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Contents
editorial
DJO BANKUNA
Pissing On The Rainbow Nation
NATHAN TRANTRAAL
Ôs haatie wit mense nie. Hoekô haat julle vi ôs?
GLENN HOLTZMAN
The Music Department in South Africa as a Mirror of Racial Tension and Transformative Struggle: A Critical Ethnographic Perspective
TENDAYI SITHOLE
Black artists and the paradox of the gift
Theme Johnny Mbizo Dyani
ZWELEDINGA PALLO JORDAN
JOHNNY DYANI: A Portrait
JOHNNY MBIZO DYANI
A Letter From Mbizo
ARYAN KAGANOF
Johnny Dyani Interview 22-23 December 1985
SALIM WASHINGTON
“Don’t Sell Out”
LOUIS MOHOLO-MOHOLO & HERBIE TSOAELI WITH JOHNNY DYANI
In Conversation with Mbizo
ZOLISWA FIKELEPI-TWANI & NDUDUZO MAKHATHINI
When Today Becomes The Past: The Archive as a Healing Process
ASHER GAMEDZE
Tradition as improvisation | Continuity and abstraction
GILBERT MATTHEWS & LEFIFI TLADI
An Interview with Lars Rasmussen
EUGENE SKEEF
The Musical Confluence of Johnny Dyani and Bheki Mseleku in Exile
TENDAYI SITHOLE
Blue Scripts For Johnny Mbizo Dyani - Script i: The Figure
TENDAYI SITHOLE
Blue Scripts For Johnny Mbizo Dyani - Script ii: Ontology Of The Bass
TENDAYI SITHOLE
Blue Scripts For Johnny Mbizo Dyani - Script iii: Musical Offering
TENDAYI SITHOLE
Blue Scripts For Johnny Mbizo Dyani - Script iv: Home And Exile
TENDAYI SITHOLE
Blue Scripts For Johnny Mbizo Dyani - Script v: Experimental Philosophic Incantations
TENDAYI SITHOLE
Blue Scripts For Johnny Mbizo Dyani - Script vi: The Posthumous Life
ED EPSTEIN
Spiritual
CAROL MULLER
Diasporic musical landscapes: Abdullah Ibrahim, Johnny Dyani, and Sathima Bea Benjamin in an African Space Program (1969-1980)
BENJAMIN ZEPHANIAH
Riot in Progress (Legalize Freedom)
S’MAKUHLE BOKWE MAFUNA
Notes on the Exile Years
KEI MURRAY MONGEZI PROSPER MCGREGOR
Who the Son was?
ARYAN KAGANOF
Somebody Blew Up South Africa
JONATHAN EATO
Interludes with Bra’ Tete Mbambisa
MAX ANNAS
Morduntersuchungskommission. Der Fall Daniela Nitschke
SHANE COOPER
Lonely Flower
THANDI ALLIN DYANI
"I love you. You don’t have to love me but I love you."
galleri
SLOVO MAMPHAGA
Shades of Johnny Dyani
HUGH MDLALOSE
Jazz is my Life
TJOBOLO KHAHLISO
Shebeening
FEDERICO FEDERICI
Notes (not only) on asemic phenomenology
ANDRÉ CLEMENTS
Vita-Socio-Anarcho
DEREK DAVEY
Verge
borborygmus
MUSTAPHA JINADU
Trapped
VUSUMZI MOYO
From Cape-to-Cairo – AZANIA
MALAIKA WA AZANIA
In a foreign tongue...
SHARLENE KHAN
Imagining an African Feminist Press
DILIP MENON
Isithunguthu (A conversation in Joburg)
CATHERINE RUDENT
Against the “Grain of the Voice” - Studying the voice in songs
GEORGE LEWIS
Amo (2021), for five voices and electronics
STEVEN SHAVIRO
Exceeding Syncopation?
BRUCE LABRUCE
Notes on camp/anti-camp
PATRICIA PISTERS
Set and Setting of the Brain on Hallucinogen: Psychedelic Revival in the Acid Western
frictions
KHADIJA TRACEY HEEGER
Doctor Patient
KNEO MOKGOPA
Vuleka Mhlaba (What Would Happen if Madiba Returned?)
CHURCHIL NAUDE
Die mooi mooi gedig en anner massekinners ….
OSWALD KUCHERERA
