A Chapter in South African verse: interview with Jeremy Cronin.

Jeremy Cronin, a South African poet and politician who spent years in prison and exile, is presently a member of parliament and the deputy general secretary of the South African Communist Party. The interview probes into his poetics and political orientation. Cronin views his prison poems as self-survival strategy, testament to the realities of incarceration, and an attempt to forge a voice of resistance and solidarity in opposition to apartheid and his own white South African upbringing. Cronin sees capitalism as barbaric progress, the need to wean the communist tradition from its own totalitarian habits, and globalization as turning the world into a market. Poetry for him offers the possibility of challenging leftist dogmatism through irony and its ability to evoke the local and the rooted against the standardization of globalization controlled by a few corporations. The interview ends with three exemplary poems of Cronin.

Introduction

Amnesia classifies Third World countries as 'developing' (structurally adjusted amnesia) ...

Jeremy Cronin. "Even the Dead." Even the Dead: Poems, Parables and a Jeremiad. 1997

The report-backs were straightforward: we were all behind schedule and over budget. I might add that we were almost past caring. It seemed impossible that we'd be finished in time for the official opening. The builders were still knocking down walls left, right and centre, and establishing piles of rubble in every room.

Ivan Vladislavic. "The WHITES ONLY Bench." Propaganda by Monuments. 1996

Jeremy Cronin was born in South Africa in 1949 and grew up in that country. He spent a year studying in Paris in 1972-73, and lectured in philosophy at the University of Cape Town on his return to South Africa, only to serve 7 years imprisoned--from 1976 to 1983--in Pretoria's Maximum Security prison, for "seventeen acts of terrorism." In other words, "seventeen underground SACP/ANC pamphlets and newsletters, distributed between 1973 and 1976" warranted the incarceration. But the pamphlets in prison became poems. And the prisoner has gone on, after continued activism on his release from prison in the United Democratic Front (UDF) and another three years in exile in London, to spend now still another kind of time---as the Deputy General Secretary of the South African Communist Party (SACP), and serves currently as an ANC MP, with a portfolio in Transport. Cronin's writing persists in embracing not just poems, however, but polemic as well, for he also writes regularly--as circumstances and conditions enjoin--for, inter alia, the SACP publications The African Communist and Umsebenzi, which he edits, as well as political editorials for such South African newspapers as the Mail and Guardian and Business Day and literary reviews for The Sunday Independent. Pamphlets and poems, that is to say, continue to animate Cronin's contributions to the verse-making and critical writing of the South African story.

But, as the museum worker describes the situation in Ivan Vladislavic's short story, "The WHITES ONLY Bench," "The builders were still knocking down walls left, right and centre, and establishing piles of rubble in every room" (Vladislavic, 57). The story's project was to construct a museum to the past, to apartheid, so that, once housed, it would not be reconstructed--another kind of "structurally adjusted amnesia," perhaps, but as the committee learned when they convened to assess their progress, the institutional outcome was still pending: "The report-backs were straightforward: we were all behind schedule and over budget. I might add that we were almost past caring. It seemed impossible that we'd be finished in time for the official opening" (57). "Left, right and center": the walls were coming down, to be sure, and the prepositions scattered throughout the preceding sentence suggest the still indeterminate outlines of the new directions and compelling directives that would have yet to ground the eventual construction, and, along with their attachments to nominal substantives, are reminders of the commitments and omissions that render the construction a pending, indeed transitional, one: report-backs ... straightforward ... behind schedule ... over budget. ... past caring ... in time for the official opening. And so it may well be, as Jeremy Cronin puts it in his poem "Moorage,"

   Because the struggle we haven't, in fact,
   Left behind, as it flaps out
   As this banner
   Is also a struggle to make
   The too good to be true be true (Even the Dead, 13)

"Structurally adjusted amnesia," the sort that "classifies Third World countries as developing," is but one of the categories of amnesia that Jeremy Cronin identifies in the title poem to his second collection of "poems, parables and a jeremiad," published in 1997; there are also CNN's "globalised amnesia," the Gulf War's "lobotomised amnesia," and the "milk of amnesia" offered by such U.S. television fare broadcast in South Africa as Santa Barbara, the Bold and the Beautiful, Restless Years, as well as "upwardly mobile amnesia," "affirmative action amnesia," and "black empowerment, the world owes/me one, Dr. Motlana, give me a slice of it amnesia." "Even the Dead" was composed in the middle years of the first term of ANC rule in South Africa, following the country's first-ever democratic elections held in April 1994, and at much the same time also as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) began its more than two years of hearings into "gross violations of human rights" committed under apartheid government from 1960 to 1994, and amidst the controversial question of "amnesty" for the perpetrators and the still unresolved means of "reparation and rehabilitation" for the victims.

