Lifestyle

This Carting Life

Kozain carts loss into our SA present as poetry

October 09, 2005 Edition 1

Jeremy Cronin

by Rustum Kozain

(Kwela Books and Snailpress)

R153

Eleven years into our new democracy there is a widespread sense of loss. Yes, there are, to the contrary all those cheery tracts by motivational speakers, "one hundred and twenty reasons to feel good about being South African". Their strained optimism confirms my point.

The prevailing sense of loss is not a pining for a dreadful apartheid past but, rather, a conviction that our present reality is less than we had struggled for, less, perhaps, than we deserved.

Rustum Kozain's This Carting Life is a debut collection, but of poems widely published over the past decade in journals here and abroad. It takes loss as its central concern. The contemporary South African sense of something politically, socially or morally foregone is hinted at throughout, but Kozain's poetry foregrounds more intimate dimensions.

"Ma says, God, she's switched off,/can't take the strain of everyone's problems". A few lines later, in Family Portrait, the poet adds: "I've switched off too."

In one of the finest poems of the collection, Brother, who will bury me?, the poet imagines himself being buried under Muslim rites in his hometown of Paarl. The hypothetical funeral is written from close familiarity. "Bagged in linen, draped under a green spread/Will I be carried in a stumble...?"

As he is hurried along in "a two-mile hike through gawking streets", he imagines childhood friends carrying him and having "Now all grown unequal in height", accidentally tipping the bier so that his body slips out. But this mishap is immediately corrected in fumbled haste.

In the press and hurry of this, which the poet sustains for some four pages, we start to feel the head-long vortex of social determination, the deep gravity of given identity claiming back its own. The poem refuses this burial. But in the refusal there is another loss: the loss of a world of ritual familiarity.

The dominant loss, however, the one that casts its shadow across the collection and weaves its way into everything else, is that of a romantic relationship that has ended.

"Two hours and fifty-three minutes after you leave/Cape Town draws its cloud cover up to its neck/over its head, and readies itself for the lost love/of rain that will now finally come for weeks."

In another Cape Town winter, in another poem, the poet counts out "the years you left/or I ran you out: 8 years ago,/9 years, 10. Ten winters..."

In this obsessive tallying we come to understand that this collection is not a one-night fling on the rebound. There is a deep wound here.

But why poetry? Kozain answers that question by making poetry explore strategies of rekindling passion in the face of loss, going where only poetry might go.

There are several poetic probes. In the poem Brother, who will bury me? a Muslim burial is refused and rest is found in an adjoining location, a pauper's grave near to where, as a 10-year old child, the narrator had once fled from a bullying brother.

He remembers having returned home later with "a malaise of veld flowers" stuck "in a bleached Coke can", brought back to a mother, with uncertain results. This alternative place of burial was once the site of shacks of migrant workers, poignantly if ironically named Bongweni, "favourite place".

Other poems escape the claustrophobia of ethnic or family foreclosure by exploring alternative family trajectories - like the dislocated, itinerant sheep-shearing family of the title poem, This Carting Life. Or the homely epiphany of musical nomadism.

One of my favourite poems is Talking jazz. It recalls a musician father who had given up playing semi-professionally because "the band now just played/non-whites-only hotels, patrons/too drunk and noisy, without class/who all the time just wanted

langarm/a swing too brash to be jazz."

Still lurking at home is the father's double bass, and when Desmond the traffic cop (and amateur sax player) comes to have his car tuned, there is the possibility of an improvised jazz session. "And sometimes, just sometimes/ the sax hit its high note/ immaculate/ free/ of time."

There are other poetic strategies of searching for a high note pitched above disappointment. There is androgyny, building on Roland Barthes's observation: "In any man who utters the other's absence something feminine is declared".

In the poem The woman I am, the syntax becomes self-entangled, solitude is overcome in the celebration of a feminine masculinity. Or is it the other way around? Or does it matter?

There are several other poetic strategies for surpassing loss. They all have a stoicism about them, a circling around "the diminished power of the lost thing found".

Remembering a visit to a grave-yard with his mother and lover, the poet says to his mother: "I wanted you to cry and touch the tombstone [of her parents, his grandparents]/wanted you to tell me why you long for them/so I could own that loss and turn it into loneliness."

Loneliness is better than loss, the collection is saying. Loneliness might even become jazz, or nomadism, or androgyny, or memory or a hybrid of the above talking into our South African present as poetry.