from Slave Trades
The following is a short excerpt from Ari Sitas’ book-length poem, Slave Trades – that blends multiple voices to explore the landscape of Ethiopia during the stay of Arthur Rimbaud, from 1880 onwards.
The whole is Slave Trades and an Artist’s Notebook (Cape Town, South Africa: Deep South Publishers, 1999; 190 pages). Cover by William Kentridge. Excerpted here with the permission of the author and the publisher.
From the Original Preface to Slave Trades (1999)
Slave Trades attempts to peg-mark and create a territory of feeling which hopefully is accessible to most. At first, this territory was written as an absence by the few poets that had shaped me – Pindar, Homer, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Kavafis, Cesaire. And it reflects my sense of horror that indeed, it was such an absence. So this attempt is a struggle through and against the webs they have spun inside my head. By necessity, allusions to their work are plentiful. And allusions to the many monastic texts, historical documents, folksong genres and oral compositions that have cluttered my life in the last decade are also of necessity, part of the landscape. All I can hope is that I have managed to animate this “non-place” into a credible “imposition.”
Secondly, the composition is also a deeply personal statement, so personal that it disturbs to discover that so many demons and voices could have come to inhabit my cask, despite its setting in Ethiopia and the parade of “real” characters like Kavafis, Menelek, Makkonnen and Rimbaud. It has been a very difficult book to complete and strange to inflict on the small reading public that is usually made up of friends, acquaintances and comrades.
Thirdly, I believe though that in moments of spiritual crisis, people try and revisit the past and the possibilities it opened then and revisit, how what was possible then, was pruned or atrophied. In that move of the imagination homelands get re-imagined, nations re-born and our need for certainty and for something like a navigating star makes us embroider, re-value and learn to admire our ancestries. I have been down that path and this composition is part of the process. Nevertheless, alongside these territories, the landscapes and the sounds that make me other I found little comfort: I also rediscovered ownership, possession, violence, the rack, the axe, the fire.
Fourthly, the work must read like a long lament, an “amane”, a song of loss and yearning. The proliferation of greed, of money, of the “taler”, the growth of imperialism, colonialism and the wars with Khedive and Italian forces, which like the Qunpun ants, ate the inside of people, their souls, leaving their forms unchanged until they crumbled, affected every aspect of life, thought and feeling. The sense that a new type of Hamasen wind was stirring up the “desert” was everywhere. The sense that Habesh or Abesh (thus, the word Abyssinia!) was changing radically, was deeply debated. That world was not the place of “nothingness”, the “desert of the soul” where “genius” like Rimbaud crashed, it was a complex, changing world, like “tej” intoxicating and lethal, a place that resonated through our lives during the last century.
From Section 1
•
Give me the moon she said not knowing that I hated women and their petted cages, their canaries and the lice they grew in their
marvellous rose gardens; I would have never reached for the moon for her,
for them
they never understood that deep inside the hues that the sun makes to
dazzle on the water, on the wave which is cut in twos by my dream-
armadas, by my brainfins of a shark, all my images of them have been
stark, maternal, barren
she never understood that she paced around my house as ornament
and sphinx for others; and I was kind with my love for her, I was kind
with my affection and my counsel; but she, frowned and despaired and
when at night, after her first sobs and prayers, trembling and pleas,
after boiling the seawater for drinking in this parched, desperate,
nothing of a town, she spun a web around our bed and I sunk into my
purgatory year.
I did not treat her like all the others do to her own kind; I did
not call her savage, brute and lice-infested wench; I did not place
a chain around her neck and lead her down to market; to the growls of
the surrounding town and folk I made her the princess of my sand-
infested, cow-dung polished dorms
I fought for silk and thread for her in every market; I traded
wines and grapes for ornamental gold; I unloaded camel hordes of
rifles for her chamber's sheets; I paid in kind for years to get
her taught the French ways, to hold her own. But she paced up and
down my inner courtyard like a demented whore.
I did not come to this godforsaken place to dream, I did come to kill
the dream, there was too much of it over there and much of it too
soon.
She will be gone with florins round her neck, back to her tribesmen.
