Red Room Where the Writers Are

 Commissioned debut poetry collection.

 Features  Five African Songs and a prose poem titled  Hottentot Venus.

 The true story of the sexual exploitation of a young Hottentot girl called Sara Baartman, sold to a ship's doctor who convinced her her fortune would be made  from her unique physiognomy in London. She was sold to a Vaudville show and put up on exhibition. She was later sold to an animal trainer in Paris, where she became the toast of salon parties. She died in the winter preceding Waterloo. Upon her death, Georges Cuvier, Napoleon's physician, removed her brain and presented her elongated genitalia for the Academie Mediciene  pronouncing her proudly as ''Here is my Hottentot Venus". Her remains remained on display at the Musee de L'Homme in Paris until 1975 when they removed from public view. Her remains were returned to South Africa in 2002.

Currently, the remainder of the Bushman tribe are employed on their own land by Hoteliers who run an African Bush Experience 5 star holiday resort, where they re-enact the old tribal Khoisan lifestyle and the women have to allow the foreign tourists to touch and fondle them and pose for photographs. Tourists are allowed to tip these women and girls with packets of crisps and tins of coke. 

The cycle of abuse remains unbroken. 

 

 Hottentot Venus Part I

Native

Niave

At a time when

           Negritude

was barely an idea,

Barely, someone’s idea.

Black being beautiful

 arose from

         the residue

of torturers, Spitting in

split tongues

                          an Irony

Once glittered with

rationale

And racism.

Voiced amidst the marketplaces

of Innocence seeking colours;

it was a hope lost

to tangerine dreams

… as Trust folded

                     into black yearns

of  someone else’s

death

          shroud.

Borrowed persuasion

scuttled instead coal-bleeding victory

into loneliness:

It made her memories

                  inconsolable,

inflicting Absences

To drown in handspun shame,

scared to death

for singing

personal

Hymns for her dead.

 

As always, Scientific campaigns

go all out

        to signify

              astute doctrines,

but Black-bled

And echoed across

the African plains,

the affliction

                    is as deadly

as Poison arrows.

Arrows

blanched for pain. Excruciating.

A bloodless biting syntax

can always

 fall

back

on language

      inside such a

            Universe of reason:

 - cruelty to men,

                   animals

                                 Death

Becomes

a metaphysical enterprise.

Dilemma 

         - enlightenment

embroidered as reason

onto the skins

of savages.

And in the harsh

heat, the geckos freeze

for the Cicadas have fallen silent.

 

 ----------------------------------

from Part II 

Punctuated

          by sodomy

  and an addiction to gin,

Hottentot Venus died

            so Count Georges Cuvier,

could slobber over her corpse

Godlike – all pulse

 Dissolved

by the rumbling of

High-brow bowels watching,

                       cowering,

Like starved hyenas

grappling for carcass

         In the midday heat: Cuvier’s presentation

of eternal inferiority: cult-off genitals

and her bottled brain.

In death

her shadow maquette

lived

     Without her name

Entangled in the meshing

Of  political silences

Forever encased

In a paradise of cages.

A Woman who would be wife and mother

Sunk into bitter water…

Humane-ness truncated

Language cracked

and splintered by debate.

But the air

    is strung of glass

At the River Mouth,

Where the African breeze

Disperses

 their ancient verse

Of vowels chimed

against clicking

Stone-age Consonants

To awaken the soul

 

… And Yours

can

      only quiver

At the sadness

                   of their song.

------------------------------------------------------  

from SEXIONS

Emanations

                 in the deep night of our beds

 desire walks barefoot through passions

and imaginings

drawn of endless hours

etching you into my days

that no longer remember

the time before you were there

 your touch flows to

the centre of my sex

beckoning the gods

to dance divine the spectacle

burrowed  in the seasons

of my heart

your jeweled adoration

shimmers the length

of your affections

that I may lose my mind

to the fragrance of all you have become to me