Aux messieurs comme il faut.
Mais moi je ne veux pas
A Young Black Child’s Prayer
Lord, I’m very tired.
I was born tired.
And I’ve walked a lot since the rooster’s song
And the hill that leads to their school is quite high.
Lord, I don’t want to go to their school anymore
Please, make it so I don’t have to go there.
I want to follow my father to the cool ravines
When night still floats in the wood’s mystery
Where glide the spirits that dawn dispels.
I want to take my siestas at the foot of leafy mango trees,
I want to wake up
When the siren of the Whites roars
And the Factory
Upon the ocean of canes
Like a docked boat spews forth its black crew …
Lord, I don’t want to go to their school anymore,
Please, make it so I don’t have to go there.
They say a little black boy must go there
So he can become just like
City gentlemen
Proper gentlemen.
But me, I don’t want to
Become, as they say,
Devenir, comme ils disent,
Un monsieur de la ville,
Un monsieur comme il faut.
Je préfère flâner le long des sucreries
Où sont les sacs repus
Que gonfle un sucre brun autant que ma peau brune.
Je préfère vers l’heure où la lune amoureuse
Parle bas à l’oreille des cocotiers penchés
Ecouter ce que dit dans la nuit
La voix cassée d’un vieux qui raconte en fumant
Les histoires de Zamba et de compère Lapin
Et bien d’autres choses encore
Qui ne sont pas dans les livres.
Les nègres, vous le savez n’ont que trop travaillé.
Pourquoi faut-il de plus apprendre dans des livres
Qui nous parlent de choses qui ne sont point d’ici?
Et puis elle est vraiment trop triste leur école,
Triste comme
Ces messieurs de la ville,
Ces messieurs comme il faut,
Qui ne savent plus danser le soir au clair de lune
Qui ne savent plus marcher sur la chair de leur pied
Qui ne savent plus conter les contes aux veillées.
Seigneur, je ne veux plus aller à leur école.
A city gentleman,
A proper gentleman.
I prefer to stroll by the sugar refineries
Where the brimming sacks
Swell with sugar as brown as my skin.
I prefer the hour when the amorous moon
Whispers into the ears of coconut trees leaning
Toward what is said in the night
The cracked voice of an old man smoking
Telling of Zamba and Brer Rabbit
And lots of other things
That aren’t in books.
Black folks, you know only how to work too hard.
Why must we learn so much from books
And then their school is really too sad
Sad like
The city gentlemen,
The proper gentlemen,
Who no longer know how to dance the moonlit nights
Who no longer know how to walk on the flesh of their feet
Who no longer know how to tell tales all night long.
Lord, I don’t want to go to their school anymore.
ALBERT COSSERY
Translated from the French by JOCELYN SPAAR
ALBERT COSSERY (1913–2008) was a Cairo-born French writer of Lebanese and Greek Orthodox Syrian descent who settled in Paris at the end of the Second World War and lived there for the rest of his life. His novels include A Splendid Conspiracy, The Colors of Infamy, and Men God Forgot. In 1990, Cossery was awarded the Grand Prix de La Francophonie de l’Académie française.
Les Mendiants
Le long d’un triste mur, au fond d’un vieux faubourg,
Pareils à des pantins en manque de ficelles,
De pauvres loqueteux exposent en plein jour
Leurs innombrables haillons aux vermines cruelles.
Ces rachitiques affreux horriblement sourds,
Abrutis, appuyant sur le mur leurs corps grêles,
Lancent leur complainte aux dames des carrefours
Qui leur donnent un sou pour mériter le ciel.
De leurs bouches édentées l’haleine putride
Monte tel un encens vers les azurs splendides …
On eut cru, à les voir ainsi déguenillés,
Un bataillon de morts, l’allure débraillée,
Et qui ressuscité aux doigts d’un magicien,
Etait venu vomir quelques péchés anciens.