She will be gone because I cannot make her mine, and through my
doorstep or outside in this treeless dump, no one else will make her
his no more.
She will be gone from the records of our life and those who will
remember her have not even learnt her name.
She will walk the three rows of mudhouse to the port in the early
morning and the wind will resand her footprints on the path.
She will be referred to as this girl who lived with him, almost his wife,
for almost one year; this tall, slim, light-coloured beauty with her
matted hair who did not succumb to the Mission School’s grind, who
wore him out; the stupid native, who lacked the intelligence to be his
bride; damn it, yes the woman he abandoned because he chose the
adventurer's and the corsair's life.
I looked at her and said: farewell Eva, go.
She looked at me and frowned, turned and let Africa's magnet tag her
in, away and in, and into the landscape of all of my despairs.
•
I am the she, whose centre disappears
I am not
I am unwritten
unclassified
I am the last murmur of something older
than chattel or rifle
I am the dangerous she
unbaptised
exposed without purdah
uncircumcised
bought for guns, but unpriced
unsaved from the serpent
with too many odours to be formed by a magician's brush
unlineaged, suspended in memory
dispossessed of any line that roots me aground in the wind
ancient, not Evaed
Nobkhubulwana knows my name
Athena knows my black name
When I play my harp
sonnets kill like arrows:
“I saw them coming to my homestead crying
their bare breasts stiffened from fear
hide us, they begged
you can have a score of the best spotted cattle
do not let us be taken by your Christian friends
give us genitals and clothes so we can be seen
as weak men and tie our breasts down so our chests
feel just flat and wobbly
hide us and we will give you the very first yam crop
the dates and the nuts we have grown
let us be seen to be defected men
rather than women with active wombs
and loins that can squeeze out animals for branding
in the market of the believers”
I see him now, consumed against a crimson desert sky, beyond hope
or death returning to the eel-eating country of his birth. I see my kin,
shading their eyes with the guns my brother bought in exchange for
my firm backside.
And I scream at the scrawny birds of fate – I am the she, they cannot
centre, I am the unshe of their nightmares, I am the footstomping,
ever flowering mother of my ever thirsting rib and torso and wing.
From Section 2
I had them leave Harar at daybreak
when the wind, kind and healing
is still caked and iced from all the stars
Spring this year did not strike the
ground with poppy and moss. Mother, it didn’t.
Nothing dances in this highland breeze, nothing in this wretched
place where nothing dances on a soft horizon's lip and thigh,
nothing on this crust of all my wounds, my sorrows.
We do not deserve these trees
the skies do not conform to our injunctions
We marched through Easter scents so strong you felt them basting up the air. The foreigners, already with gun in hand were stalking the francolin, the guinea-fowl, the hares whose hard flesh need marinades and beatings, the dik-dik antelope that satiates their feasts. The locals could be heard taking emetics before their morning prayers. I confess mother, I felt the flames and smelt the sulphur with every few steps in our descent.
I who had commanded the poem to become a Sea and its stark form to become pure pulse, its vowels, radiant colour, I commanded the torn nerve-ends of my cells to vaporise and douse the fires, to start the downpour, to drown Degadallah, Egon and its swamps, its quilts. I commanded my crib be turned into an ark and all the hands that dragged me down with hired breath to turn into mariner cherubim with godly names, Mouned, Suyin, Abdullahi, Abdullah Bekr, and float my useless load of bone to its triumphant port.
They were drunk from sweat and aches, mother, cursing their fates, cut me up, I yelled, cut me up and drown me and mostly sing
you dogs
you mutineers
I who had treated everyone with the hands of a fair and firm master who prayed with them each time a sickness struck now crash into the truth of their hate and their insubordination
They do not deserve us anymore
we shall go despite their protestations
you dogs
you mutineers
I command you to row harder still, slice this sky this sky deep blue from the sea’s arrows, dampen its brow, the life of lizards left for me in some forgotten town with its customary palms and swaying cane the life of lizards crawling up and down the corridors pleading for a knife or a god to save me I who once hugged the world with words condemned to hear only the scraping of my shirt, its buttons, its ribcage on splinters on ground aground grounded, I command you to flap your wings and row, you dogs, you mutineers, this is the Effendi talking to you, cover me, I need more blankets, the stars are icing up my spine, the dove has not appeared, the dew is cutting past my beard into my flesh, row you mutineers, give me food, give me cover, where are my camels, where are my animals two by two, you dogs, mutineers do not throw me down into the currents of the Dalamali, I shall deduct a pound off each one's wages, lift me up, I command you
row on harder still and sing. I who have mastered the world in all its cunning, command you to obey and, wade and row. Let my thoughts just play only to play Allah please let me forget this pain the minarets must not scream out at me this bone this life, I command you to row I am the only captain of this ark.
