By writing a few lines: How Arthur Nortje, Cecil Colin Abrahams,
Dennis Brutus, George Botha, Jakes Gerwel, Neville Alexander, and
Ambrose Cato George found the way out of apartheid South Africa

By Abigail George

Miss Gilbey taught Speech and Drama. Every Friday afternoon as the car
speeded down the highway en route to her studio cum house I would
learn a poem about ducks or gypsies parrot fashion. As my mother or
father said the words out loud to me, I would recite them back
verbatim. I was six years old fashioning a posh, whitey English accent
with clipped tones that did not win me any friends back at the school
I went to and especially on the playing field during break. I was six
years old. I had not begun to straighten my hair yet to look like the
blonde, horsy looking with long teeth, fair or dark, golden-haired,
freckled, hockey and tennis playing children who had names like
Miranda who joined me when I started going for lessons. She drilled,
‘Speak with expression, expression, expression into me.’

The first thing I noticed is that they weren’t self-conscious like me.
They were brimming with confidence, made friends easily while I had to
battle with bullies who mocked me by imitating my voice that was
beginning to change at the predominantly coloured school that I went
to. The first time I went to Miss Gilbey’s studio I went with my
mother who was taking elocution lessons but she stopped soon after
taking me. I sat there, in a corner on a bench, my back against a cool
wall, felt in my pocket for the candy my mother had given me and
started licking away at a red lolly that tasted like cherry making
what my mother told me afterwards in the car were ghastly sucking
noises that perturbed the dear old Miss Gilbey.

Every now and then I would catch her looking at me and I would smile
at her. She never smiled back. Her eyes felt like laser beams when
they connected with mine. I felt them keenly. Only later on the way
home with my mother scolding me for bringing that sweet inside with me
would I realise that I had been very irritating like only a child
could be; completely oblivious to what the grownups around her were
thinking without being told that she had done something wrong. Later
on when I had moved onto Sharon Rother’s, a past pupil of Miss Gilbey
who had done her licentiate, Speech and Drama studio in Walmer, which
was held in a room adjacent to a church, Miss Gilbey also moved on.

She moved all the way to Montagu with her sister who suffered from bad
bouts of asthma. The air there would be good for her, I reckoned. Two
women living on their own for most of their adult life; when did they
ever come into contact with men, I wondered? In the aisles of a
supermarket when they shopped for groceries going down a long list of
perishable items? Did a man ever call Miss Gilbey ‘a good girl’ or
‘you’re a beauty, sweetheart’, wink at her, put his arm around her
waist and walk with her for awhile while asking her what her name was
(her name was Marjorie and I couldn’t ever imagine even if I tried
very hard now that any man, even a brazen man or a boy could call her
by her first name) and where she lived and would she like to get a
bite to eat.

Perhaps some hot tea and a steak and kidney pie with gravy in a
restaurant at a hotel. The English men I had been taught by were
gentlemen. They were quiet intellectuals, academics, teachers, soft
spoken lecturers at universities and introverted and bookish.
What did the life of a spinster feel like? What did the life of an
unmarried woman who did not have to cook for a husband, a small child
or children, who never hovered and cooed over a crib of a pretty
new-born baby? What did a woman over fifty who was past the age of
flirting, the cunning moves of seduction do for fun? Did she attend
church, bible study with other young women; serve tea at the end of
the Sunday morning service with crumpets and sandwiches made with
fish; pilchards and sardines or cheese and tomato or egg with dollops
of mayonnaise or chicken, wilting lettuce and mayonnaise, cakes, petit
fours, biscuits made with coconut and almonds all laid out on tables
with white table cloths?

Was that the appropriate behaviour for a woman her age, a lady? Had
there ever been a man in her life? In the time I imagined when she was
young had she ever corresponded with a young man writing letters
filled with lover’s nonsense that only made sense to them, not to the
outside world. Did they write about their unfolding passion, their
wonder at their innocent love, the madness of the war, the burning
houses, flames licking attics, bedrooms, roofs, charred flesh, bodies
burnt beyond recognition?

