Rough Music

Ari Sitas

Description

Ari Sitas is a distinguished sociologist, novelist, dramatist, a founder member of the Junction Avenue Theatre Company, and a cultural activist celebrated for his work in popular and worker theatre. As a poet he has written eight books, and collaborated with many visual artists and musicians. His poems are passionate, politically undaunted and wide-ranging, expressed with the exploratory instinct of a jazz improviser.

Sujets

• Littérature Africaine
• Littérature Africaine

Informations

• Publié par: Deep South
• Date de parution: 29 décembre 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781928476184
• Langue: English

Extrait

Poetry books and manuscripts by Ari Sitas
Tropical Scars (Johannesburg: Congress of South African Writers, 1989)
Songs, Shoeshine and Piano in Essential Things , edited by Andries W. Oliphant. (Johannesburg: Congress of South African Writers, 1992)
Slave Trades (Grahamstown: Deep South, 2000)
Rhythmskewed (unpublished, 2000) – translation of a manuscript of 1991 Greek poems in Cypriot dialect
The RDP Poems (Madiba Press, Durban, 2004)
The Book of Accounting (unpublished, 2008)
Insurrections (CD + booklet, Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape, 2012)
80 Days Around the World – the India Section (forthcoming 2014)
The Vespa Diaries (under construction)



Poems from unpublished manuscripts have appeared in New Coin , Badilisha Poetry Exchange , The Common [USA], and Marikana. A Moment in Time edited by Raphael d’Abdon.
2013 © Ari Sitas
All rights reserved
ISBN: 978-0-9870282-2-8
ebook ISBN: 978-1-928476-18-4
Deep South
[e-mail]
www.deepsouth.co.za
Distributed in South Africa by
University of KwaZulu-Natal Press
www.ukznpress.co.za
Distributed worldwide by
African Books Collective
PO Box 721, Oxford, OX1 9EN, UK
www.africanbookscollective.com/publishers/deep-south
Cover and section page design: Adrie le Roux & Elmarie Costandius
Text design: Liz Gowans
Contents
from Tropical Scars (1989)
Ethekwini
We Continue
Doubts
Our little tropical scars
Evening tides
from Songs, Shoeshine and Piano (1992)
Shrieks
Shantytown
Crooning
Mango Tango
Washing
The Monkey-Tree
Barbarism
from Slave Trades (2000)
from Rhythmskewed (2000) originally in Greek, 1991
from The RDP Poems (2004)
Black Mamba Rising
Reconstruction
Living Rites
Times of deliverance
Lament for the Dying of the Word
Bombing Iraq
RDP Film Documentary (RDP Project Launch, Inanda 1995) 107
from The Book of Accounting (2008)
Summer Love
Jazz, Bass and Land
from 80 Days Around the World – the India Section (2010)
Mooring
Master and Slave Dialectics
Learning to Love
Remembering Freiburg
Allahabad
Varanasi
Kolkata 2
Kokovoko
from Insurrections (2012)
Ghosts of the Quarry: Insurrection
Insurrection: Flowers
The Eighth Insurrection of the cow
from The Vespa Diaries
Klerksdorp
Evening Song (Durban)
Marikana
Ethekwini
There is
an expanse of green and dust
hemmed-in
by cane and a stitchwork of hills
there, here,
this expanse
spat at by waves
pummelled by sunblasts
stewing in sweat
yes, liquid
yes, waves: whose necks are
thickset with corrugations
there, here
is this expanse that claims me: my Hell.
From here
from this hell’s odours
– tomato street, guava avenue, molasses valley
steel-shavings township, glue location, masala hill
melting and boiling–
there is no stench of heaven left to prize
there is a sky: yes –
blue-like, grey-like, alien-like
weighing downwards
pouring
sweat
at dusk
downwards
riveting all aground
downwards, yes –
with only sideward escapades.
There, here,
mechanical bullfrogs and cicadas grind away
and sometimes wounded cars cough-by pierced by
assegais
and sometimes surfers emerge from the mouths
of microwave ovens
and aways
life continues like the sound of splintering glass.
This hell,
hemmed-in:
its forced geometry of concrete boils
spreads outwards
sidewards
in its rashes of sackcloth
of shack, of specification matchbox
to touch the stitchwork of hills
as near the docks
the boss drives by in his Shepstone Benz
as his “boys” load Cetshwayo’s skull as
cargo
here, there,
confined
where visions of heaven subsided long ago
with the arrival of sails creaking
under a hyperload of sparrows
here,