The Beggars
Along a sad wall, of an old quarter of town,
Like puppets wanting strings,
Poor ragged ones expose in broad daylight
Their countless tatters to the cruel vermin.
These ghastly rattletraps grotesquely deaf,
Half-witted, drag along the wall their spindly corpses
Projecting their lament to the crossroads’ ladies
Who give them a cent to merit Heaven.
From their toothless mouths the stinking breath
Rises like incense toward the splendid blue …
One would think, seeing them so frayed,
That a battalion of the dead, with their threadbare allure –
Revived at the fingers of a magician –
Had come to vomit certain ancient sins.
Misère
Pour avoir méprisé leur infecte mélée
Les bourgeois ont pour moi des regards outragés,
Et, triste vagabond sur un sol étranger,
Je marche comme un fou, les cheveux emmêlés.
A ma vue de bohème aux habits ravagés,
Les fillettes fardées ont des airs désolés …
Mais je passe, perdu dans mes rêves ailés,
Bâillant lugubrement aux passants enragés.
Enervé par le poids de la faim que je porte,
Je crains que, n’ayant pas l’armature assez forte,
Il me faille, à regret, prostituer mon âme.
Et que, pour un vil pain que mon ventre réclame,
Un beau jour, fatigué d’atteindre l’idéal,
Je vende mon génie au fripier matinal.
Misery
For having loathed their vile melee?
The bourgeois turn outraged eyes on me,
And, sad vagabond on a foreign ground,
I walk like a madman, with tangled hair.
At this bohemian sight of ravaged clothes,
Little painted girls put on ruined airs …
Yawning dolefully at the rabid passers-by.
On edge from the heavy hunger?
My skeleton too weak to carry – I fear ?
I must, with regret, prostitute my soul,
And that, one fine day, for the paltry loaf?
My gut demands, tired of pursing the ideal,
To the morning flea market I might sell my genius.
Nuit
à Jean Moscatelli
Nuit sertie de mes larmes
– Larmes volées au désespoir –
Tu es la négresse qui charme
Mon île d’or et de noir.
Nuit lascive, nuit de chair brune,
Tu es le sexe d’une femme perdue
Par qui mon rêve fut mordu
En des temps loin comme la lune.
Car maintenant, nuit bénie,
J’ai rejeté l’humiliant fardeau :
Je suis seul comme un cadavre joli,
Le premier soir du tombeau.
N
ight
for Jean Moscatelli
Night set with my tears
– Tears fled to hopelessness –
You are the negress who charms
My isle of gold and black.
Lascivious night, night of brown flesh,
You are the sex of a lost woman
Who bit my dream
In times far-off like the moon.
For now, blessed night,
I have refused the shaming weight:
I am alone like a pretty corpse,
The first night in the tomb.
ATHOL FUGARD
from “Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act”
“I don’t want to concern myself with the past. I lived in it too long.” ATHOL FUGARD has been working in the theatre as a playwright, director and actor since the mid-fifties. His plays include Train Driver, No-Good Friday, Nongogo, Blood Knot, Hello and Goodbye, People Are Living There, Boesman and Lena, Sizwe Banzi Is Dead, The Island and “Master Harold”… and the boys. Fugard says, “My real territory as a dramatist is the world of secrets with their powerful effect on human behaviour and the trauma of their revelation.”
Now I must understand it.
If they take away your eyes you can’t see.
If they take away your tongue you can’t taste.
If they take away your hands you can’t feel.
If they take away your nose you can’t smell.
If they take away your ears you can’t hear.
I can see.
I can taste.
I can feel.
I can smell.
I can hear.
I can’t love.
I must understand it.
If they take away your legs you can’t walk.
If they take away your arms you can’t work.
If they take away your head you can’t think.
I can walk.
I can work.
I can think.
I can’t love.
I must understand it.
When you are hungry you eat.
When you are thirsty you drink.
When you are tired you sleep.
I will eat.
