Poems from plunder to pillage

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“What is poetry if it does not save people?” asks the speaker in acclaimed poet Antjie Krog’s latest collection. So we are challenged by the age-old question of the purpose of art.

Originally written in Afrikaans as Plunder, Pillage is poet Karen Press’s English translation of the collection.

More than anything, the poems are an ode to nature and its supple richness, and how the human race is intent on pillaging it for elusive profit.

So concerned about the environment is Krog that she dedicates the last part of the collection to the subject. This is the only section with an overall title enveloping the poems that follow. 

Thus, the speaker asserts: “How can we care for the planet if we do not care for one another/ how can we care for one another if we do not care for the planet?”

In the call-and-response opening of oh fragile earth, a priest declares his allegiances: “I greet you in the name of the Earth/ the love of the Sun/ and the communion of the Holy Oxygen/ amen.”

One would have thought that by now the message was clear and didn’t need repetition in a work of art. But given the gravity of the global crisis, one of the speakers reminds us that we should “confess our sins” for “we sin daily inordinately in what we irreparably harm/ in what we irreparably destroy of the Earth and one another/ through what we do and through what we refrain from doing.” The reminder seems apt.

For me, this sets the tone for the whole book, which plays with form in this and other poems. Other sections of the book are concerned with themes such as the consequences of love and its demise; the craft of poetry and the tenacity of its creators; honouring women in an uncaring space; the perils of youth in a precarious land and the courage to be self-critical in relation to the person in the mirror.

The complexity of the content is reflected in the sources chosen to enrich the collection, including Krog’s own work during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The journalist and her team won a Pringle Award for this work. Other sources include fellow poets and playwrights, philosophers, books and journals, among them Njabulo Ndebele, Samuel Beckett, JM Coetzee and Pumla Dineo Gqola.

One of the most moving poems in this collection reflects on the experiences of the student movement some years back. The piece is titled #FeesMustFall-October 2015. I suspect art would not have been left behind in analysing the tumultuous student movement at the time. So, the speaker exposes her vulnerability and her companion’s in a sweeping decolonial movement.

Here the poet makes forays into experimenting with forms marrying poetry and prose, including journalism. For instance, student activist Bonani Mxhosa Mfeya is quoted in the #Fees poem as saying: “If this space is too expensive for black people to exist in, then it is better if this space doesn’t exist.”

One gets a sense that the speaker is trying by all means to celebrate the ordinary but is overwhelmed by the extraordinary events of our country, past and present. 

In #Fees she is with a friend navigating the maze of her ordinary world which has been turned upside down by the protesters. But she is elated that she is still present as witness: “… staying with me/elated that we still are/among the unfoldable sails of the majority’s dreams”. 

Krog, an academic, linked to the University of the Western Cape, is no ordinary poet, having won, among others, an FNB Vita Award for best volume of poetry in South Africa at the start of the millennium. 

Press even gets a cursory mention alongside colleagues Keorapetse Kgositsile and Derek Walcott in novelist Nthikeng Mohlele’s novel Michael K. 

This latest collection of poetry comes eight years after the publication of Synapse (Mede-wete) which was given the Hertzog Prize for Poetry in 2017.

According to the blurb, this latest book explores similar themes of the earlier prize-winning collection which include “family, body and land, but this time in the harsh and brittle light of pillaging, whether by nature, humans, or old age”.

The poet is not one to shy away from topics that question riding roughshod over our fellow humans. In a section dedicated to musician Mantombi Matotiyana, the seventh song is called still life with faces and is daring in its novelty in making us reflect on our behaviours. 

The last line of the first stanza is telling: “her scarf sways between the limits of sanctity.” 

This is one poem I found myself reading and re-reading and reading again to find the elusive “message”. There was none forthcoming, at least not in the neat packaging I was expecting.

The resolution (and not the message) for me lies in the last stanza which partly concludes: “… we/ ought to sanctify each other’s bodily beings; it’s/ what throughout our human existence we don’t aim towards.”

The praise poem for the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu titled praise song for a fearless conscience comes as an apt follow-up to “a conscience that was not afraid to be alone before a crowd”.

The piece references the ugly scenes during the struggle for liberation when the term “necklace” could mean a death sentence. 

The speaker recalls the heroic deeds of the clergyman: “a conscience whose tongue could spread like an eagle’s wings/ that could lift up a crowd and set them down beyond the flames”.

This is the power of poetry, which some have called “the mother of literature” and its ability to distil tumultuous historic events in a few lines.

Some poems in the 128-page book attempt to fulfil the speaker’s vision of what the genre should be like. In the vulgarity of verses she asserts: “a poem bores into the casing of the word/ pierces, pores, transforms, simmers into multiverses/ and extends the margin”.

It’s only through this “extension of the margins” that I feel poetry can be made to appeal to a broader spectrum of readers. But maybe I am suffering from what the speaker refers to in the vulgarity as “supermarket logic has conquered poetry/ aggressive promotion, and poets as celebrities”. My answer, too, lies in the last stanza: “I mortar language as I like.”

Pillage is published by Human & Rousseau, an imprint of NB Publishers. The hardcover sells for R260 while the digital copy sells for R208. For further information go towww.nb.co.za.