Did they write in code, draw entwined hearts made out of paper? Did
she ever seal the letter with a wet, crimson kiss that peeled off her
lips or did she ever put her feet up in the afternoon and watch the
soaps as a middle-aged woman or quiz shows as a girl?
Did they even have a television now in South Africa? I knew Miss
Gilbey didn’t do that because she gave Speech and Drama lessons every
afternoon during the week. I was the only coloured child amongst
whites. But I didn’t, not for a long time, see myself as being the
only coloured child amongst whites. I played with them because I was a
child and when you are child words like racism and prejudice do not
ring incessantly inside your head like say in the head of a
representative of the local government, the president, his cabinet or
a community leader who was voted into power by stalwarts, comrades,
communists and people who believed in Biko’s Black Consciousness.

Had she ever gone swimming with friends when she was as old as I was
when I first started coming to see her? Had she ever clutched her
mother’s hand frightened of the road outside her house filled with
screaming cars? What were her parents like? How did she come to live
in South Africa? Did she grow up during the war; when bombs rained
down from the black skies in England, was she ever stuck with other
people, families robbed of their men in bomb shelters? Was she a
liberal? She obviously didn’t believe in the politics of the day
because she had taken my mother and then me on. So, in her own quiet
and independent way she was rebelling against the government.

She was making a political statement. At thirty-one I imagine the
woman, the child, the girl and then her middle-aged. Didn’t she ever
want to be a wife? Growing up I thought as a very young girl, a child,
that everyone wanted to be a wife but at thirty-one and the divorce
rate globally so high, the only people getting hitched are those
blinded by the alluring volcano that is love. They are not conscious
of the other person’s imminent flaws yet, how arguments can erupt from
seemingly nowhere, the cancer of talk of divorce in the interim wild
in the air while you and the other person in the relationship is
waiting to make up. They are not conscious yet of the fall out of an
illness that will later on strike the family or an intense, lingering
depression that manifests and steeps itself into the bones of either
the wife or the husband or the small child whose homework is
overlooked over the breakfast at the kitchen table while the parents
of that small child or children, who wants the attention of both of
the adults his or her features resemble while they are at war with
each other over some petty, childish thing.

A thing like who had to take the garbage out, who didn’t come forward
and help to make the unmade beds, the smears of toothpaste in the
bathroom’s basin or whose turn was to wash the dirty dishes in the
sink and put it in the dishwasher. Miss Gilbey must have died already
in Montagu; perhaps in her sleep, in her bedroom. Perhaps she is
buried there now. Who visits her grave, puts fresh cut flowers on it,
clears away the old ones, throws the brown water out and puts clean
water in the pots or jars or bottles? Even in death she is a mystery
to me; these two lonely sisters in a world of light of their own
making; their contemporaries with double chins, sagging bosoms,
grandchildren, wearing too much make-up, wearing hats to church that
bloomed roses, smelling of perfume.

Miss Gilbey had a solid air about her when I first met her. As if she
knew she belonged in the world. She always had a pot of tea on her
desk that she poured with poise, a jug of milk, a pretty cup and
saucer with patterns of flowers on; very English, very proper, very
old-fashioned. She sipped her tea as we recited our poems out loud
correcting our enunciation, willing us to speak fluently, with
emphasis, willing us to reach for that gold star she would stick in
our books that we children pasted our poetry and monologues from the
books of Winnie-the-pooh in. If she was satisfied with how our vowels
sounded, how we articulated the poet’s language, how invested we were
in executing the lull of the text, showing the full range of emotions
that was expected of us as a spirited ghost or a highwayman we would
see a gold star shining off the page, blinking up at us.

