WAMUWI MBAO

Aryan Kaganof is a maker of experimental art that welds the archival and the everyday in distinctive and compelling ways. His new collection (although assemblage might be a better description) of nomadic poetry WE WHO ARE NOT DEAD YET is a work of tessellated storytelling framed by reference points that stretch back and forth through time:

An archive recycles endlessly
by composing the elements
of what one has experienced
into
traces
of blood
beating.

At once reassuringly personal and disarmingly irreverent, this dense collection runs to four enteric movements, rotoscoping the putrefaction of the body politic in uncomfortable detail. The poems are topiaried such that the eye cannot help but fall down a flight of words, or totter poised to leap across a chasm of meaning. Sometimes, the words themselves have been eroded, as though we are reading in the aftermath of some falling-away of language under the onslaught of what it has to describe.

If you are not partial to prose-poetry – a genre that all too often ends up being the best of neither realm – then you may find that the reading is not as fluid as straight-up verse. The eye constantly catches on some barbed bit of meaning between the words. I found myself reading each page, doubling back, reading again, to ensure I had everything with me. For a relatively slim volume, We Who Are Not Dead Yet feels as though it defeats a first read. I worry that I am not grasping its roiling, twisting meanings in full. I suspect myself of having a tin ear for what it’s trying to say. It compels writing about. I have to defeat the urge to pull something reconstructive from it. What sensemaking is possible here? It is by turns headachey and wondrous, tiresomely full of old man shit and brilliantly unwilling to allow self-indulgence.

What shines off the page? Here, the earnest quality of the writing. There, the way a poem constructs violence as an undramatic thwarting of life. A line rears up: “Nothing happens, there is no entertainment.” The collection is studded throughout with simple blooms of clarity like that, which read well against other more prolix moments:

the flames licked up
and charred his many
treasons. his blood boiled
his corpse stank to high heaven
we stood around and heaved a great
sigh of relief, without the poet’s treasons
it was so much easier to swallow the lies we
had been fed instead of our promised freedoms
he only spoke to shadows anyway
shadows and
treasons.

Many of the poems have a pulling, demonstrative quality, as though the words are themselves not adequate to the task of carrying meaning across. When this works (‘Cento for Carina Venter’, ‘Born Again’) it’s does so strikingly: the early poems have a kind of breathlessly performative quality, a run-on enjambment that leaves you half expecting to find them having dropped off the page entirely. 

At its centre is the knotty epic Palimpsestina (a portmanteaux that is not necessarily an instruction for reading – not quite), 34 sections of incantation and obsessive-compulsive lament. It’s a recursively immersive brocade of great scale and formidable momentum that calls us to gather at the lacuna of meaning occasioned by the Marikana mine massacre, the unspeakable irruption of death-dealing into our national consciousness:

gaps in narrative,
a landscape of ekphrasis and confession,
time unleashed from a dank, hiss
(and history)
of relentless radio static

The events of August 16 2012 are the warping, rumbling reverberation that returns throughout this collection, and in the palimpsestinas gnaw at the question of how such violence becomes historical. This section, whose poems are a low requiem sound, insists upon itself in a granitic way (there are built-in clarifications that do not clarify), but it also unleashes a force field that courses through the book, giving context to what lies before and after it in the book. Reading it, we are enjoined to think about how we reach the limits of our national grief. Is it a knowable, readable, visitable, place?

In this country
It is not the smile
that matters, released
behind closed doors does
it even have a name? Is that
even important? You are a literate
someone. You live here.

This is not an immediately welcoming read, not that it needs to be. The insistence on the brute facticity of the faecal troubles my aversion to the scatological at the same time as it draws a through-line to other denizens of the excremental carnivalesque: Joyce, Beckett, Rampolokeng. In a recurring sequence (that revives an amusing bit of old military slang) titled Stellenbosched and Stellenbosched Again, a musing on the impersonal squalor of public transportation addresses itself to the forever-dismaying South African university town (and all its festering inequalities) swings chaotically from Hadean train to oozing street to toilet bowl. We glimpse here an autographical impulse surfacing, and I (self-interestedly) want to linger here a little longer.

Such weaknesses as I might point out include, simply expressed, a certain wordy overdelineation that can read a tad too artlessly:

We live in a country
where a white man's property
is worth more than a black man's life
We are collectively responsible for this atrocity
We have, collectively, the power to tear
the walls of this Prison down
      We who are not dead yet.

Which is a fine agitprop-ish sentiment but a very on-the-nose one, too.

When form and style are suddenly subverted beneath truth’s rubble, the obeisance to brute facticity can feel a little too heavy-footed.

At other times, a sentence may veer off the path of meaning, its logic disappearing from view (that undergrowth again). Even the titular poem feels at moments as though it is wrestling grubbily with the idea of poetry:

Perhaps some
distant memory of who you used to be inspired you
to make the herculanean effort of getting both shoulders
into your leader’s rectum and yes, you did it, you actually moved
your entire body into the anal canal and crawled, wormlike to a
distant place where you could hear the hubbub and when you
got there, boy were you surprised; a million other shitheads
like yourself all in the process of turning to worms. You
were not alone at least, and now, in the comfort of
your leader’s bowels you could all enjoy his con
stant feasting with only the occasional distur
bance of some fallen from grace shithead
being blown noisily out of your leader’s
mighty asshole along with other dis
gusting faecal matter.

There’s no reason not to make poetry from shit, is there? The best flowers grow from it, after all. This collection feels robustly, grossly frank in how it amplifies what is repellant and true about the ordinary of our social immiserations. If its compulsive insalubrious tendencies induce a shudder, it’s a necessary one.