Hottentot Venus
The Thirteenth Year of my Daughter
Beyond the Himalayan Ranges
Notes Towards a Nature Poem
The Dragonfly in the Sun
The King Has No Clothes
All the Elements
How to Save a Life
Partnershi

Dabydeen, Cyril

Ghose, Zulfikar

Gray, Stephen

Mahapatra, Jayanta

English

Research Online

Kunapipi Volume 2 Issue 1 Article 5 1980 Poems Stephen Gray Jayanta Mahapatra Zulfikar Ghose Cyril Dabydeen Follow this and additional works at: https://ro.uow.edu.au/kunapipi  Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons Recommended Citation Gray, Stephen; Mahapatra, Jayanta; Ghose, Zulfikar; and Dabydeen, Cyril, Poems, Kunapipi, 2(1), 1980. Available at:https://ro.uow.edu.au/kunapipi/vol2/iss1/5 Research Online is the open access institutional repository for the University of Wollongong. For further information contact the UOW Library: research-pubs@uow.edu.au Poems Abstract Hottentot Venus The Thirteenth Year of my Daughter Beyond the Himalayan Ranges Notes Towards a Nature Poem The Dragonfly in the Sun The King Has No Clothes All the Elements How to Save a Life Partnership This journal article is available in Kunapipi: https://ro.uow.edu.au/kunapipi/vol2/iss1/5 Stephen Gray HOTTENTOT VENUS My name is Saartjie Baartman and I come from Kat Rivier they called me the Hottentot Venus they rang up the curtains on a classy peepshow two pennies two pennies in the slot and I'd wind up shift a fan and roll my rolypoly bum and rock the capitals of Europe into mirth I was a special voluptuary a squealing passion they had never seen anything like it before Little Sarah twenty six born on the vlei past Grahamstown bought for a song and a clap of the hands a speculative sketch come to life a curiosity of natural science weighed measured exported on show two pennies two pennies in the Gallery of Man I am unique I am lonely now I always was out here my deathbed a New Year's eve a salon couch girdled with reporters and I turned my complexion to the wall and dreamed of a knife cutting deep in a springbok's hide and they woke me with brandy for smelling salts and I wouldn't wake again in their august company my soul creeps under cairns where wayside travellers throw another stone in my memory two pennies two pennies dropped on my eyes they laid me in state in my crinoline robe my hands folded coyly as they always were and I let them bury my body so celebrated so sensational they could never do while I was alive what they wanted to do sink me in wax and decant my brain and put me in a case in th_e Museum of Man 27 I stare out at the Eiffel Tower my hands covering my vaginal flaps my own anomaly the kneebone connected to the thighbone connected to the hipbone connected to the spine and the skull they mounted me without beads or skins or quivers Saartjie Baartman is my name and I know my place I know my rights I put down my foot and the Tuileries Gardens shake I put down my foot and the Seine changes course I put down my foot and the globe turns upside down I rattle my handful of bones and the dead arise. Saartjie Baartman was bought in 1810 by an English dealer and exported from Caffraria to the fun fairs and circuses of Europe, as an exhibit, the first of many. Billed as the Hottentot Venus the diminutive Saartjie rocked the cartoonists of Britain with her steatopygous buttocks not into idle sympathy but into gross lampoons. In Paris her anomalous figure unchained a series not of love songs but of musical grotesqueries a [a Hottentot. She died not of adulation but of alcoholic poisoning on New Year's Eve, 1816. One notes her ultimate debasement: instead of being accorded the rights of burial, like an animal she was destined to take her place in the Museum of Man. In the Palais du Chaillot where to this day her rigid skeleton and her decanted brain stare out at the Eiffel Tower, symbol of the age of steel and of progress which was to dispossess her people. This note is taken from Stephen Gray, Southern African Literature: an Introduction. 28 66 Jayanta Mahapatra THE THIRTEENTH YEAR OF MY DAUGHTER A little longing like a piece of disturbed sleep back of her mind scurrying away the echoes of the startled bees Now she chases a butterfly when the whole of her secret sleep spills the waiting tender voices into the season's honey 41 BEYOND THE HIMALAYAN RANGES When darkness falls the stones come closer toward us, both the written and the unwritten, and our hearts are thin, with nothing behind, like facades intact in a movie set that sway with only blue sky on either side. Darkness that comes, revealing nothing else; coming through the clenched landscapes of China and through the frozen perimeters of Siberian stone, flying unnoticed with millions of migratory birds with the shadows of sheathed atoms in their beaks. Darkness whose meaning escapes our children: of the leper's mutilated limb that becomes gesture, of ideology whose words are redeemers of the flesh. Somewhere, beyond the high Himalayan ranges, a lost man wears his like a sleep which goes far down the mind where the red stones stand. There is no movement in the sky; it is blank as his face. Only the unseen wings in the air keep dragging their shadows like net~ on the snow. 42 Zulfikar Ghose NOTES TOWARDS A NATURE POEM The object to be described is there, of course: one sees it whether it's the pot of geraniums beside which the cat is asleep, in the back garden, or the yellow and black swallow-tailed butterfly unable to abandon the honeysuckle, which it leaves in a repeated rehearsal of withdrawal only to come back to in a renewed fervour of desire; or it could be there in the imagination, that image of last summer which has stayed in the mind like a cliched photograph of nature ... it could be one of many with birds, trees, flowers etc. There's no real problem since it's all there and one has not lost the capacity to look. And yet it's become impossible to stick to a simple point of descriptive certainty, giving shapes their colour and weight: one can't avoid wondering about the subtler textures and the elusive tones, it's not just the bright orange of the marigold petals, it's also the tiny crescent of shade which is nearly black but not really black which each petal makes upon the one below it which has to be included if the description is not to be merely a label. The felicitous epithet or the inspired metaphor are of no help; unless diversion can lead to a return of focus as when listening to a familiar music the mind wanders and a more deliberate attention makes us hear a phrase we'd missed in earlier listenings. 