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Isobel Dixon explores the diverse poetic landscape of South Africa for Poetry London

Luís de Camões’s sixteenth-century Portuguese epic The Lusiads describes the rounding of Africa’s southern tip in dramatic allegorical style, as Vasco da Gama encounters Adamastor, the monstrous spirit of the tempestuous Cape. Cabo Tormentoso, the Cape of Storms, as Bartolomeu Dias first called it, rather than King Joao II’s more politic renaming as Cabo da Boa Esperança, the Cape of Good Hope – hinting at the fruitful new route to the Indies spice trade. Dias later died in a great storm off his own Cabo Tormentoso, and though poets like Scotsman Thomas Pringle in his nineteenth-century sonnet ‘The Cape of Storms’ echoed him, the official, hopeful name remains. Flying into Cape Town now is a great deal calmer than those early explorers’ journeys. It was a sunny winter’s day when my plane made its recent approaching sweep over the Peninsula that Drake proclaimed ‘the fairest in the whole circumference of the earth’.

   I re-image this aerial view and wonder how one would draw a pictorial map of the creative landscape. I think of fine poets now no longer with us and places associated with them: Tatamkhulu Afrika’s Bo-Kaap, the historic Malay Quarter; the University of the Western Cape where Arthur Nortje studied before dying of an overdose in Oxford in 1970; the township from Afrikaans poet Ingrid Jonker’s most famous poem ‘The child (shot dead by soldiers in Nyanga)’; or Three Anchor Bay where she walked into the ocean to drown.

   It would be a very crowded poetic map. The Mother City has always drawn artists and writers, not just mariners, to its bosom, and the ‘Tavern of the Seas’ has seen its share of literary feuds and festivities. And how would one categorize a Cape Town poet? Does birth alone, or length of stay, confer the title? And what of South Africa’s multiple languages? This can only be a snapshot, a personal view through the lens of one trip, focusing of necessity mainly on English, with a dash of Afrikaans. My Xhosa isn’t good enough to read poets like Abner Nyamende in volume form or on the literary website LitNet (which contains work in several South African languages), or to fully appreciate the robust oral tradition. Afrikaans poetry alone merits more space. Poets like Breyten Breytenbach, N P Van Wyk Louw, Wilma Stockenström and Antjie Krog were a vital revelation to me years ago, proof of the possibilities, the immediacy of poetry.

   To Franschhoek first then. A ridiculously picturesque village in the mountains of the winelands, it hosted the second Franschhoek Literary Festival this May. Evangelizing for poetry was Gus Ferguson, widely proclaimed as a patron saint for local poets. A much loved cartoonist and poet himself, he has long edited Carapace magazine and the Snailpress and Carapace Books imprints. In Franschhoek, he ran workshops and judged the ‘Voices from Our Valley’ competition and at an energetic open mike session I saw keen poets spurred by this to read their work for the first time.

   The Poet Laureate, Keorapetse Kgositsile, had to be in Cuba on official business and so couldn’t attend as planned, but prize-winning poet Gabeba Baderoon graced (and if you ever see her read, you’ll know that grace is indeed the word) several events. With three collections to her name (and a Swedish translation due soon) she is also editing a book on identity and Islam in South Africa. I missed Afrikaans hiphop poet Jitsvinger (aka Quinton Goliath, from Kuilsrivier) but watched a breath-taking performance by the Nefertiti of Mitchell’s Plain, Blaqpearl (aka Janine van Rooy) at the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Catch them both in full voice on YouTube (though only some of their performance is in English).

   The Olive Schreiner Prize 2007 was also awarded at the festival, to Cape Town poet Rustum Kozain for This Carting Life (Kwela/Snailpress, 2005). To a packed but pin-drop silent hall, Rustum read his devastating poem, ‘The Kingdom of Rain’, a tribute to his father which is also a celebration of the natural world and a critique of apartheid:

                                              we chug
up Du Toit’s Kloof Pass in his old 57 Ford,
where he wills the mountain – under cold cloud,
tan and blue rockface bright and wet with rain –
he wills these to open and let his children in,
even as he apologises –
my strict and angry fearsome father –
even as he apologises for his existence
then and there his whereabouts declared
to the warden or ranger in government
issue, ever-present around the next turn
or lazing in a jeep in the next lay-by:
“No sir, just driving. Yes, sir, my car.”

