Insight

The artist and the moment

Published

3 years ago

November 23, 2021

However great a work of art is, it initially comes to the artist at a particular moment in his life and is inspired or triggered by something.
Every painting, poem, novel, song, drawing etc is a product of that special initial moment of inspiration in the life of an artist.
I agree with Wayne Shumaker who said, “In the lives of some poets, however simple or various, the works grow naturally out of the recorded events, or are in themselves simple events…”

“The Negro Speaks of Rivers” by famous African American poet Langston Hughes is a case in point. It is considered to be one of the most amazing poems from the black world which was instigated by one identifiable moment in the life of the poet.
It is said that Hughes wrote this brief poem in just about fifteen minutes, with a shivering hand in July, 1920 when he was aged 17. He had just graduated from high school, and was on a train heading to Mexico City where he would spend just over a year with his father, a man he barely knew.

Hughes says that he was crossing the Mississippi just outside of St. Louis when inspiration struck. The poem came to his mind and heart after looking down into the muddy water of the Mississippi which was turning golden in the sunset. The poet suddenly turned the memory of the history and survival of his people into brilliant lines.
In that breathless poem, Hughes traces the critical historical moments in the lives of the black people. He indicates that black people have always been around and they are, in fact, as ancient as all the major rivers of the world.

Hughes shows that the Negro has always been around the great rivers like the Euphrates and the Congo. The Negro participated in the construction of the pyramids of Egypt along the Nile. The Negro was involved in both the founding of the US and the American Civil war:

“I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi
when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans,
and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn
all golden in the sunset.”

In that poem, Langston Hughes finds the black man rooted and original as he continues to write:

“I’ve known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.”

Hughes honours the wisdom and strength which allowed African-Americans to survive and flourish in the face of all adversity, most particularly the last few centuries of slavery. This poem was first published in June 1921 in a magazine.

Langston Hughes is a famous African American author and poet, who lived from 1902 to 1967. He wrote in a modernist style during the time he was an author, which was from the 1920s to the 1960s. The Harlem Renaissance inspired him a lot and he became one of the key voices of this movement.

Jorge Rebelo, is the great Mozambican poet who participated in the war of the liberation of Mozambique in the 1970’s. He and others wrote poems during that war. Rebelo will most likely be remembered for his poem titled “Poem.” A work of genius, “Poem” is important for arguing on why and how revolutionary poetry should be simple and useful. Jorge Rebelo said he would “forge simple words” that “even children can understand and:

“Come, tell me all this, my brother.
And later I will forge simple words
Words which will enter every house
like the wind
and fall like red-hot embers
on our people’s souls.
For in our land
bullets are beginning to flower.”

In the poem, Rebelo was responding to why his poetry seemed simple and rather pointed. He said it was the war itself that gave birth to such a literary tradition.
Written on the move or at the spur of the moment and between battles, there was the pressure to record a thought, a philosophy about the struggle. Yet the seeming simplicity and innocence of Rebelo’s poems were the diamond-hardness of his poetic vision.

When Rebelo says “in our land, bullets have beginning to flower,” he probably means that the revolution is now beginning to bear fruit and that victory was certain. He also means that the war is now all over Mozambique.

Talking to a journalist in 2007, decades after the war that inspired that poem, Rebelo said he wrote the poem when he was still an activist and leader in the information, policy and propaganda unit of the liberation movement called Frelimo. Through Frelimo, the guerrilla fighters managed to push the Portugues to grant self rule to Mozambique.

Rebelo’s actual words were “We used to have a tradition, to send end of the year messages, and this year we sent cards where I penned this poem. I reflected on the struggles of the past year and this was the outcome. Later some comrades translated it into English. In the recent past, I have published other poems of mine in Portuguese, called appropriately, Messages.”

Considered as one of the greatest novels to come out of Zimbabwe, Charles Mungoshi’s Waiting for the Rain, published in 1975, is a book that was saved by a moment in the life of the writer. This novel is a story about Lucifer Mandengu who has been to mission school and is now considered elite and very educated. He has just been offered a scholarship to go abroad and train as an artist. Before he leaves, he boards a rural bus towards home to bid his people farewell.

Mungoshi says when he began writing Waiting for the Rain, he actually had a short story in mind “about Betty and her unwanted pregnancy and her understanding brother, Garabha. It was all in a once upon a time tense. When I brought in the other characters, the story kept on expanding and before I knew I had over 100 pages of script on A4 on my hands.” And yet, at some point, Mungoshi felt the short story was dull and he actually abandoned it for some time until one crucial moment that pushed him back to the story.

