TENDAYI SITHOLE

Blue notes from Mdantsane

Fanon in the hood
Wretchedness and destruction of the human
The native smile cannot mask that wretched soul

Mdantsane’s shadows of jazz vibrations
Nostalgia of the mecca of jazz
The shadow of the yesteryear nostalgically lost 
Legends fading, falling and failing
Migration, relocation and death
Mdantsane of Mbambisi and Saule
The cats before you and the cats after you, Mdantsane is melancholy blue through to loss
Where art thou is that jazz fiery coming from
Gaulana fighting hard with strings to strangle this blue melancholia to make things alive
Simane’s trumpet calling imbizo
Sikade’s drums calling imbizo
The fall of Madame Saule’s body and not her voice
Where are the cats in these four paint-bright roomed match-boxed pondokies?
The mecca of sonic vibrations of chanting the craft of liberation
Where is that jazz collection which used to whistle from these small yards?

Fanon in the hood
The zone of nonbeing Nyaope ripping young lives like a plague
The fading of what was and what is being turning into the abyss
I feel jazz and it is here Mdantsane give me what was
Give me that blues

Subject and structure

The subject is music
The structure is injustice
Music against injustice
Music as critique
Injustice subjected to critique

Let there be sound
Music is Dyani
Against injustice
As critique

Let there be music
Dyani is music
Music is Dyani
Invention of music
Music as invention

Let there be Dyani
Let there be music
Let there be critique
Let music destruct, construct, deconstruct, reconstruct

Dyani’s bag

Passport in the pocket
Stepping forward looking back never to return
The thought of leaving
Apartheid shackles that manacle and choke
Soul defiant
The heavy and tall bag behind the short 19 year old
Off to exile…

Izwe lethu

For the land taken away by force
Land dispossession
Music for land and crying for what was there
The ghostly haunting of the alive and the dead haunting in doubles
The ontology of land dispossession
Black pain is blues
Blues of joy blues of pain
Blackness in blue
Black in landlessness
The cry for land
The land stolen under the blue sky
The landless still have the blue feeling

Tsolo

Tsolo location faded in mystique
It was never there
Duncan village across the road
Tsolo is underground and Braelyn on the surface
Blackness eliminated
The graves still have white to greyish ancestral bones
Heavy vegetation on their graves

Maxambeni railroad they used to nationalise bags of food from a moving train making its
way to the harbour is just a legend
Dyani was to return to the Mdantsane, the return of homeless home
No Tsolo No Umbilical cord
Duncan Village stands impotent as a site of resistance

Florence Street and Bashe Street faded in mystique
Only legendary tales stand in the memories of the elders nearing their graves
The tale of the Centre which was there where the cultural vibration was the life of the people
Demolished and never rebuilt
The censure of culture
The national culture castrated
Only memories remain as there are shacks that have mushroomed
Ocean of shacks when one shack burns all burn in solidarity
Damnation and nothingness of blackness
The site of resistance disciplined and punished
Violence is still a marker
The Centre is not there anymore
Tsolo is never there as if it has never been
Faded in mystique

Rain

Rainy days
Sky pouring down
Washing the stained soil
The blood of those who toil their stolen land
How longing is that smell of nature hugging my nostrils

Rainy days the smell of Africa
No washing of the body in this concrete jungle
No repentance as the soul is damned here in exile as prayers go in vain
Rain comes down soothing the soil that the ancestors inhabit underneath
Chests carrying the soil, facing up the sky and being stepped by the colonial boot

Rainy days of mud and clay
The memory of home is so painful
Trying to reach home through song is so painful
I want to go home—this longing is just painful when it rains
Exile and stoned deprivation of soil built from the blood and sweat of my people

Rainy days and the music of the people
Rituals of rain
Dances of rain
Chants of rain
Songs of rain
Rainy days please take me home
Rainy days make me those drops that sing in this forsaken exile

Longing

time passes timelessly
loss
                longing

home is far fading away
            loss     
                  longing

taste buds tasteless
           loss
                 longing

longing time
longing home
longing taste

it is all in the bass
it is my time
it is my home
it is my taste it is my longing

Ubizo

I am being called
Imbizo summoned to ancestral calling
Africa is calling my name
I reach for the bass…

Lefifi/Mbizo blue letters

What the ink marked on paper
What eyes saw
What the heart felt
What the mind thought
What was encoded and decoded

Letters of existential anguish
Letters written in the belly of exile
Letters of joy and sadness
Letters of the artistic sacred and the profane
Letters of life and death

Letters on Azania & whatever the ink can pour

What remains a mystery?
Letters of mystery
What remains unknown?
Letters unknown

Dear Mbizo,
……………
……………
Yours in struggle,
Lefifi

Dear Lefifi
…………….
…………….
Yours in struggle,
Mbizo

Back and forth
To and from
Post and receive

Writing a letter
Reading a letter

Inscription in blue
Deciphering blue

Dear in blue
Yours in struggle in blue

Anticipation

looking forward to go home
i have been singing this music far away
yet so spiritually near

looking forward to play with cats who have been making mbaqanga, maskandi and all genres
my bass has home everywhere and it also my music

in 1986 i came home
leaving exile behind
coming to where I was born

i came dead
i came with music
i came with life