Read his essay ‘Moedertang’ on LitNet, if you want to understand more about the linguistic complexity that South African poets can draw on, or be entangled in. I was very happy to be invited to read with Gabeba and Rustum in England at the Bristol Festival this year, and with Rustum and academic and poet, Kelwyn Sole, at the Book Lounge store in central Cape Town. A full house was further evidence that the live poetry scene is flourishing. And it seems to me that readers have access to a wider range of poets, writing from different styles and backgrounds, compared to a decade ago. The internet is of course the great disseminator, with poets’ websites, clips on YouTube, and lively debates on sites like book.co.za and litnet.co.za, which race to be first with the literary news.

   At another enterprising independent bookshop, Kalk Bay Books, I met Finuala Dowling; her three collections and entertaining readings have won her a dedicated local following. With wry and witty poems like ‘Straight men of Cape Town’ and ‘How to use a porcupine as an alibi’, Finuala is also a moving and serious poet, as shown by ‘To the doctor who treated the raped baby and felt such despair’ and her latest collection, Notes from the Dementia Ward(Kwela/Snailpress, 2008). Try to catch her (and Antjie Krog at Aldeburgh this year. There were a couple of Cape Town Book Fair poetry events to take part in too. Last year at the Fair I saw Jeremy Cronin read – precise, warm and witty. His debut Inside (Ravan, 1983) dealt with his years as a political prisoner, where he mourned the loss of ‘that most beautiful/desolate city of my heart’. Now an ANC MP, he lives in Cape Town again. Another Capetonian of long poetic pedigree is Patrick Cullinan, whose Escarpments: Poems 1973–2007, like Cronin’s latest, is published by Umuzi.

   In nearby Stellenbosch, the Spier wine estate hosts a poetry festival, and there’s Versindaba where this year’s Ingrid Jonker Prize (which alternates between English and Afrikaans debuts) went to Megan Hall’s Fourth Child. With clarity and control, and at times dark humour, her collection reveals how she became her grandmother’s ‘fourth child’ after her mother’s suicide. Poems like ‘Suicide Notes’ and ‘Gunshot’ together gain narrative force, with no trace of indulgence. I was thrilled to discover this new voice, published by newcomer Modjadji, founded to publish women’s writing, and named after the African Rain Queen.

   The Ingrid Jonker judges were Gabeba Baderoon, Kobus Moolman (poet and publisher of the journal Fidelities) and Ingrid de Kok, one of the country’s most respected poets. Her fourth book Seasonal Fires: Selected and New Poems (Umuzi, 2006) is also published in the US by Seven Stories. Two more Cape Town-based poets, Karen Press and Adam Schwartzman, are among the few South African poets with a UK publisher, both with Carcanet. Schwartzman is also editor of a fine anthology Ten South African Poets (Carcanet, 1999), a good introduction to a handful of voices, including Nortje, Afrika, Press, and De Kok – and poets from other parts of the country as well. A Poetry London visit to Johannesburg or the Eastern Cape would yield up yet more riches.

   One of the first collections I bought on arriving at university in the Cape was Stephen Watson’s In this City (David Philip, 1986). Table Mountain and the city on its slopes loom large in Watson’s work and I was drawn by this landscape and his long, meditative lines. The Other City: Selected Poems 1977–1999 (David Philip, 2000) includes more elegiac nature and love poetry, as well as poems from Return of the Moon (Carrefour, 1991), his lyrical reworkings of /Xam Bushmen stories, based on the loving and meticulous records kept by the nineteenth-century linguists Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd. Watson caused a furore in 2006 when he accused Antjie Krog of plagiarizing his book; she had used the same source material for a collection The Stars Say ‘Tsau’ (Kwela, 2004) and robustly refuted the charge, likening it to ‘an accusation of plagiarism by Walt Disney studios for making poems out of the stories of the Brothers Grimm’. Her book is subtitled /Xam Poetry of Dia!kwain, Kweiten-ta-//ken, /A!kunta, Han#kass’o, and //Kabbo, the orthography indicating the complex clicks, naming the individual prisoners who gave testimony. I am glad of both Watson’s and Krog’s reworkings and believe the original storytellers would be too. And on my visit I found another book that adds to this treasury, the artist Pippa Skotnes’s Claim to the Country (Jacana/Ohio University Press, 2007), a sumptuous illustrated volume with contextualizing commentary and facsimiles of archival notebooks, letters and dictionary cards, a testament to some of the earliest and most haunting poetry of the Cape.

   I left the Cape of Storms (and another rumbling literary wrangle, involving Breyten Breytenbach’s response to a review of his  atest prose volume) with poetic Good Hope. While there may be debates about reviewing, routes to market and the education of the poetic palate, the trade itself is in no danger. While poets in South Africa may be materially no richer than poets elsewhere, there is an audience with a taste for this spice.