantment of the world” (REF). And, In Those Honeyed Regions of Darkness, suggests that our creatively-critical and critically-creative work calls for us, who are interested in abolitionist futures and imaginaries, to labour towards a reenchanting the present and future. This is perhaps best articulated by what my late colleague, Prof Harry Garuba describes as a “continual re-enchantment of the world” and “laying claim to what in the present is yet to be invented” (REF).
In the writing of, And, In Those Honeyed Regions of Darkness, how we move and manoeuvre whilst being stalked and haunted, is a way of affectively thinking through liberatory and emancipatory imaginaries, or what Robin D.G Kelley calls “freedom dreams” (2002).
This ongoing work is an inquisitive form of meditation and/or speculation. And so, I suppose it began with a question that I have been wrestling with for several years, and one that continues to relentlessly confront me throughout my PhD. The acclaimed poet, critic, and theorist, Fred Moten. once asked, “What does it mean to suffer from political despair when your identity is bound up with utopian political aspirations and desires?” Moten’s question has never left my mind. It challenges me, keeps me awake at night, and I feel these reflections ask a similar question.
***
That said, I have no clear answers for Moten, only questions that lead to more questions. When thinking through abolitionist imaginaries, there are, of course, no easy answers. It is perhaps an aporia between the seen and the unseen, an aporia between the creative and the critical.
I learned to separate the creative and critical imagination. I have worked to unlearn that binary; this, for me, is a part and parcel of abolitionist imaginaries. Abolitionist imaginaries undermine and unsettle normative conceptions of what the ‘critical imagination’ and ‘creative imagination’ are forced to be and mean. I believe abolitionist imaginaries are always-already fugitive, they resist the standing social order, they refuse to be captured in the stranglehold of what Trinh Minh-ha describes as the “rein of worn codes” (1989: 47). Our abolitionist imaginaries are interested in the suggestive possibilities that can emerge.
[1] A song by Zim Ngqawana, a song called Qula Kwedini, repeated over three days, over and over
[2] In 1985, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote, ‘I am the Smoke King / I am black! / I am swinging in the sky, / I am wringing worlds awry’ in a poem entitled “The Song of the Smoke”.
[3] Carolyn Forche