HEIN WILLEMSE

Reading Frank Meintjies’s autobiographical collection of poetry, A place to night in, reminds me of a phrase Es’kia Mphahlele^{[1]Es’kia Mphahlele, Afrika My Music, An Autobiography 1957-1983, Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1984, pp. 132-133.} coins in Afrika My Music, “the tyranny of place.” In his long years of exile, Mphahlele longed for his country, “a place that contains real life… A reality so deeply rooted… that I can never lose it.” This complete immersion in the life and history of the country of his birth, he regards as “its tyranny and its value as the root and my kind of commitment to human justice in a place called South Africa.”

Right from the outset of Meintjies’s collection, the key themes of place and displacement in their multiplicity of concrete and metaphorical meanings are present: the uneasy new spaces that “consider me / observe me”, the sense of “unbelonging” and the self, enfolded “in abiding and unabiding truths.” The question in the final stanza in “New spaces, folds and snarls”: “Where is home?”, the poet’s shorthand for his exploration of the tyranny of place, permeates in various guises throughout the collection.

These spaces are varied, ranging from the childhood home, apartheid-segregated tosnwhips, the rural hinterland, inner city squalor, significant historical sites to foreign lands. Several poems vividly recall places and memories of the poet’s youth, e.g., “That place along the Otto’s Bluff Road”, “A Poem”, “Grey Street”, “In the city”, or “Wentworth”, and the rewriting of the Lord’s Prayer in “Untitled”, memorialising the death of this brother, Stanley. These memories, places and other spaces are the “bits that constitute” him,

		The particles that constitute me
		ripple along the skull, past the cut above my eye
		around the removed appendix,
		past lungs that once phlegm’d like boats in thickest fog
		down to my ankle where the go-cart axle punctured me

from: “The bits that constitute me.”

Meintjies writes with clarity of purpose, although often understated. In “Athlone” the poem’s narrator paints a picture of this township and its main thoroughfare, also calling to mind an event during the apartheid era when a group of policemen ensconced themselves in boxes on the bed of a railway truck, drove into a protesting crowd, shot, killed and injured several people. The event is memorialised but with a measure of ambiguity, i.e., other forms of disruption of social relations in the township: “the devil’s breath / a swirling gust.” In addition, in a twist of poetic ingenuity, the poem ends with the Afrikaans saying onder draai die duiwel rond (underneath the devil twirls) drawing on the association of the vile act presumably by Afrikaans speaking policemen.

The places, often named and described in concrete terms, evoke intense subjective contemplation on identity, poetic form, presence and mortality. Meintjies is adept in imaginatively conjuring up all these dimensions in a single poem. In “Purple flower” the well-chosen image “old man with squirrels for eyebrows” evokes a multiplicity of meanings ranging from layered histories stowed away in memory, the busyness of its gathering to the implied verdancy of life, associated with “rapids and whirlpools.” Amidst all these images of life, death lurks “in the body of time / and life is a purple flower, bright, on a hedge.” The ever presence of death recurs in another form in “Beside you” where it is said the “death doula” walks beside one, and “his words will have roses in them / his words will recall raindrops plopping to the earth.”

Often past and present co-exist in the same space. The sight of the “rains-scuffed stone” in “In the castle” at once brings to mind the long histories of enforced labour, brute force and inhumanity, and the presence of the dislocated outside the castle’s walls. A further example is Meintjies’s reworking of a visit to Robben Island into an inventive exploration of the self. The visit prompts the hypothetical question “what if a missing slave ship was found” at the same time recalling the history of enslavement in the Americas and locally, while also obliquely registering its absence from the contemporary local narrative. The concrete description of place, the missing slave ship, becomes the premise for an introspective enquiry into “the vessel of torrid dreams… far below the surface of my head”, its “connections, deep and rusted” and “the courage… to dredge up / such barnacled hulks.” Meintjies’s poetry mostly in mellow tones records the growing social, political and ecological awareness of an observant narrator in the roles of bystander, looker-on and participant. Whatever is observed often resonates, evoking deeply felt emotions of recognition, dread, injustice or association, and much more. A place to night in is the work of a mature poet, intellectually astute with a refined social, political and ecological consciousnes s, ever-present but never overpowering. This is imaginative literature that is, as Mphahlele said “an investment in the cultural well-being of his people.”