we do not deserve these pains
we do not deserve their face of discontent and rage
In the horizon, near Gildessa, the waters run into the sand to burrow down to some remote kingdom down below, where everything rustles in shadow to mix with fire in the stern earth's workshop to feed lava to the craters to open the last act with thunder and with the downpour of mucus, of fire.
I pleaded with them to lift me up tasting the red sand
underneath their heels
you mutineers
you dogs
my leopard, lion, pig, ostrich,
my many sorts of antelope, the gerenhuk with its camel-like neck
all nailed on the crossed
planks of my wrecked ark
in these Easter passions
on these Eastern seas
left Ithaca – or was it Cyprus – who knows
it might have been the trashed city of Troy
my hands still aching from so much slaughter
from so much drink
from so much myth
it could have even been this Durban harbour
with its rust-eaten, cargo leaking Achaean ships
and their Zulu crewmen at the stern.
This time Homer was with me, chained, panting at my heel
seasick and crouched licking my kneecaps, nervously
licking his testicles licking his sores.
You see heathens like us are twice accursed
in the old days, the seagods wrecked our floating planks
and during these, the seagods wreck our floating metal
and always the sails feasted a trickster wind
when the seagods were drunk or mating
and so like always old Poseidon, the bristly one
with fish between his ears
went to the dark skinned land of all the Ethiops
to eat libations and drink with Menelek's amassing braves
to inhale and scent the putrid smell of bleeding ox and fire
our wandering began
afloat our legendary boat
“Homer,” I said, “you dog”
“spin us a tune, you wag,” I added.
•
The Effendi wet his blankets
howling in his sleep
and his sins, his miser's life
came out to sit upon his head, haunting us
under the candle of a fresh spring moonshine
The Effendi pays with coin
the lion of Judah scratched into its face
We receive this cursed thing
to bow down low, to lead our cursed lives
The Effendi screams, coin-dreams
pour out of his head like snakes
to eat the bird's spring offspring
and we sing sharpening teeth
sharpening the knives
The Effendi spices the gardens of his dream
with all our roots of nightmare,
with all of our clotted needs
The Galla wise men shout, stirred
by ancestors who whisper to them in the
dead of night, not to use the coin
to buy the seed
The seed will be bewitched, they chant
and out of the land's womb shall burst out skulls
like the first rain's mushrooms
covering the horizon field to field
The Effendi is dying
after he drowned
our cattle beneath his cargoed sail
and now, memories of rounded horns
scour through the valleys searching to rip
through us during our deepest sleep.
