KHULILE NXUMALO & SIHLE NTULI

Back of the Moon

lashona ilanga falling down upon us
a heavy burden,
a darkness carried through night skin
sin of street poles as artificial light
first revealing silhouette then shadow
to fully formed bones
ripe for breaking,

back of the moon,
a stick up, a night’s clubbing
discombobulating the senses
carelessness into carefulness
& how can anyone know for sure
that the people surrounding us
are not simulations, so even if
we fall thru the dead glitch
red dot
red dot
expanding and intensifying
maybe we do not have any other place
for us to go
for us to go

maybe toward new atomic bomber
caved up histories where we hid the rocket ship
to cluster townhouses
high end
as we were the ones
we believed that we really were the ones
sent out to chase the trail left behind
when the hadedas have eaten all the clivia
agapanthus

so there we were,
that we be here,
just looking
bringing all drunken young people
come to a rest on one fell swoop
always that new light,
at times a very round moon
when it lit the path just to our right
tonight we decided that now
we got nowhere to be seen

engulfed, the things we heard
when orange morning was orange
no longer hearing us now,
that more than seventy trees have died
all that life severed    all that wisdom
disconnected from the soil,

& there is no longer any clean air
to breathe, the mind such a beautiful thing
to waste, a taste of bitterness
left on ends of forked silver
as we witnessed the manifestation
words like wheels turning
from a tongue that spoke itself
into extinction.

Black Label

majita, magenge,
manene, nini nani, bomasalamuva
let us bow our heads
sithandaze, let us ask ubra God

for all that we do not have
for all that we would like
kodwa nokho, only if it might be possible

we are not asking for too much, baba
ngoba siyazizwa lezindaba za la ngaphandle,
sometimes phela we must think of ubra God,

& all the oceans of prayer coming
but at least some of us still make time
to prevent the drought

& when abanye speak
one cannot help
but wonder

when did amadoda become so proficient in gossip

wishing only the tallest thing to get today

must not go beyond ingudu

not darker than a bottle of carling black
a rejection of pure water

yet still insisting
they die of thirst

Running of The Bull 

le nkunzi was humongous / specimen of gargantuan
pulling eyes forcefully towards it / a trance / a temporary lapse

forgetful of where one was going / to snapping out of it
to find eyes staring back at you / tied to the gate of a house

eSnqawnqawini / F-section neighbourhood / inkunzi versus ukuqina
kwefindo / ukuqinisa ikhanda / to the all now too serious / not wiki

not easy victory / not play play bruce lee / amakarati
wakanda / habe! / nango eseyigijimisa / ukuzo fikelela emankelenkeni

kgele ke bao / withal now too serious / withal trickery / withal tread
with red theme more care / its situation of make do inflame

sessions trees are even coming out / out of four eyes
out from broken gate / bambani nansi inkunzi

a dazzling stubborn refusal / the only yearning is to run
the day inkunzi turned Mashu into Pamplona

untied by hand of Maradona / an elder summoning
adolescent young men / with leopard print vests

izikhindi no phaqa / sent out to chase in their numbers
kaze bazothini abantu / nansi inkunzi ibaleka

hypnotised behind steering wheels / drivers unable to move
bending their necks / just to get a closer look

Rissik Street

nothing as serious as a machine token light
non-separable a map anew
is serious with sound

with vibration major goat
to put in the house     sold already pure

or a horse      or heirs              teller’s,
lovers        love us      when we are not as mad as yesterday

iminwe phezulu
a finger in the sky
feeling out for temperature

a long walk to freedom
that ends on the steps
of Johannesburg city hall

& I may even go mad again tomorrow
depends on how the wind blows

breeze of imphepho
shepherds the lamb
down Rissik Street

knife licked, primed & ready
for blood to splatter on the memorandum

because for a long time
this city has been in dire need
of cleansing

Silver Cressida

for nights / a silver Cressida / with dark tinted windows / parked by the house
of the electric welder / at sunset / hymns we heard / said mothers
mourn your fathers / fathers mourn your mothers

kukhona okushaya amanzi la / something sinister is brewing
oledy pulls back curtains / dreaming silver Cressida erased
but nope / still there / & waiting / where is ityma?

these days / we are faces darker / in coal yards of fear
down the soul / comes to you from outside / calling us to meet with them,
while the people that call us / call to us / from places of snake oil / smoke from ice

bathi bazofunani bona la / damn that silver Cressida
if only night could have fallen on top of it
make it Cressida no more!

a welder borrows Nelson from Sarafina
for fear numbing / brick grabbing /windscreen shattering
a silver door opens

Saturday Night Fever

to have sat, in 740 silos, to stretch
between my lotioned bed till you came

& called me, I had been sitting
I was turning so much last year that I became a hidden slur

that was how I refused, I was not going to get here
by having more or fewer people with different colour

bluetooth speakers look in from above me
like a map changing street names,

overeaten bad sound makes bad music.
I sat & I refused          & really how could I have smiled

while shadows move inside of me
my body motionless & still refusing

speakers knocked senseless
by countless jabs & right hooks
during middle rounds of my refusing,

belikokota ipiano        yet how did I still manage to refuse
alluring echo rolling down the street

forced entry into my breathing space,
knocking on the glass of my window,
overriding umoya wami oncwele

right at the intersection, the transition

Saturday midnight drunken stumblin’
Sunday morning church walkin’