Mungoshi says: “Then one day I went to my local beer hall and there I watched that Jerusalem drum expert and the people. Looking at them, I was suddenly touched by – the sense, their feeling of being family, and seeing each of them with his or her problems and the drummer trying to assuage these with his unifying drum… Anyway, through them at that moment, I had found out that this story was as urgent as the message of the drum…”
Mungoshi continues about the moment of inspiration: “The landscape, the physical life of the book became much more alive, much more present because I was living it as I was writing it and I have never felt as blessed as I felt writing (or re-writing)Waiting for the Rain.(I do not think I revised –not much, any way – this second version.)”

The essence of this prize winning novel is about grappling with the issues of home, identity and belonging in the changing times. Through it, Mungoshi is constantly asking key questions: Do we truly belong to this land? Is it possible to belong here and elsewhere? What must we change and what exactly must continue and why? Is there any space for the individual in our quest for collective glory? Are we right? Are we wrong?

Then there are also two interesting cases of inspiring moments and situations between two black American writers; Lawrence Dunbar and Maya Angelou. This is a story about how one’s moments of anguish as a writer could cause another writer to respond to the first work, lighting a fire downstream!
‘Sympathy’ is an 1899 poem written by Paul Lawrence Dunbar. He was one of the most prominent African-American writers of his time. He wrote the poem while he was working under unpleasant conditions at the Library of Congress.

Dealing with the dust and must of books in a hot, closed space was unpleasant for the tubercular Dunbar and that strained his health. This may be reflected in an October 26, 1898, letter to Young, in which Dunbar notes an ongoing illness that kept him from the Library for two weeks and requests a leave of absence.

As a result of reflecting on this, Dunbar wrote the poem that is often considered to be about the struggle of African-Americans. The iron grating of the book stacks in the Library of Congress suggested to him the bars of the bird’s cage. The torrid sun poured its rays down into the courtyard of the library and heated the iron grilling of the book stacks until they were like prison bars in more senses than one. During such a moment he wrote

‘Sympathy’. Parts of the poem go like this:
“I know what the caged bird feels, alas!
When the sun is bright on the upland slopes;
When the wind stirs soft through the springing grass,
And the river flows like a stream of glass;
When the first bird sings and the first bud opes,
And the faint perfume from its chalice steals—
I know what the caged bird feels!
I know why the caged bird beats its wing
Till its blood is red on the cruel bars;
For he must fly back to his perch and cling
When he fain would be on the bough a-swing;
And a pain still throbs in the old, old scars
And they pulse again with a keener sting—
I know why he beats his wing!”

On the other hand, Maya Angelou’s poem entitled “Caged Bird” was inspired by Paul Dunbar’s poem “Sympathy.” The major theme of both poems is freedom.
Just like Dunbar’s, Angelo’s poem is famous for its intimate description of freedom, and for the role of personal voice as a true element of it. In the ‘caged bird’ Maya Angelou talks about how a free bird wastes her time and wallow in her freedom.

She says a free bird flies everywhere daring both the wind and the sun in its flight. But she writes that a caged bird can seldom see through the cage because its wings are clipped and its feet are tied and all the caged bird can do is sing while in the cage.
That kind of a bird sings about its desires for freedom. Meanwhile the free bird gazes at the lawn and the trees where she can go at will. The caged bird’s voice goes across the hills and plains because she wants to be free:

“A free bird leaps
on the back of the wind
and floats downstream
till the current ends
and dips his wing
in the orange sun rays
and dares to claim the sky.

But a bird that stalks
down his narrow cage
can seldom see through
his bars of rage
his wings are clipped and
his feet are tied
so he opens his throat to sing…”

Maya Angelou, born in April 4, 1928 as Marguerite Johnson in St. Louis, was raised in segregated rural Arkansas. She was a poet, historian, author, actress, playwright, civil-rights activist, producer and director.
The cases above demonstrate that some artists actually seize the unusual moment in real life and transpose it into art.

Memory Chirere

Insight

Down in the Dump: Conclusion

Published

1 month ago

December 2, 2024

The Post

I closed last week by recording the dreadful news that trashy Trump had been elected called to mind WB Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming.” This is the poem whose opening lines gave Chinua Achebe the phrase “things fall apart.”

Yeats observes “Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”

It was written in 1919 and controversially uses Christian imagery relating to the Apocalypse and the Second Coming to reflect on the atmosphere in Europe following the slaughter of the First World War and the devastating flu epidemic that followed this.

It also reflects on the Irish War of Independence against British rule.

In lines that I can now read as if applying to the recent American election, Yeats mourns: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”

And then I can visualise Trump in the poem’s closing lines: “What rough beast is this, its hour come round at last, / Slouching towards Bethlehem to be born?”

Trump is certainly a rough beast and isn’t the choice of verb, slouching, just perfect? For a non-allegorical account of the threat posed by the Dump, I can’t do better than to quote (as I often do) that fine South African political journalist, Will Shoki. In his words: “Trump’s administration simply won’t care about Palestinians, about the DRC, about the Sudanese.

