Testimony

Sliding puzzles, truth games, split screens.

Profile of artist Sue Williamson. Financial Times, 20 February, 2021.
Image above from It’s a pleasure to meet you (2016).

In one screen of this two-channel video installation is a young woman, Candice Mama. She tells the story of encountering Eugene de Kock: commander of apartheid’s most notorious death squads and the man who killed her father. ‘It’s a pleasure to meet you’ is what De Kock says to her and each family member when they meet him in prison, while a pastor presides. She speaks of being convinced by his sincerity and remorse. A photograph flashes up of the family smiling broadly as if posing with a celebrity. But the celebrity is apartheid’s chief killer, in maximum-security jumpsuit, thick glasses and sinister side fringe. ‘Do you forgive yourself?’, Mama asks De Kock. He replies that nobody who has done the things he has done can forgive themselves.

In the other screen is a young man, Siyah Ndawela Mgoduka, listening. He also lost his father, but his only contact with the killers is a memory of being given the middle finger across a TRC hearing by a security policeman. Mgoduka cannot quite bring himself to believe in the story being related so sincerely right next to him (even as he might want to). It is a story which has the sound of having been told many times before, of having become (as many TRC cases did) an exemplary tale, a parable.

Why the ‘dress up’, asks Mgoduka, and why was there a pastor there? Why the rush to forgive, when it might all happen too quickly, and leave you with unprocessed anger? He speaks of the TRC as a gift that was offered, an opportunity for white South Africans at large, but one which was not taken. Or else taken for granted, with (like so much else in the country) someone else doing the heavy lifting: ‘You can’t be the one who’s arrogant when I’m forgiving you.’

Kingdom of Rain

An interview with Rustum Kozain.

The following conversation took place on 31 July 2015 at Rustum Kozain’s flat in Tamboerskloof, Cape Town. Prior to my arrival, Rustum had prepared a chicken balti with cabbage according to a recipe from Birmingham, and also a cauliflower and potato curry. During our discussion (lasting one and a half hours, condensed and lightly edited here) he occasionally got up to check on the dishes — which we ate afterwards with freshly prepared sambals...

Wasafiri, 31:2 | 2016 | 76-80

RK [...] The idea of sonority — I have to agree with you. I do have a thing for the sound of words. So the sound of a word often plays a large part in its choice in a line or a poem. Why don’t I sound like Linton Kwesi Johnson? That’s one of my greatest frustrations in life [laughs] — that I can’t write like LKJ in any believable way. Part of that is because I don’t have a Caribbean background. A large part of Johnson’s charm has got to do with the language he is using, which is tied so closely to drum rhythms in the Caribbean. He has a gift but he also has that legacy or that inheritance that he can work with. I’ve tried writing parodic poems in [my reggae-sourced] Jamaican Creole, but it’s rubbish. I’ve tried writing hip hop as well, but there is a particular skill in composing for oral performance that I don’t have.

HT I was raising the question of slowness, but certainly not as a lack. Because, in a sense, what I find when reading poetry nowadays is the need to remind myself to slow down. I think we’re all programmed to read so fast now – online and on screens – to read instrumentally and for content. So I sense the kind of syntactical mechanisms you put in place to ensure a certain productive slowness...

Dagga (An Extract) | African Cities Reader 1

The shame of being a man – is there any better reason to write?
– Gilles Deleuze