Teesta Review: A Journal of Poetry, Volume 2, Number 2. November 2019. ISSN: 2581-7094
All the Places, Musawenkosi Khanyile, uHlanga,
Cape Town, 2019, ISBN:
978-0-620-83871-9
This collection strikes me as a
mature book of a poet who has considerable control over the craft of writing
and the selection of images, and seems like firm footsteps of a poet who will
soon register his voice in the global arena of anglophone poetry. I am
optimistic that this collection is the first of a poet whose verses may cause
some ripples in the still lake of time. Musawenkosi Khanyile’s All The
Places uses
language evocatively to de-familiarize his life with poems divided into
sections, “Rural”, “Township” and “Urban”:
She had a beautiful smile with a missing
tooth.
She said Doctor, spitting out saliva,
when I asked her what she wanted to
be when she grew up.
The
acknowledgement section recalls how this book was composed in partial
requirement for a Masters in Creative Writing at the University of the Western
Cape, which endows him with a unique vantage point to pursue the craft of
writing. The collection is published
in 2019 by Cape Town-based uHlanga, a publishing house that has previously
published Koleka Putuma’s collection Collective
Amnesia, which still lingers in my mind.
By engaging with this collection as an English Poet from
India, I perceive that poetry written in English from South Africa seems to
stress on rhythm and rhyme, and has a higher degree of performative elements.
But this nuanced collection seems to have terse metaphors when it comes to
tackling issues like racial violence:
Like
now, seated at a long shiny table in a hotel
with
colleagues who overlook his township English
and laugh kindly at his
jokes
Correct
those who ask you: What was it like growing up in the township?
Say the appropriate
question is: How did you survive the township?
The poet successfully captures the
alienation one feels in hyper-luxurious circumstances, beautifully articulated
in the verses that follow:
The immaculate toilet
It smells like lavender
here.
The floor is
immaculate. The walls white.
I take a pee, push the
button in the middle
and watch the yellow
liquid disappear.
In the mirror I stare
back at myself.
No rush. No smell to
escape from.
I
could eat in here..
Forks and knives
I don’t know of any
household
that uses forks and
knives.
Every piece of food
finds its way
to our mouths by spoon.
Our stomachs are
beggars;
details do not matter
when
we respond to their pleas.
The
verses commented here highlight how Khanyile’s writing “declasses” the English language:
this is a poet worth his weight in gold.