88 The desire to catch the thing itself in a simple phrase persists although we know it can't be done, it's like wanting to be that age again when we didn't drink or smoke, so that we could see the world more clearly, or like believing that an intenser sexual experience is possible than what we've known, it's an anxiety for a complete happiness that we're convinced can somehow still be ours. Or a nostalgia, like parading thirty years later in the uniform one wore in Normandy and remembering some glory attached to the event while forgetting the rain, the mud, the fear of death. There's the creative confusion that comes from a knowledge of the other arts which always seem simpler and more uncluttered by peripheral considerations. One would like the extraordinary rhythm of Webern, for example, or be able to cover a canvas, so to speak, with a solid dark green and be convinced that one has caught a meadow in late evening on a summer's day in Gloucestershire, in July when the hawthorn no longer distracts with its white and pink. This afternoon the clouds lifted; the sky was an indescribable blue. E.G. For example, the way the swallow-tailed wings of the butterfly open and close with the light throwing a diagonal shadow across the flowering bush in late autumn when the last flowers are weak, stunted and faded, or the way a migrating bird's feathers catch and diffuse the reddish glow of the sun falling towards the horizon: one thing or another is changing position, adjusting itself to warmth or seeking some new source 89 of nourishment and in the process unintentionally showing itself in a new light. But it's not just the instinct for survival in the late harsh weather or any other persuasion which involves one in that complex choreography that, suddenly realizing the seemingly impossible measure in which the body's extreme contortion appears precisely natural although it exceeds the normal limits of tension, brings about a phenomenal change. The butterfly, for example, floating in the air just out of reach of the cat waiting to spring on it engages one in a double apprehension, the quiet moment is so charged with drama. The way the wings fold and unfold, one sees only a throbbing softness of yellow and black against the reddening autumn leaves, but a slight descent, provoking the cat to press into the ground in readiness for its murderous leap, causes the colours to tremble in a vivid exasperation. The unfamiliar migrating bird, so distinct in the autumn light, makes one re·consider the assumptions held during the summer when the cardinals, blue·jays and mocking· birds raised their particular but abstract noise among the thick leaves. There was, sometimes at sunset, the occasional song of one which distracted the ear, but now, this bird, whose form one cannot identify, rising up in the fresh norther which will take it far into Mexico, suddenly reveals, as the light touches its wings from below, that at the point where perspectives converge is a radiance and the thing departing, not wanting to be where it is, gathers about its body a dramatic exuberance, leaving to us a memory of its flight, the slight twitch of its wings as they hit the current going south, discovering there a liberating turbulence. 90 THE DRAGONFLY IN THE SUN The afternoon's light is caught in the dragonfly's wings where transparency permits no reflections and yet will not give free passage to the sun, preserving its surface brightness of delicate webbing as a fragile brilliance of gleaming points which make the wings nearly invisible and the diagonal markings appear as tiny irradiations of very faint pink and blue when the dragonfly darts up against the sun as if it plucked colours from the air and immediately discarded them: this is the moment of intensity, of the afternoon's light gathering. in the garden in a brief flickering of a dragonfly's wings just above the red blossoms of the pomegranate. 91 l Cyril Dabydeen THE KING HAS NO CLOTHES Limp and bedraggled he walks through the day without worry or work-troubled he struts out with a halloo into the hearts of trees entering the nest -secrets of a bramble life telling the world of the coming to an end of all things only the ground swirls beneath his squirrel-feet and the birds about-and-about pick up the refrain with a crackle-and-crackle !09 in his woodpecker's ears he takes note from a bark -edge being firm he begins with a tum-around and all is well until judgement comes his eyes peel open an apocalypse he rides out a horseman into the dark-and-darkness world of the disappearing horizon. ALL THE ELEMENTS In this variegated landscape my life turns topsy-turvy. I notice the sun once again in its chameolonic phase I quickly ask for respite I am arid in body's heat I wait for the downpour at my sides I drip under a tarpaulin I bend and quiver from the cambium-chambers of my heart A growl and hiss. I wait with dim frenzy. I listen to the buzz in the fevered shape of night. I am the dried pelt -it is this cave that I fear most. I am still in the hinterland, l!O k sun at my side, rain my skin tongue slaked all rampant beginnings. HOW TO SAVE A LIFE This is the night when the lungs are intact the heart is no longer in frenzy. Bones do not walk out by themselves Together we meander along the corridor of the skin make designs all across the body I offer you solace with words carved entrails coiled in. You give me a tame life in exchange I listen at the navel for the beasts that still rage, that keep knocking against flesh Ill PARTNERSHIP I continue to give you arms & legs. Your body holds out against dismemberment. In the world of the constant grimace, I offer bandages without so much as an apology. We continue our old game, looking on from shadow sockets, still exchanging lungs & hearts. I put my trophies in a bag and sling it across my shoulder Time for the wandering again. I leave you behind with a handful of roses. Not long after you follow -stretching out false limbs with octopus-arms to embrace me. I keep looking back, waiting for the sun to enter. Your tentacles are still all around me; I am twisted, confined -about to disappear from life altogether. Your laughter continues to keep my bare bones firmly on the ground. I hear distantly the thunder·clap of another disaster. 112 

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