•
Seven cities claimed me when my voice was young
but none of them were left to stand and see my fate
and all of them were lit up and left to smoulder
as my age betrayed me to only irksome bores
They twisted odes around their tongue
of practical and earthly chores, about the ox’s yoke
about the plough and ploughing, and the corn-chaffing
activities of mobs
of these heroic once, but lurid, shores:
they killed the gods and tore the muses up
from their womb up past their mouth and ear
so I will not sing here for this merchant cause
unless my lungs poison every word they reflate to hear
•
It started from a dream to follow the stars
to reach out for some tropical, exotic shore
where the slim shadows of women dance past the
candlelight to decorate thatched walls
It started from rumours, that the dream powders
brown and snow white, pasty, miracles of dust
that make sailors search out how to tattoo their arteries
and nostrils with vapours indescribable, cruel and
pulsing to cortex-explode and cry
It started from a feeling described by the sway
of palmtree and the pots with spiced delicacy and, tear,
that made youths brave the swells that crack
the sterns of darkwood ships around the Cape or through
Suez and into the unquiet bellysways of the Arabic seas
Then came the steamboat and the gun and financiers
and all the old-time warriors were pelted off the plank
then came the profiteers and auditors and chartered
ropehands that didn't care about how the light
dances on the scales of barracuda in the melancholy
straights of Magellan
It started from a nightmare with romantic strains
It ended with the dream of colonising stars
Remington fire, skins, ivory, gum
of auctioning their scars
to mar and fence the seascapes of every single bay
and port
to make a universe of words
and cast their tongues in chains
•
Walking shadow to shadow in this holy land, a ghost-like
fugitive, staying clear
of the larger towns but following the market caravans
village to village and,
making sure to find a church, carved in a rock
for barley
and wheat and milk
I learnt to live the life of Karaghioz and more,
“hey, Hadjevat you lordly asshole
does your tax feed your belly or follow you to feed the worm?”
I learnt to share the custom of every peasant's household
and trace their plight there out at field
circled above by supervisory eagles
with claws dripping from nectar they had raided
or blood
and had hyenas laugh at them
as they caressed their crop
I ate inside their huts and drunk with them
their timeless sorrow
I rested on their ochre-coloured, thyme-scented stones
and let the putrid smell of compost trade me in, to dreamlands
far and gone
I saw death enter to leave their hedged enclosure
and cried with them when a father, a mother
son or daughter, donkey, horse, mule, cow, sheep or goat
drifted by, after the storms, face-down, down to go with the
gushing of the rivers to that other land below
where hoarse ghosts lament our limp desires
My feet outblistered,
raced past
spirits still praying to fierce
ancestral gods
but my mind did not stop me seeing what they just couldn't see:
that they were all the same clay from the Tacuzze river down to
the harshest south
the same pain, the same prayer
I shared their maize, their snow and prayed
with them to Tekla Haymanot
•
The seed of the Lion of Judah, shall be puny
and another will take its soil and flower
and another, like a weed will suffocate the other
and another, and another
until all memory dies until no root, lineage or branch remains
and then the world shall die
and your God, Lion, will go howling in the desert
tramping through the sand
without a soul to swallow
taking to the sea
without a net to fish with
without an echo of the Word
in the landscapes of a barren, silent womb
you too shall learn the timbre of despair
•
I remember how the poor once
long long ago dared stand and holler
to be cut down by military sabres
to be strung on bayonets
we were the poor
and that, was our ark
was our commune
was our funerary call
In the enchanted houses
women walked about
dreaming of swans
of romances
of sedentary loves roses,
guitars and poets
In the dark alleys
and army barracks
I ate my shame, my fate
in the grime
to write verses in blood
In the enchanted houses
they murdered hope
the word was cheated
of its slime and truth
and the maidens dreamt of serenades
and a pale sun over some icy floes
In the streets the stench
of the carts
unto dust unto dust
carting dreams, calloused hands
to the fire
I will be gone I said
hammered on a wooden cross
and let downstream to float
out of these rivers and into
the undisclosed lands
of some tropical scented
and topazed sea
The poor took to the street
and said in simple words
that their lives were not for barter
the sky rained lilies, diamonds
marrow, shrapnel, bone
Beyond the barricades – I shouted
beyond madness' s borders fenced in by words
to search for what was not
what was not meant to be
that was unmined, unyielded, unexploited
untranslated, irreverent and free
To find my stolen heart
to turn the world into a monstrous soul
to turn my soul into a gangrenous leg
to dream my visions of a brilliant port
to pain with every other soul that pains
to draft the one communal constitution
scratched on the skin
scalped by the brain-blend on a leaf, a page, a drum.
Ari Sitas is a writer, creative socialist thinker and activist who has been described as one of the key intellectuals of the post-1980s generation in South Africa. His many books of poems include Tropical Scars (1989), Shoeshine and Piano (1992), Slave Trades (2000), The RDP Poems (2004), Around the World in 80 Days, the India Section (2013), Rough Music: Selected Poems, 1989-2013 (2013) and The Vespa Diaries (2018).