I am no one
A thin spirit
Wandering the Land at its source
Shape-shifting to become
The peaks and valleys
Of the everyday
The banality of Evil
All around me
Sits, hideous
Contemplating the world from a park bench
Evil is a face brick church built
In a modernist style
Signalling its permanence
As a landmark on the highway, heading home
I struggle to keep pace
Wraith-child match girl
Lighting flames in the wind
The terrible book of the past
Written around, and on, and through me
Jaws of bone and stone
Open to offer a route
Elsewhere
Standing at the gate
Pink light of dawn
Cold hands of morning
Slipping into the folds
Of a warmer place,
A language learnt
A past unravelled
Commentary
I wrote this poem in response to Jane Alexander’s sculpture ‘The Butcher Boys’, currently part of the permanent collection at the South African National Gallery. It depicts the brutal and dehumanising forces of apartheid. It is unsettling and haunting. It is also the subject of the tourist’s gaze. A work to be photographed with by visitors to the gallery pulling amusing poses. This is the way of things. Alexander made the work in the 1980’s, a time when the violence of the state, and the response of the people was exploding in South Africa. I remember this time as my childhood years in Johannesburg. Sun-lit and ordinary. Lying on hot bricks, wet from the pool. The tanks rolling down the quiet suburban streets to quell uprisings in the neighbouring township. The barbed wire going up around our primary school. Bombing my bike as fast at it could go around the twisted pedestrian bridge that spanned the highway. Horror on the outskirts of an insulated suburbia that was participating either through active collusion or a studied refusal to notice. Being in South Africa over the last few weeks, the visceral sense of a great evil that made the present is something that I feel everywhere. Life goes on, as it should, but this poem bubbled up in response to the insidious ways in which evil sits with us. In my practice I think about what it means to live with the after-effects of evil. What the balance is between knowing the evil of the past, seeing how it operates in the present, and also being sufficiently free of it to be able to respond to what is right now. It is the tension between knowing what made us, and releasing its stranglehold without the denial and amnesia that can characterise a too-hasty release of the pain story. Working through identifying and releasing pain stories in the West of the Wheel, I am aware that these stories are woven into the fabric of national narratives, kaleidoscopically. Poems bubble up in dawn meditation. The cacophony of the dawn chorus. My tired eyes snap open.
Briefly, I am awake.