Travelling on the Khayelitsha Train
SISCA JULIUS
Islands in the stream
FAEEZ VAN DOORSEN
Nobody’s Mullet
GADDAFI MAKHOSANDILE
The Face of Hope
VONANI BILA
Extracts from Phosakufa (the epic)
NIQ MHLONGO
Mistaken Identity
OMOSEYE BOLAJI
People of the Townships part 2
SIMBARASHE NYATSANZA
How to Become an African President
JEAN RHYS
The Doll
OSCAR HEMER
Coyote
MICHALIS PICHLER
Bibliophagia
claque
LINDELWA DALAMBA
From Kippie to Kippies and Beyond: the village welcomes this child
GWEN ANSELL
Zim Ngqawana: A child of the rain
MKHULULI
Black Noise: Notes on a Semanalysis of Mogorosi’s DeAesthetic
LIZE VAN ROBBROECK
DECOLONIZING ART BOOK FAIRS: Publishing Practices from the South(s).
DYLAN VALLEY
The Future lies with folk art: Max Schleser’s smartphone filmmaking THEORY AND PRACTICE
PAUL KHAHLISO
Riding Ruins
DIANA FERRUS
Ronelda Kamfer’s Kompoun: unapologetic and honest writing.
UNATHI SLASHA
Piecing Together the Barely Exquisite Corpse: On Tinashe Mushakavanhu’s Reincarnating Marechera: Notes on the Speculative Archive
WANELISA XABA
One from the heart: Dimakatso Sedite's Yellow Shade
BLAQ PEARL (JANINE VAN ROOY-OVERMEYER)
Uit die Kroes: gedigte deur Lynthia Julius
FRANK MEINTJIES
Wild Has Roots: thinking about what it means to be human
MPHUTHUMI NTABENI
The Land Wars: The Dispossession of the Khoisan and AmaXhosa in the Cape Colony - a discourse on the unrelenting and ruthless process of colonial conquest
ekaya
MKHULU MNGOMEZULU
Call Me By My Name: Ubizo and Ancestral Names for Abangoma
HILDE ROOS
In Conversation with Zakes Mda: "The full story must be told."
INGE ENGELBRECHT
Tribute to Sacks Williams: A composer from Genadendal
ESTHER MARIE PAUW
A tribute to Hilton Biscombe
WILLEMIEN FRONEMAN
Resisting the Siren Song of Race
off the record
SANDILE MEMELA
Things My Father Taught Me
HEIDI GRUNEBAUM
On returning to my grandmother’s land (notes for a film)
HILTON BISCOMBE
A boytjie from Stellenbosch
KHOLEKA SHANGE
Art, Archives, Anthropology
RITHULI ORLEYN
On Archives, Metadata and Aesthetics
KEYAN G. TOMASELLI
The Nomadic Mind of Teshome Gabriel: Hybridity, Identity and Diaspora
FINN DANIELS-YEOMAN & DARA WALDRON
Song For Hector - the utopian promise of the archive
TREVOR STEELE TAYLOR
Censorship, Film Festivals and the Temperature at which Artworks and their Creators Burn - episode 2
GEORGE KING
Sustaining an Imagined Culture: Some Reflections on South African Music Research in Thirty-Five Years of Ars Nova
RAFI ALIYA CROCKETT
Loxion Fabulous: Temporality and Spaciality in South African Kwaito Performance
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MOHAMMAD SHABANGU
Monday 20 January 2020
ANDILE KHUMALO
22 July 2021
STEPHANIE VOS
Monday 7 February 2022
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RAMPOLOKENG, MUYANGA, OOSTERLING, VD BRINK, GRUNEBAUM & KAGANOF
Forget Nietzsche
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Archive About Contact Africa Open Institute
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    #07
  • claque