The Lovers

for three months after we went under, stayed in eighteen separate sick bays knowing
all the strings, all the wires are no longer alive, & almost as it takes, we just make do staid
& impenetrable penumbra frog of eyes, we just stand behind it

all of it feels like we have died, almost like the red heart sits in the middle weight
a long street name, your laughter is searing when it repeats the name South Africa
back to me, all this talk about plastics, about moons fallen down in the environment

what will eye pretend to look at now, while eskom comes for us while you wonder
how much sharper rays of the sun will get while I worry about the skin
of the children, & we even heard melanin is under fire now, there will be wars over water

we also heard, so then what will we use to protect ourselves from amaphara, uyabazi labafana,
dodging water like the Jackie China’s of drunken master in the same way my mouth maneuvers
from a truth on the tip of my tongue, the one we cannot not say, so nobody dare, no end, no end

so don’t even dare, thinking of running away, now, a flame with a tail about my love
now chases us all, it is in the summa of their letters, that we enter their many faces, at the
outskirts we hear, a huge pile of voices, some see a huge eye chant in a flame,

while I choose to go closer, & I do not believe I’ve gone mad
even though my stride is gliding like motown moon man sliding,
I mean walking, backwards into a past, where none of this shit ever happened.

Sihle Ntuli: This collaboration with Khulile has in itself been transformative. I’ve been placed in positions of deep and thorough contemplation on the implications of living in KwaMashu while also having lived in the suburbs of New Germany. The township poetry style of Khulile Nxumalo from his debut collection Ten Flapping Elbows Mama made me dream about immortalising KwaMashu, this sudden realisation came to me while book hunting at a Makhanda book shop in High Street during my early days as an undergraduate at Rhodes University.

There is a lot to be said about the dislocating experience of being born during South Africa’s transitional period in the 90’s. For many in my generation, the decision to move to the suburbs was out of our control, though as I have found out personally during this period of miseducation, there is a sentiment of betrayal from those we left behind and alienation from those we found already in the suburbs.

This collaborative project came about as a result of the golden shovel poetic form created by Terence Hayes, he himself meaning to pay homage to Gwendolyn Brooks. My first golden shovel was Buried Alive from my collection Zabalaza Republic, written after Trudgel by Seithlamo Motsapi from the acclaimed collection Earthstepper / The Ocean is very Shallow. To follow this up, I wrote a golden shovel titled Eternal Sunshine after My Lover still blows from Khulile’s Ten Flapping Elbows Mama.

The first poem we did together was Back of the Moon, the title itself being a nod to the South African television and film industry. Khulile was quite impressed after seeing the golden shovel and suggested the idea of doing the chain poems, he sent me links where Alan Finlay talks about the process of working with Phillip Zhuwao on their joint chapbook The red laughter of guns in green summer rain.

I handle most of the editing side of this collaboration, this includes aesthetic layout, naming of poems etc. The way we work is fairly straight-forward, one of us comes up with a concept, writes a few lines and the next person improvises after them. A poem like Running of the Bull about young men in a township chasing after a rogue bull is an example where I presented a concept and Khulile improvised after me. The poem Silver Cressida is one Khulile began and I too was able to improvise and trade verses with him.

The creative process has led me into new artistic pockets that combine elements of all the various places that I have lived. Gcwala is still very much a work-in-progress though I will say it’s shaping up to be an intriguing coming together of differing generations of South African poetry.

Khulile Nxumalo: When Sihle first sent me his golden shovel Eternal Sunshine written in response to my poem My lover still blows from my collection Ten Flapping Elbows Mama, I remember noting and saying to a friend how his photo with the round rimmed glasses had a likeness to Credo Mutwa. At the time I was not aware of the golden shovel poetic form and I had never met him. When we met for the first time at a Melville Postnet, the conversation went the way of talking to a person and picking up where you last left off, that by itself suggested a certain affinity and likeness between us two. Though it was still not evident that this extends to the creative process as well, I immediately thought this was worth exploring.

In the world of poetry, or even the arts in general in our country, there is more need for conversations, collabos, and working together across assumed divided spaces. One tends to gravitate towards certain pull factors the more one encounters different works and authors. I really love the product that came from the creative process between Alan Finlay and Phillip Zhuwao. I had met them some years before at Grahamstown and all three of us had been the younger voice on a bill that featured Kelwyn Sole, Robert Berold, Seitlhamo Mostapi, Karen Press, Joan Metelerkamp and others.  So it was both from a personal encounter and my own private exploration that led me to start thinking of the chain poem a lot more and imagine its variations.

So far, I have done a few chain poems with Kyle Allan and LamaKhosi Kunene. It is quite striking the way the form will bend to how the collaborators see and feel one another.  I am saying what comes out ends up beings a variable stack of voice, word, image, music and text plus more. Coming from not only the dizzying Literary Studies fashion of intertextuality, discourse and world literature, but also the physical structure of South Africa; including the way in which we spawn into the creative space from each little locality and ultimately all address our imagined place, brings with it a richness ripe for this kind of creative exploration. A thing that is near to saying I have got the whole world on the palm of my hand.  Soon one sees new iterations of form or craft that are not only inter- but also bear traces of cross- or trans- and more.

From the onset of Gcwala, I was inspired in particular by the collaboration between Nils Fram and Olufar Arnalds in Trance Frendz, and the idea that Sihle once mentioned to me of a collision of cities.

I gained a new perspective to imagine the way that one can creatively encompass this thing called Post Covid reset and my current residency in my home in Diepkloof Zone 6, Soweto. I will also add there is therapy here for me to deal with the grief and loss of my sister Maureen Nxumalo.

Although one of the references in the work with Sihle Ntuli was “sound of laughter on green summer rain”, the Finlay and Zhuwao project, I have now become certain that there isn’t a set formula as such. I am keen to see what life the work will embrace in the performative extensions.

I have an obsession with musicality at this point in time. Everything deserves to be on its own eternal and blinking lights orbit. For us today and for all tomorrow.