In the room filled with a breeze that felt as cool as a humming fridge
(we didn’t have air conditioners in those days) as my voice bounced
off the walls of the studio, as I watched the backs of the white
children’s heads, tufts of dark or golden hair escaping from
ponytails, still in their school uniforms or sport kit sniggering.
There was nothing, nothing said of the forced removals that took place
in 1964 in South End in what was once a diverse and cosmopolitan
suburb filled with Indians, Malays, Muslims, blacks, whites and
coloureds living together harmoniously; religion, awash with their
culture at times of thanksgiving and holiness and their loyalty, their
faith in their different Gods and to each other were their pillars of
strength.

There was nothing, nothing said of the unrest that was brewing in
South Africa, the daily disdain and underlying aggression in chars as
they faced their employer’s, men and women; comrades being picked up
by the Special Branch or plainclothes policemen or police spies, being
detained after being questioned, brought before a court of law,
imprisoned on Robben Island. There was no talk of a coloured man
called Georgie Botha’s apparent suicide in this room where my voice
rose and rose and rose higher and higher making an imprint, burning
it, a hole in the head of Marjorie Gilbey. In the heads of those
privileged whites who also came to the studio. I wanted to achieve
what they had.

All those gold stars stuck in their books. I didn’t mind the silver
ones but gold spelled something marvellous; something magical.
Something accomplished wonderfully; magnificently. I never got red
stars. Seeing a red star gave me a start, a headache started
throbbing, butterflies in the pit of my stomach started to flit as if
I had failed a test at school, got all the sums wrong, spelled the
words incorrectly. You only got a red star when you hadn’t learnt all
the words to the poem, stammered and needed prompting from Miss
Gilbey. There was no talk of the Rivonia Treason Trial, George Bezos,
what was in the newspapers about it, the stories that were running
internationally and a man called Mandela.

There was no talk of coloured men like Dennis Brutus and the poet
Arthur Nortje who was born in Port Elizabeth, in South End which was
now a suburb where white people lived comfortably, well off behind
their high walls, their dogs and electric fences. Nortje later won a
scholarship to study literature at Jesus College at Oxford. It was on
Dennis Brutus’s recommendation that he got that scholarship. But I was
only six and didn’t know anything besides school and my family. I was
just a colored girl, innocent and wide-eyed, six years old with
skinned knees from playing amongst the teachers’ cars, wearing North
Stars when I came to Marjorie Gilbey’s Studio for Speech and Drama.

A child bullied by the older kids from other standards, tormented by
them as they stalked me speaking in high pitched, squeaky voices
making me cry. Mandela was just a ghost of a man. The essence of the
man never showed the outward shame of humiliation from his
persecutors; the Afrikaner wardens who spoke English poorly at the
prison on the island. He never showed pain or suffering. His spirit
was the spirit of a child, unfettered. The work of his soul continued
to live in the outside world, outside of Robben Island where he was
imprisoned, living in his supporters, garnering more and more praise
internationally.
There was nothing, nothing of men being found hanged in their cell,
tortured with burning cigarettes, told to strip naked so that they
could be searched or a detainee slipping on a bar of soap.

Plague Poem for Day Thirty-Six

She asks me what’s up for today,

an innocent enough question

one we’ve asked each other

for so many years it’s easy to

lose count, but now it takes on

a weight of meaning, perhaps

a subtle dig, I have been doing

very little recently, yards need

tending, garage cleaning, and

the cellar organizing, or she may

be making a point about how

much more she does every day

while I read, write a bit, watch

too much TV, nap, and some days

walk around our neighborhood

the world I’ve built and live in now

and when she asks what’s up, I end

up saying I have plans, plans I leave

mysterious, a bit of pride, a vague

something to say when she asks

and I have nothing else.