I will drink.
I will sleep.
I won’t love.
I must understand it again.
If they take away your soul, you can’t go to Heaven.
I can go to heaven.
I can’t love.
WOLE SOYINKA
Playwright, poet, novelist, memoirist and fierce defender of human rights, WOLE SOYINKA was the first African to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1986. His works include Aké: The Years of Childhood, You Must Set Forth at Dawn, The Interpreters, A Shuttle in the Crypt, Ogun Abibimañ and the plays Death and the King’s Horseman, A Dance of the Forests, and The Lion and the Jewel. Much of Soyinka’s writing is concerned with “the oppressive boot and the irrelevance of the colour of the foot that wears it.”
Apologia (Nkomati* )
Doyen of walls,
Your puzzled frown has spanned the gulf
Between us.
Your stoic pride rejects, I fear,
This homage paid across four thousand miles,
Unfleshed at source, not manifested
In the act. Justice glowers in your rejection –
I submit:
Utterances flung like lead shot will never
Forge the chain mail of our collective will.
Only the salt of sweat-bathed palms
Pressed in anger will corrode
These prison bars. Our caged eagles
Wait on flight, their sweet-stern cry to stir
Our air again. Our assaulted patience
Waits in concert.
We wear out our shame like bells on outcasts.
The snail has feet – I know: our jury
Shuffles to assemblage on the feet of snails.
These retreats in face of need
Betray our being – no wonder
The traitors steep us in contempt!
An old man of sixty-five ekes out his life
In prison slops. The poet
Strings you these lines, Mandela,
To stay from stringing lead.
* The Nkomati Accord: put simply, the nonaggression pact between South Africa and the front-line states.
Art
Breyten Breytenbach, Tied up, from ‘Cadavre Exquis’ series, 2000–2012, mixed media on paper
Frankétienne, untitled, 1983
Cedric Nunn, Collecting water from the Tugela River. Msinga, KwaZulu-Natal, 1992
Cedric Nunn, Children arriving at a harvest festival. Herschel, Eastern Cape, 1989
Cedric Nunn, At the age of 88, Amy Madhlawu Louw still at works in her fields; iVuna, KwaZulu-Natal, 1988
Cedric Nunn, The home of my grandmother Amy Madhlawu Louw. This was meant to be a temporary home after she was moved by tribal elders to make way for communal grazing after the death of her husband. She lived here until her death in 2003
Cedric Nunn, My grandmother Amy Madhlawu Louw takes a midday nap, having worked in her fields from first light. Born in the region, she resisted attempts to displace her and remained in the area until her death in 2003
Cedric Nunn, Amy Madhlawu Louw chatting to her neighbour and friend MaQwabu Khumalu. iVuna, KwaZulu-Natal, 1988.
Cedric Nunn, Amy Madhlawu Louw chats with neighbours and friends in her yard. iVuna, KwaZulu-Natal, 1988.
Cedric Nunn, Amy Madhlawu Louw.
Cedric Nunn, Amy Madhlawu Louw’s kitchen. She died in 2003 at the age of 103. Nothing remains of her home
Cedric Nunn, Funeral of 2 youths comrades and killed in the ’natal War.’
Cedric Nunn, Local women with harvested reeds to be used in the building of traditional homes
John Berger, Aimé Césaire.
Cedric Nunn, Tractor driver on a sugar farm. Mangete, KwaZulu-Natal
Cedric Nunn, An indigent person in the inner city. Joubert Park, Johannesburg
Jill Schoolman, untitled.
Cedric Nunn, Collecting water in drought-stricken KwaZulu-Natal
Cedric Nunn, A woman in the community of Baganek, which was threatened with forced removal in order to make way for a natural reserve
Cedric Nunn, Rosie Strydom, one of the last of the ‘Coloured’ community that lives in the area, after the death of her husband Henry
Breyten Breytenbach, Albert Cossery with Raven’s Head