Cronin provides, in the opening poem of Even the Dead, "three reasons for a mixed, umrabulo, round-the-corner poetry": 1. the "mud of its production," 2. the "shift out there/From lyric to epic," and 3. that "Here it is safe to assume/Nothing at all. Niks." Umrabulo is a term that exists in several South African languages and cultures, used to describe the customary passing round of beer and the proverbial conversation that accompanies it; umrabulo has also been used as the title of a series of ANC pamphlets and discussion documents, taken from the word's adaptation amongst political prisoners on Robben Island to "inspire political discussion and debate." As the back cover on one such pamphlet describes it, "this concept is being revived to assert our fundamental adherence to the necessity for enriched discussion at all levels of organization. In this way, the programmes that we implement will be based on a solid understanding of our options and our principles" (1997).

Even the Dead, Cronin's second collection of poetry, was published in 1997. "With the words 'after' and 'goes'/The question at least proves....": Jeremy Cronin opens his verse rendition of "Five Thoughts Concerning the Question: 'What Happens After Mandela Goes?'." The program of thoughts that follows considers such retrospective presentiments on 'after' and 'goes' as iconography (2), loss (3), party politics (4), democracy (5), and concludes with "words that should be thoroughly mistrusted: 'identity'; 'we have always', and 'in the image of'./ Not to mention:/ 'Crown prince'." Cronin's "five thoughts" were included in that new collection of his poetry: Even the Dead: Poems, Parables and A Jeremiad. Set amid other verses--poems and parables--that describe "three reasons for a mixed, umrabulo, round-the-corner poetry," or May Day commemorations in 1984 and 1986, "Joe Slovo's favourite joke," and assorted "troubles" with revolutionism, reformism, and certain Marxists, the words "after" and "goes" provocatively argue the complications of history that lay behind and ahead of the "new South Africa"--the jeremiad of amnesia and truth-telling that gives the volume its title: "even the dead." Even the Dead argues on behalf of a narrative in lyric form that would re-tell the translations of the political struggle in and for South Africa from a national liberation movement in league with the internationalism of socialism to the new imperative of meeting the demands of globalization and free-market economies. "Structurally adjusted amnesia," Cronin called one such narrative in the title poem.

Even the Dead, "poems, parables and a jeremiad," was just as dynamic and historic a document in its own write, its own right--for it has significantly to do with both writing and rights. As the COSATU (Congress of South African Trade Unions) report to the TRC maintained: "the struggle for basic trade union rights on the factory floor" is intimately connected to the "struggle for human rights in society." Divided into three sections entitled "Explaining Some Things," "Moorage," and "Even the Dead," Cronin's collection embraces in verse and prose poetry the years from 1984 to 1997, and at once lyricizes their travails and travesties, epigraphizes their momentum, and narrates a history in the making. Cronin's first volume of poetry, Inside (1983), written largely from within prison, to which Cronin had been sentenced for detonating "pamphlet bombs, had been published the year before the chronicle told in "even the dead" was initiated. Inside's poems had told from within cell confines of the already storied struggle in South Africa--Soweto's sappers, the language of self remade in resistant mirror images; it inquired into deaths in detention, and asked after family connections that could be traced to the laying of telegraph lines across the southern part of the continent begun in the late nineteenth century. Inside combined poems of personal intimacy with pronouncements of political comraderie. Composed in cells as they might have been, the verses were also produced from the shop floor, as "Walking on Air" tells it:

   In the prison workshop, also and otherwise named
   [seminar room], where work is done by enforced dosage,
   between political discussion, theoretical discussion,
   tactical discussion, bemoaning of life without women,
   sawdust up the nose, while raging at bench 4, for a week
   long, a discussion raging, above the hum of the exhaust
   fans, on how to distinguish the concept 'Productive' from
   the concept ... 'Unproductive labour' ... (Inside, 5)

The story of John Matthews, who wasn't in Kliptown in 1955 "when the People's Congress adopted the Freedom Charter" but had been "there the day before, he built the platform," that story follows, "pieced together, here from many months, from the prison workshop" (Inside, 6).