   Plague Poem for Day Thirty-Seven

Sometimes I forget things, easy things

a pill at a certain hour, a person’s name,

or who I sent something to but forgot and

sent the same thing off again. I forget

so easily, why I walked from the kitchen

into the living room, what it was that I

hoped to find in the car. Forgetting has

become part of every day, I shed parts

of me this way, I trim down my life

get rid of whole sections of my past,

parts I miss and parts I’m better off

without. It’s part art, part medical, much

too methodical in its ways to be creative,

more paint by numbers than impressionist,

more fill-in-blanks than poetry. I forget

more each day, have become proficient in

my own way. Tried to write a check, but

fumbled the date, remembered the number

of the day, the month, even could have said

Wednesday with confidence, but I couldn’t

remember the year, it’s not ’97 anymore,

what happens to years, days are simple, but

years hurt – I wrote 2015, I remember that

year but for some reason have forgotten all

the rest, even today, it’s an easy thing to do.

     Plague poem for Day Thirty-Eight

Where do they go after they’re done with us?

Where do they go, the dead that is, where do

they go after they give up the ghost, the ship,

stop all this nonsense? Do they gather in the

wings, compare notes, watch to see who’s next?

Do they take time, think back about how their

ends unfolded? Do they talk about the who, what,

and when of it, the warning signs, the bad advice,

the look on the faces around them when they knew?

Do they decide which ones of us they will haunt,

tap on the glass, drag chains, pace slowly back and

forth in the attic, whisper to us on windy nights?

Now that they know that enough wasn’t enough but

all they could take; do they mark things down in

their ledgers, try to balance the book, the things

they remember and what we are saying about them?

Do they care about body bags, coffins, and makeshift 

morgues? Do they care about the numbers, the living

and then the dead, the seeming winners and their place

as losers? Do they measure remembrance – the flags

at half-staff, the mention on the evening news, vague

funerals with nothing left to say? Do they know that

they were/are keeping us from returning to normal?

Do they wonder now that they know more than we do?

Autumn Leaves II   In the fall, I find myself playing in a hill of leaves, Like when I was a little boy, The world was full of adventure with the sounds of life.  In the fall, I found myself looking at the world, When the skies were gray with a hint of life, Something unique about the sun being hidden.  At that moment I find that I was alive, Alive to see the world in a new way, In a way that I will never forget.         4-12-2020   Autumn III  There are no clouds in autumn that are white, The sky is gray like my foster’s mother hair, With silver streaks.   An old washing ringer washtub, Pressing the clothes as she feeds them, Through the wringer. The gray wooden porch and bending steps,  Clothes blowing in the November wind, It was quiet as I watched her, A moment in which I understood, Life was safe at that moment with gray clouds, And hair streaking gray hair and her countenance were soft.       4-12-2020     Autumn Leaves IV  The leaves fall on me as snowflakes would, There were gray skies and I watched, My foster mother with her silver-gray hair, And arthritic hands hanging clothes on a clothesline.   At that moment, I realized that life was fleeting, In the very moment, I felt the world stop, And she with her reddish tan face, With a nose that had been broken.  Her silver hair blowing in the breeze, On that autumn day, When I realized that my love for her, Was true.        4-12-2020   Autumn Leaves V For Donna    In the fall of nineteen seventy-seven, It was a blizzard of leaves fallen to the earth, The wind was blowing as it were December, Winter winds.   The hospital ward was mostly empty, Except for my foster mother and me, She had a soft face and farmers hands,  From a life of hard work.   I applied lotion to her face, As she had done so many times when, I was a little boy getting ready for school, “No ashy kids in my house!” her voice commanded.  One of the few times, I heard her voice, Now on her death bed, Gentle warm tears flowed down her face, It was the first and last time that I saw her.  It was the first time that this Seventy-year-old, Half Negro and Cherokee woman, Accepted a gentle touch, It was a moment that we all long for, To be loved and to love.   A moment like that first time watching her, From afar that November day seven years earlier. We both knew that this was a moment, We shared life and her last connection to someone, She loved me as her son.      4-12-2020 Autumn Leaves VI  The leaves return to the earth, One by one in a shower of many. Dancing in the wind, Fallen to the fertile ground.  In the spring of the year, they shall return, When the sun is hot, and the moon is bright.  When the stars light up the sky, There a twinkle and I will see.  I will remember the gentleness of your soul, And the warmth of your smile.  Spring will be the beginning, Of love that we shared, Never to be forgotten.         4-9-2020

A rose has beauty

And sending it to someone

Has a message so caring.

