Stranger at Home. Ashlee Neser
conventions of the poem. The concept implies poetic efficacy and ‘naturalness’ of purpose. In the category of ‘demonstration’ fall all the poems produced as part of teaching seminars, as well as those generated for fieldwork purposes at Opland’s request. The term ‘demonstration’ suggests a kind of simulacrum: the form is exhibited through texts that are not themselves efficacious or possessed of individuality. The distinction conditioned audience response to Manisi and fails to account for the poet’s political agenda in addressing his listeners. In addition, the categories label performances in misleading ways: for example, Manisi’s poems at Transkei’s ‘independence’ celebrations are considered to be ‘performances’ because they unfold in ‘natural’ contexts and are thus ‘efficacious’. In fact, the ‘independence’ poems are deeply compromised texts that bear the hallmarks of the inhospitable politics in which they operated.
On the question of ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ contexts, this study tries to attend carefully to that which hampered Manisi’s efforts to communicate with his audiences: political complexities, circumstances of censorship, and the difficulties in excavating terms and ideas from beneath their apartheid veneer. Manisi consciously tries to educate his listeners about the role he feels he must play as imbongi: a liar who tells lies truer than the truth. His frequent suggestions of the difficulty of speaking truth constitute the poet’s way of problematising his poetic form’s very conventions. In examining notions of ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ contexts, I hope to get nearer to an understanding of Manisi’s particular use of his traditional form in circumstances of extraordinary political and social complexity – the ‘natural’ and ‘normal’ were in short supply in apartheid South Africa. It is important to try to avoid easy binaries between homogeneous, rural, traditional communities of consensus and mutual understanding in which texts operate uniformly, and complex urban audiences for whom popular forms must constantly shift and renegotiate themselves in struggle with their conditions of production.
I rely on translated and transcribed texts, the majority of which are quoted from Opland’s (2005) The Dassie and the Hunter (which contains the most up-to-date translations of poems) and a few of which are drawn from the Opland Collection of Xhosa Literature, which I had the good fortune to consult intensively in early 2002. Manisi regarded himself as a guardian of his language, which he knew intimately and loved with a palpable reverence. Opland testifies to the extraordinary depth of Manisi’s knowledge of the isiXhosa language by admitting that several of the expressions and words used by the poet were nowhere to be found in translation or official isiXhosa dictionaries. The translations of Manisi’s poems represent collaborations between poet and researcher: it was usual practice for Manisi and Opland to produce translations together in discussion, and Opland welcomed Manisi’s corrections, suggestions and interpretive elaborations. Although the Opland Collection of Xhosa Literature includes several audio and visual tapes of Manisi’s performances, for instance in the United States, I do not comment on these as part of my interpretive endeavour, largely because they conveyed so overridingly as to obviate much critical description, the sterility of the uncomprehending classroom environments in which they were made. I was struck in watching them by two things: first, the energy Manisi injected into his declamations despite his isolation, and second, how easy it must have felt for English-bound audiences, confronted by a wall of incomprehensible sound and by the taciturn glower of the man making noise, to take the poems merely as instances of a genre, as having nothing intimately to do with them. Something of the poems’ understanding of their own urgency and mandate – encoded in the ways in which the texts converse with the conventions of their genre – reached me only when I was able to read them in translation. The limitations of my access to the poetry Manisi performed are severe indeed; for some readers, they will militate entirely against any value in my project.
As the rise in popularity and importance of translation studies suggests, the postcolonial world is one in which, if we are not exactly at ease with the contingency of our understanding of and access to difference, we are at least bound to accept these limitations and to make them meaningful as part of our intellectual and cultural transactions by working creatively and respectfully with the nodes of access available to us. Much work in the field of oral studies proceeds from an authority rooted in intimacy with the language in which subject-texts are produced – this is a formidable authority, which produces knowledge and insights of a particular kind. It is the indispensable tool of the kind of anthropology, ethnography and literary study conducted by leading scholars in orality like Graham Furniss, Opland, Gunner and Barber. These researchers are able to gather material, translate it, and then write about it in a secondary manner. In doing this kind of work, they not only describe and interpret the materials with which they emerge from the field, but they also actively participate in the creation of a body of texts that we call ‘African literature’. Oral literature occupies in the schema of this whole a primary place conceptually – anyone who teaches the subject will wish to impress upon students the richness and duration of oral production on the continent, as well as its complementarity with and diffusion into the practices of a number of Africa’s written products. And yet, can we begin to acknowledge a thing called ‘African literature’ if we cannot recognise that particular, transcribed oral texts are acts of literature in their own right, deserving of multiple attentions, and are not merely instances of genres or of the rule that oral literature flourishes here? It may be time to acknowledge of scholarly enquiry into African literature, which has surely reached maturity, that there are those equipped to make texts available to new audiences, those trained to assess such acts and their textual eventualities, and those who wish to read the residues of both of these preoccupations with a view to quite different questions and interests. In order to read David Manisi’s poetry with my own intellectual concerns in mind as well as my own limitations, I must rely on those in my field who have very different interests and skills from my own.
Duncan Brown’s discussion of translation, in his seminal book Voicing the Text (1998), acknowledges the many limitations that attend reliance on translated texts but argues persuasively that this reliance can encourage a more detailed accounting for and analysis of the processes of mediation specific texts have undergone. My own preoccupations, for example, concern the political contexts that mediated Manisi’s texts in their performance, as well as the categories of efficacy and naturalness applied to them. In approaching Manisi’s poetry as one of the potential future readers for whom he hoped in creating texts for the record, I work from Brown’s assumption: that despite the ‘conceptual and ideological difficulties’ translated texts raise, they remain ‘ “useful” in making available the political visions, aesthetic understandings, spiritual insights, symbolic identifications, economic imperatives, social pressures, and quotidian lived experiences of South African people in history’ (1998: 14). More than that, however, I have tried to suggest that the translated texts themselves have entered the record of African literary history and ought to be used in the new ways made possible by such a passage.
There are two parts to this book. In the first, I write about Manisi’s publishing career as well as his performances at Transkei’s ‘independence’ celebrations. These texts all apparently fall within the category of the ‘natural’ since they were produced in isiXhosa for Xhosa audiences, with whom the poet intended to communicate according to shared literary and cultural conventions. But the texts reveal their struggle with their socially and politically fraught world, and Part One problematises the idea that the Xhosa imbongi had access during apartheid to ‘natural’ contexts of textual production. Part Two looks at those of Manisi’s poems that were produced for Opland’s fieldwork and for university and school audiences, and that have been labelled ‘demonstrations’. The argument of Part Two is twofold: first, that despite his frequent lack of success, Manisi tried to deploy the conventions of his form in alien and sometimes hostile environments so that an understanding of his university poetry as mere ‘demonstration’ undermines the poet’s attempts to address his audiences. And second, that these efforts at efficacy in alienating environments also strained the texts in various and sometimes surprisingly generative ways. What I hope this study shows, more than anything else, is that an archive of literary endeavour such as Manisi’s bears the scars and complicities of its time and reveals the vacuums made by all its absent, ungathered texts, but that it also reflects on itself – its capacities and distortions – in fascinating, plentiful and instructive ways