It will be indifferent to the plight of the downtrodden and the oppressed, who will be portrayed as weak and pathetic. And it will give carte blanche [that is, free rein] to despotism and tyranny everywhere.

Not even social media, that once revered third-space we associated with subversion and revolution in the first quarter of the 21st century can save us because Silicon Valley is in Trump’s back pocket.”

So what follows the triumph of the Dump? We can’t just sit down and moan and bemoan. In a more recent piece of hers than the one I quoted last week, Rebecca Solnit has observed: “Authoritarians like Trump love fear, defeatism, surrender. Do not give them what they want . . . We must lay up supplies of love, care, trust, community and resolve — so we may resist the storm.”

Katt Lissard tells me that on November 7th following the confirmation of the election result, in the daytime and well into the evening in Manhattan, New York, there was a large demonstration in support of the immigrants Trump despises.

And a recent piece by Natasha Lennard gives us courage in its title “The Answer to Trump’s Victory is Radical Action.”

So, my Basotho readers, how about the peaceful bearing of some placards in front of the US Embassy in Maseru? Because the Dump doesn’t like you guys and gals one little bit.

One last morsel. I had intended to end this piece with the above call to action, but can’t resist quoting the following comment from the New York Times of November 13th on Trump’s plans to appoint his ministers.

I’m not sure a satirical gibe was intended (the clue is in the repeated use of the word “defence”), but it made me guffaw nonetheless. “Trump will nominate Pete Hegseth, a Fox News host with no government experience, as his defence secretary. Hegseth has often defended Trump on TV.” You see, it’s all about the Dump.

Chris Dunton is a former Professor of English and Dean of Humanities at the National University of Lesotho.

Insight

A question of personal gain

Published

2 months ago

November 26, 2024

The Post

Recently, an audio recording featuring the distressed MP for Thaba-Bosiu Constituency, Joseph Malebaleba, circulated on social media. The MP appears to have spent a sleepless night, struggling with the situation in which he and his associates from the Revolution for Prosperity (RFP) party were denied a school feeding tender valued at M250 million per annum.

In 2022, Lesotho’s political landscape underwent a significant shift with the emergence of the RFP led by some of the country’s wealthiest individuals. Among them was Samuel Ntsokoane Matekane, arguably one of the richest people in Lesotho, who took the helm as the party’s leader and ultimately, the Prime Minister of Lesotho.

The RFP’s victory in the general election raised eyebrows, and their subsequent actions have sparked concerns about the motivations behind their involvement in politics.

In an interview with an American broadcasting network just after he won the elections, Matekane made a striking statement, proclaiming that he would run Lesotho exactly as he runs his business.

At first glance, many thought he was joking, but as time has shown, his words were far from an idle threat. In the business world, the primary goal is to maximize profits, and it appears that the RFP is adopting a similar approach to governance.

Behind the scenes, alarming developments have been unfolding. A communication from an RFP WhatsApp group revealed a disturbing request from the Minister of Communications, Nthati Moorosi, who asked if anyone in the group had a construction business and could inbox her.

This raises questions about the RFP’s focus on using government resources to benefit their own business interests.

The government has been embroiled in a series of scandals that have raised serious concerns about the ethical conduct of its officials. Recent reports have revealed shocking incidents of misuse of public funds and conflicts of interest among key government figures.

Over the past two years, the RFP has been accused of awarding government contracts to companies affiliated with their members, further solidifying concerns about their self-serving agenda. For instance, vehicles purchased for the police were allegedly sourced from suppliers connected to a Minister’s son and MP.

The MP for Peka, Mohopoli Monokoane, was found to have hijacked fertiliser intended to support impoverished farmers, diverting crucial resources away from those in need for personal gain.

Such actions not only betray the trust of the public but also have a direct impact on the livelihoods of vulnerable communities. Monokoane appeared before the courts of law this week.

While farmers voice their concerns regarding fertiliser shortages, it seems that Bishop Teboho Ramela of St. Paul African Apostolic Church, who is also a businessman, is allegedly involved in a corrupt deal concerning a M10 million fertilizer allocation, benefiting from connections with wealthy individuals in government.

The procurement of fertiliser appears to be mired in controversy; recall that the Minister of Agriculture, Food Security and Nutrition, Thabo Mofosi, was also implicated in the M43 million tender.

The renovation of government buildings with elaborate lighting systems was contracted to a company owned by the son of an MP. The RFP’s enthusiasm for infrastructure development, specifically road construction and maintenance, is also tainted by self-interest, as they have companies capable of performing these tasks and supplying the necessary materials, such as asphalt.

Minister Moteane finds himself in a compromising situation regarding a lucrative M100 million airport tender that was awarded to his former company. Ministers have even gone so far as to award themselves ownership of diamond mines.