A thank you for friendship,

And being always there

What more could one ask .

So I leave with a prayer.

And may blessings pour down

That we will share the roads of life

And remember the rose that will

help us through strife.

Odiyan

You call me monkey man, odiyan, shapeshifter

When I stalk the still night, deserted by shadows.

Everyone is imprisoned in their homes.

You take photographs. I let you

See me in my naked wisdom, I turn

Your myths around, the camera can see me too.

Your wide angle, your narrow perspective, the side glance

Doesn’t matter. What matters is matter, and how it thinks

How it changes shape, becomes ape.

How it walks on stilts, my legs lightning.

You measure me metric, call me eight feet, electric.

You chase, I follow you, in a karmic circle

Where yesterday is today but with another name.

I count stars on lazy nights, not with fingers but with toes

Bending inward, breaking the chasms of distance.

Yes, I change shape sometimes, when I feel like it.

In the rain everything will be blurred again.

Today’s light post, tomorrow’s shadow. 

I am still alive, if that’s what you want to know.

Though living now is a different matter,

Filled with absence and uncertain wisdom.

I fly on my feet to remind you it can be done.

You are a little short of confidence, need a spring of hope

And though you are all inside, you must not forget who you are,

What you can be. As for me, I am who I am. Pure matter

That changes form. A spirit, free bird, Ariel, peeping tom,

I am not going to change, but into a bird, or who knows

The next wild thing that comes my way.   

Woman of the High Plains  

(Dorothea Lange, Woman of the High Plains, 1938)

In one photograph there is a woman

Scorched by sun.

Hand on forehead, another on neck.

She cannot resist a smile,

Where does it comes from?

Something the photographer just told her?

We won’t know. It changes things,

Turns her into an emblem,

Fortitude against the elements.

This is deep desert country. Texas, 1938.

She needs the work, has to keep at it.

Cannot give up. No not now.

Salt dripping the sack she wears.

The horizon beyond the toil. Earth and sky.

No war yet, but enough going on at home.

She stays unnamed. Perhaps the name is hidden in Lange’s notes.

Notes that say: ‘if you die, you are dead, that’s all’. Her words.

But she is alive, willing, a survivor.

There is still some time to go.

There will be work today, tomorrow.

We aren’t sure about the day after.

We don’t know what after that. Perhaps a house, in sunny country

Perhaps olives and vegetables. Perhaps the hint of a smile

Even as the day moves down west.

Twilight and then night. The photographer goes home,

Equipment packed into a box.

The photograph reaches the galleries, eighty years later.

We pause near the exit, return to her

From a million miles away

In another country, almost another world

A familiar worker down the road

A weary deserted path to nowhere. The sight of a day’s wages

The same sad hint of a smile.

Short Bio: Amlanjyoti Goswami’s poetry has been published in journals and anthologies around the world, including his recent collection River Wedding (Poetrywala) which has been widely reviewed. His poems have also appeared on street walls of Christchurch, exhibitions in Johannesburg, an e gallery in Brighton and buses in Philadelphia. He has read in various places, including in New York, Delhi and Boston. He grew up in Guwahati and lives in Delhi. 

Stone Soup is a European folk story in which hungry strangers convince the people of a town to each share a small amount of their food in order to make a meal that everyone enjoys, and exists as a moral regarding the value of sharing.

Stone Soup can also be taken as a fable about how every person’s small, but unique, contributions can add up to something quite nourishing. That is a wonderful metaphor easily translatable to each issue of Synchronized Chaos.

Right now much of the world is physically distanced from each other, and most people are spending much more time in their homes due to the coronavirus outbreak. Yet we are finding ways to connect, ways to pursue our unique creative gifts and share them with others through virtual community.

