This is the first book of poems by Alistair Paterson since Summer on the Côte d’Azur (2003). Paterson is a good example of someone who, depending on your point of view, is either in the mainstream of what is happening in New Zealand poetry or peripheral to it. More specifically, you are not likely to find his work published by “prestigious” university-based presses such as Auckland University Press or Victoria University Press. However, there are many poets in New Zealand who have had the advantage of Paterson’s encouragement and who have been published in one or more issues of Poetry New Zealand, an annual compilation of New Zealand verse of which Paterson has edited almost 30 volumes over the years.
Africa is a single, 70-page poem, produced with high production values in hardback by John Denny’s Puriri Press. The cover’s yellow-ochre tones and the image of a bushman rock panting resonate with the overt theme of the poem, “that our African origin is still a major part of us, that it connects us and suggests we all belong to a single tribe and therefore should care for and support each other.”
Paterson describes the genesis of this project as the discovery in his local library of Neil Bennun’s book, The Broken String, which introduced him to the myths and legends of the now vanished South African /Xam-Ka !ei branch of the San people, mediated via the anthropological work of Wilhelm Bleek and his sister-in-law, Lucy Lloyd, who immersed themselves in the lore and language of this people when six members of the group stayed with them in the 1870s. In the book’s Foreword, Paterson, unwell and reflecting on his own mortality, writes:
The visionary views and beliefs of the /Xam-Ka !ei – their conviction that animals, people and their spirits, the past and present, coexist with each other, the idea that reality comes from within as much as from without and consists of a weaving together of a matrix of disjointed everyday events and complex relationships – resonated with me.
What we have here, it is clear, is a structural principle for a long poem and a way into understanding what is going on in it.
This is how the poem proper begins:
This is the moon
I told you about, that I desire
should return –
should come for me,
//Kabbo says.I’ve waited for the shoes
I must put on
strong for the road.
The sun will go along,
stay with me.I will go with the moon
& the warm sun
while the ground is hot,
along a great road.
I shall walkletting the grass
the flowers become dry
while I follow the path –
while I go
with the ancestors . . .*
They’re alive
our ancestors are alivethey live through us & yet
there’s a sense in whichwhat’s happened seems
never to have happenedin which thinking about it
what’s gone, what’s over
is like looking at a church
examining it (the church)from a distance, admiring
the lift & luft of the spire…
As Paterson’s notes tell us, //Kabbo was an /Xam resident with Bleek, and his principal teacher. What is being evoked is a voice from the Nineteenth-Century, which begins with a recollected telling (past to present tense), then moves in the second extended sentence to past perfect, then present, then future tense and rests in a kind of eternal mythological present. The elements of //Kabbo’s exposition are squarely located in Bushman astrological mythology. You can get a sense of this from Africa, or by way of a further introduction, check out Bleek and Lloyd Archive online. Here is an extract from a summary from this site of “kaggen (the Mantis) and the Moon (version 1):
In Bushman…mythology the Moon is looked upon as a man who incurs the wrath of the Sun, and is consequently pierced by the knife (i.e. rays) of the latter. This process is repeated until almost the whole of the Moon is cut away, and only one little piece left; which the Moon piteously implores the Sun to spare for his (the Moon’s) children.
For general readers, such a resource is a useful way of discovering the symbolic meaning of /Kaggen (the Mantis character, the trickster, eland-creator and shape-shifter who in some ways is hero of various mythological narratives) and the shoe, a motif in this book, and linked with the creation of the moon and journeying.
The * sign is used to mark a transition between sections of this long poem. It might be seen as signalling a point of departure prompted by what has come before. In this case, //Kabbo’s mention of his ancestors prompts the 21st -century voice to announce his own conviction about the ever-presence of ancestors and begin a reflection on historical time. The prompt/response pattern provides forward momentum to what is really a sustained meditation on who we are as human beings, how we make meaning and how certain enduring meanings make us. (Another typographical structural marker, illustrated in the quoted section, is the use of apparently redundant parentheses as in the case of (the church). I read these to cue readers to substitute their own equivalent of “the church”, for example, a bridge such as Brooklyn Bridge.)
Another online source on African Mythology (Answers.com) has this to say about /Kaggen: “He creates, but he also has a destructive urge. He has godly knowledge, yet he is capable of acts of mortal stupidity; he is sublime, he is also obscene”. Such tensions also underpin the sustained meditation which is this book, which on the one hand celebrates art and artistry, and yet offers plentiful contemporary reminders of humankind’s achievement in respect of the destructive arts and the stupidity of its leaders.
This book, of course, will stand or fall with its readers on its artistic merits. What I like about it is the pared-back, simplicity of its cadences, which at the same time have the capacity to evoke powerful reflections. Try this:
From ‘reality’
observed perhaps as if
it were a crime inspired
by a police metaphor
or this:
a reassertion
of things forgotten
once dreamed of
tidied up, then put away
discarded
never fully understood . . .
I’m recommending this book as the sort you could keep by your bedside or let loose in your classroom. It would be a wonderful book to use in a unit exploring the nature of mythological reality.