Meanwhile, the nation struggles with national identification and passport shortages, which according to my analysis the RFP seems hesitant to address until they can find a way to partner with an international company that will benefit their own interests.

The people of Lesotho are left wondering if their leaders are truly committed to serving the nation or simply lining their own pockets. As the RFP’s grip on power tightens, the consequences for Lesotho’s democracy and economy hang precariously in the balance.

It is imperative that citizens remain vigilant and demand transparency and accountability from their leaders, lest the nation slide further into an era of self-serving governance.

In conclusion, the RFP’s dominance has raised serious concerns about the motives behind their involvement in politics. The apparent prioritisation of personal profit over public welfare has sparked widespread disillusionment and mistrust among the population.

As Lesotho navigates this critical juncture, it is essential that its leaders are held accountable for their actions and that the nation’s best interests are placed above those of individuals.

Only through collective effort and a strong commitment to transparency and accountability can Lesotho ensure a brighter future for all its citizens.

Ramahooana Matlosa

Insight

Down in the Dump: Part One

Published

2 months ago

November 26, 2024

The Post

Attentive readers will recall that some weeks ago, I scribbled a series of pieces on elections due to be held in the UK, France, South Africa, and the USA. These elections were unusually critical for the well-being of their countries and even that of the world.

The results of the last of these elections are now with us and we are faced with the devastating news that Donald Trump is heading back to the White House.

I can hardly think of worse news to swallow or to equip the world to survive the years ahead.

The Dump, as I call him, is one of the most odious, dangerous, untrustworthy individuals currently inhabiting planet Earth. To cite a few of his demerits: he is a convicted felon; he believes climate change is a hoax; he is a sexist and a racist (one of his former military advisers has gone so far as to describe him as a fascist).

He is a snuggle buddy of the Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and will probably discontinue aid to Ukraine as it resists invasion by Russia. Western European allies such as France, Germany and the UK are dismayed at his victory, as he holds the principles of democracy and constitutionalism in contempt.

As for Africa, well, he once described it as a “shit country,” so don’t look forward to much support from him.

Readers who spent time at the NUL will remember my dear colleague Katt Lissard who is now back home in New York. She spent some years with us as a Professor specialising in Theatre studies and was the Artistic Director of our international Winter / Summer Institute for Theatre for Development.

Many activists in the USA like Katt, who don’t see themselves as part of the political mainstream, chose to campaign for the Democrats and Kamala Harris in the hope of keeping Trump and the far right out of power. Confronted with the news of Trump’s victory, she sent an email to friends noting this was “just a brief check-in from the incomprehensible USA.”

She then explained: “We’re in shock and the early days of processing, but white supremacy, misogyny and anti-immigrant bias are alive and well and driving the boat here.” So, how do Katt and millions of decent, like-minded Americans plan to weather the storm?

Katt explained: “We were deeply depressed and deeply furious as it became clear that one of the worst human beings on the planet was going back to the White House, but we are still breathing and know that we will in the days ahead begin to formulate plans and strategies—and not just for heading north across the Canadian border.”

Picking up on that last point, it may well be that many decent Americans might just up and off across the border; Canada had better prepare for an avalanche of applications for residence permits.

And not just from Americans; in, for example, the American university system alone there are many many Africans employed in high positions (Professors and such-like), who must now face the fact they are living in a country whose leader despises them and who may opt to get out.

In her email written to her friends, once the news from hell had been confirmed, Katt quoted a piece by Rebecca Solnit, one of the most exciting writers at work in the USA today (readers may remember that I have previously reviewed two of her books for this newspaper, Whose Story is This? and Recollections of My Non-Existence).

Now Solnit is a feminist and at the heart of her work is a dissection of the way women have been marginalised in the USA (let’s remember that Kamala Harris, the Presidential candidate who lost to Trump, did so partly because so many American males could not bring themselves to vote for a woman.

I am thinking of the kind of male who invaded the White House when it was announced Trump had lost the 2020 election, bare-chested and wearing cow-horn helmets on their numbskull heads).

Solnit has this to say on our response to the Trump victory: “They want you to feel powerless and to surrender and to let them trample everything and you are not going to let them.

You are not giving up and neither am I. The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything and everything we can save is worth saving.

You may need to grieve or scream or take time off, but you have a role no matter what, and right now good friends and good principles are worth gathering in.

Remember what you love. Remember what loves you. Remember in this tide of hate what love is.” And then: “A lot of us are going to resist by building solidarity and sanctuary.”

What is so morale-boosting about Solnit’s piece is not just her vision but also her command of language.
Her writing is so crisp and elegant. Language comes at us at its best, of course, in literature, and when I heard that the Dump was on the move back to the White House, I immediately recalled one of the most startling poems in the English language, “The Second Coming” by the Irish poet WB Yeats.

I’ll kick off with that next week.

To be concluded

Chris Dunton