I, personally, have been able to interact with a more geographically diverse set of artists and writers than before, visiting virtual versions of events that would have been located far away from me. And I’ve watched each person bring something to the soup pot in the face of illness and grief – whether it’s sadness and trauma, humor, hope, kindness, eccentricity, eclectic knowledge, or confidence, it’s flavored the shared meal. As the old saying goes – no one can do everything, but everyone can do something. And your ‘something,’ whatever it is, can be brought to the table and included.

Film critic Jaylan Salah takes up a conversation with Egyptian satirist and scriptwriter Haitham Dabbour. In it, they explore the ways that we seek to transcend our inevitable mortality, whether by writing and creating, by falling in love later in life, or through obsessions with martyrdom and heroism.

Christopher Bernard reviews a transcendent dance show from the Joffrey Ballet, performed recently at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall. Various pieces embodied the punk spirit of defiance, the determination of space exploration, and human strength.

Abigail George’s essay poetically advocates a more mindful approach to both romantic love and to writing. She strives for more depth and empathy in both endeavors, hoping that our hearts will open enough to embrace refugees and the displaced.

Five contributors directly discuss the coronavirus outbreak. J.K. Durick chronicles the daily dislocation and elongation of time of sheltering in place at home, while Joan Beebe points forward to a time of hope. Michael Robinson shares a poem reflective of his sorrow over our losses, while Christopher Bernard describes the grotesque loveliness of San Francisco’s empty streets.

Norman J. Olson polemicizes in the second half of his essay about his Mexican vacation that governments should fight coronavirus by investing in human services and medical research rather than war.

In Mahbub’s selections this month, death is present, an unromantic and everyday occurrence brought about by the carelessness of random humans. Yet life, and romantic love, are also present, and just as much a part of everyday existence.

Michael Robinson’s other set of poems was inspired by his time in a nursing home. They suggest that beauty, and human love, can outlast time, violence and death, even when they do not always triumph in the moment.

John Sweet writes of individuals adrift in decaying towns, lost amid hopeless environments.

Ike Boat, the Poetrician from Ghana, versifies about his Facebook friends, who bring him succor and encouragement while he’s in a difficult financial situation at the beginning of his artistic career.

J.D. DeHart explores how artists can use the graphic novel medium to illustrate serious issues, how the form itself does not have to negate the weight of the themes. Daniel De Culla’s piece resembles the style of a graphic novel, pointing out the obscenity of religiously motivated violence.

Ahmad al-Khatat’s poems play on and draw out the different meanings of words, the different images that words can bring to mind. Some of his pieces probe the complex psyches and memories of survivors of wartime violence.

In the same vein, Jeremy Karn’s first piece comes from a young soul bemoaning ever being born, yet the next piece reflects the joy of hearing everyday, amusing kitchen sounds.

J.J. Campbell writes of the powerlessness of sickness and bodily weakness along with his regular themes of depression and loneliness. Chimezie Ihekuna urges single readers not to assume that marriage will magically improve their lives.

Using a unique, but specific creation ritual, Mark Young touches on what we know, what we sort of know, and what we think we know, and how little any of that sometimes has to do with what is explicitly stated.

Christopher Bernard reviews The Return, the fourth part of Eunice Odio’s poetry collection The Fire’s Journey. In his view, the volume deals with the darkness after expending one’s brilliant light, about the return to normalcy after the moment of creation.

Shelby Stephenson’s winsome piece celebrates a writer he knows and loves, while Leticia Escalera finds joy and inspiration in the companionship of her pets.

Finally, most explicitly in the spirit of this month, poet Joe Balaz points out in Hawaiian pidgin that our lives aren’t entirely our own, but a combination of what everyone brings to the table.

Fill up a cup and join us in reading this month’s issue. Dinner’s ready!

Recipe by Sharon Palmer, for real Stone Soup