FRANK MEINTJIES

Wild Has Roots: thinking about what it means to be human

One doesn’t often see esoteric work and literature mixed. Life is integrated, true, but bookshop shelves certainly aren’t. And a good number of readers have been indoctrinated to look for and align with pigeon-holes. So, it’s great to see Wild Has Roots published, a book in which tarot and poetry fruitfully coexist.

The esoteric[1]As used here, “esoteric” denotes a combination of spiritual exploration and self-help; seeking wholeness through going after truths that lie beyond the rational intellect. is very relevant at this time. The Covid era has forced human beings to reconsider what really matters, to revisit priorities and to fundamentally readjust, so that a better balance can be found between the inner and outer worlds. In this sense, the pandemic has demanded that we do a “reset” and, in so doing, has knocked down walls and opened up new spaces. We have, for example, seen the likes of Brené Brown, Eckhart Tolle and Deepak Chopra – articulators of the idea that inner transformation is key to attaining a better world – become more prominent and growing their audiences. On another level, there’s been a new appreciation of and receptiveness towards feminism’s “the personal is political” – a new openness to the thinking of activist-visionaries such as bell hooks and Audre Lorde. Cue the latter’s statement that

“caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare”.

A key characteristic of those involved in esoteric practices is their sense of community. This is also a golden thread in Wild Has Roots; it is written and presented with a clear sense of a collective, the ‘family’, a club of kindred souls.  This comes through in the blurb, the introduction and several text references. On page 38 – in a section that deals with Naidoo’s homegrown tarot cards – the names of about 50 women are mentioned. It’s like a roll call of fellow explorers: “Adriana, Aneshree, Bérénice….  Yolanda and Yoraya”. Says the author: “Their energies have been significant to this collection”.

Community entails shared practices, but also mutual supportiveness. Thus, these words by Bérénice de La Croix are woven into the text: “Pralini’s readings have shone a light into the nooks and crannies of my life, they have been like a hand held out inviting me to take the next steps in my journey. Her poems call me into deep places”.

The challenge – and opportunity – for such groups is to open things up, to maintain a communicability with wider audiences. The challenge/potential is to find and foreground the connection between esoteric questions and the day-to-day survival issues of ordinary folk as well as the conundrums faced by those steeped in materialist and structural approaches to positive social change – to overcome the pigeonholing that invariably happens to books with an esoteric feel.

Wild Has Roots operates as a collage. The poems, stories and several short memoir-style reflections co-exist to create a whole, but which simultaneously leave fragments, spaces that leaven the work and offer tantalizing loose ends. The prose pieces, skillfully crafted, are vignettes rather than fully-fledged short stories. As a result, there isn’t room for character development; there is also no scope for a story arc. Nevertheless there is something deep and engrossing about them. Naidoo’s characters are yearning for something –  some dignity, a sense of “holding” in uncertain times, identity and fragments of freedom. The stories in the “Roots” section pick up on the milieu of the marginalised, those living where “houses sit snugly next to each other” in under-resourced communities, those held within the colour and gender-conservatism of religious norms.

The last section, entitled “Wild”, is given over fully to poetry. This is the strongest part of the book, reflecting skillful writing that pierces through the mundane and the banal. The imagery is fresh and distinct, devoid of clichés. In haiku mangetsu, (where mangetsu is Japanese for “full moon”), Naidoo writes:

Even when you hide
the ocean in my body
dances

The settings are familiar: the sea, the promenade, the fisherman with their rods, a shopping aisle, a mountain’s contours. However, Naidoo gets the reader to see old things in new ways. Witness the titular, wild has roots:

I wondered about my roots
            …
travelling into dna
and archives
into ships’ lists and
torn yellow pages

The strength of the “Wild” poems prodded this reviewer to track back to two strong poems in the previous section, ones that foreground grit and resilience. In flight interrupted, Naidoo adopts the collective view and talks about the ones who seduce with their nectar and “lure us/ (with) bouquets of promises”. The marauders have their way, breaking wings, but, according to Naidoo, flight is interrupted only “for a moment”. In breeze, it’s as if resilience is strengthened through the writing itself: “I felt around for the void/ that the habit of you might leave/ but found instead a breeze.”

As she does with the stories, the author leaves it to the reader to figure out whether a poem is biographical or delving into the experiences of others. Either way, the reader is invited to enter the reflective spaces and to grapple with the dilemmas, searching and growing pains being processed in the piece. This openness (open to interpretation-ness) gives Wild Has Roots an edge and dynamism.

In discussing the work in one of the pieces[2]It is the intro to the section entitled Tarot. It is on page 36 and follows a blue page (p35) indicating the Tarot section. It has no heading. , Naidoo counterposes different ways of knowing. With references to academia, she rails against cerebral processes that are sometimes “violently disconnected from other ways of knowing”. She states that, as an alternative, the kind of poetry in Wild Has Roots has “allowed me a sanctuary and a language which spoke directly to my inner and outer world”. In the introduction, Wanelisa Xaba confirms the book’s use of the non-linear and the boldly intuitive as possible ways of opening up understanding. She states that she experienced the book’s content as “a strange weaving of spirituality and metaphor” and as “explosive witchcraft and cashmere poetry”.

The book has come at a time of change, a moment when – thanks to the destabilisation of old certainties – there is greater acceptance of epistemic diversity and receptiveness towards out-of-the-box thinking about what it means to be human.

Wild Has Roots is a modest intervention; it’s a thin volume with a print run in the hundreds rather than thousands. But it’s an important contribution that adds value, inspires and engages us in profound ways.

Notes
1. ↑ As used here, “esoteric” denotes a combination of spiritual exploration and self-help; seeking wholeness through going after truths that lie beyond the rational intellect.
2. ↑ It is the intro to the section entitled Tarot. It is on page 36 and follows a blue page (p35) indicating the Tarot section. It has no heading.
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BLAQ PEARL (JANINE VAN ROOY-OVERMEYER)
MPHUTHUMI NTABENI
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Archive About Contact Africa Open Institute