Even the Dead now again does all of this--political, theoretical, tactical discussion, life with and without women--it is a "discussion raging"--and more too perhaps, in its tale of the struggle to make the "too good to be true" become true ("Moorage"). A line from the same poem describes the valiant effort "To live close to every tree you had ever planted," an effort that requires new platforms ... such as that of the "You-Dee-Eff" whereby "nouns turned into verbs" and "syllabised words grew from initials" and there were "agitators lurking behind acronyms." Other poets are called on to assist in the lettered project, as in "A Reply to Pablo Neruda":

   He instructed his tongue in the difference between
      we-simple (meaning us), and we-royal (meaning I).
   He came to accept that this was more than a question of
      grammar. (Even the Dead, 31)

"Even the Dead," the title poem, closes the volume with powerful admonitions against the collapse of amnesty into amnesia--syntagmatic or paradigmatic, CNN's globalised amnesia, the Gulf War's lobotomised amnesia, Third World structurally adjusted amnesia, Hollywood's milk of amnesia. Amnesia, "even the dead" insists, "has no cut-off date."

Works Cited

Jeremy Cronin. Inside. Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1983.

--. Even the Dead. Poems, Parables and a Jeremiad. Cape Town and Johannesburg: David Philip/University of the Western Cape. Mayibuye Books, 1997.

Ivan Vladislavic. Propaganda by Monuments. Cape Town and Johanneburg: David Philip, 1996.

Other works by Jeremy Cronin:

The Ideologies of Politics. Edited with A. De Crespigny. Oxford UP, 1975. Fifty Years of the Freedom Charter. With Raymond Suttner. Ravan Press, 1985.

Inside and Out. Cape Town and Johannesburg. David Philip, 1999. (A re-edition of both Inside and Even the Dead).

Interview*

Ferial Ghazoul: Although your poetics has been identified as historical, a number of your poems are about poetry itself: how to write it and what is its target. I have in mind poems like "A Love Poem," "Three Reasons for a Mixed, Umrabulo, Round-the-Corner Poetry," (cited in "Appendix") and "Even the Dead." Can you elaborate on your understanding of the craft and role of poetry, and specifically in South Africa today?

Jeremy Cronin: I think there are different challenges for the poetry I am writing now. In my earlier prison poems of the apartheid era I was trying to do two fundamental things. The first was a self-survival strategy, to re-construct with the resources of language, voice, breath, tongue a sense of the world outside of the prison walls. The second was to bear testament, to record the reality of prison, to give voice to the relatively unspeakable, to find words for what I and, of course, millions of South Africans were (in one way or another) experiencing. For me, this double challenge posed a third challenge. To forge a voice of resistance and solidarity meant cutting against the grain of my own white South African upbringing and cultural formation. I knew that I had to do this without denying my origins, or renouncing all the resources I had, so to speak, ready on the tip of my tongue. Somehow, lyrical poetry seemed to offer a space and a discipline to work these three things together.

I don't want to prescribe for other South African poets, but for me poetry needs now to confront different challenges.

Ferial Ghazoul: You are presently the deputy general secretary of the South African Communist Party. This has not stopped you from writing poems critical of Marxists and often humorously so, as in "Joe Slovo's Favourite Joke," "The Trouble with Revolutionism," "The Trouble with Certain Marxists" and "Epitaphs." Do these poems provide a critique of a certain Marxist line or a comic relief to what is essentially a serious and committed poetic project? Do such poems represent a contrapuntal note to your public persona and thus constitute the "other" within yourself'? How can you relate such poems to your political vocation as you see it'?

Jeremy Cronin: I am (unwisely no doubt) once more trying to hold different things together, in tension. I would like the public persona, for instance, to be contrapuntal, not seamless. I would like humour to be part of a serious poetic and political project.

This all relates to one major present imperative for me. It is the need to undercut the totalitarian presumptions of the communist legacy, its know-it-all tendencies, its stubborn self-assuredness. These qualities were sometimes fostered by victimisation and a sense of being besieged, they also often contributed to communists' remarkable resilience when persecuted. But, in power, the totalitarian habit made 'actually existing communism' bureaucratically stagnant at best, a terrible historical blight at worst. For me, this does not now mean abandoning socialism, or the South African Communist Party, still less does it mean forgetting the essential insights of Marx and Engels. I think particularly of their thoroughly dialectical understanding of capitalism, then in its first phase of accelerated globalisation, with the invention of the steam-ship, and the rapid extension of railway lines and undersea telegraph cables. In 1848 Marx and Engels understood the profoundly progressive nature of capitalism, but they also understood that it was barbaric progress. That, it seems to me, is as valid in the year 2000 as it was then.

To seek to wean the communist tradition from its own totalitarian habits, and to point it in more valid directions, requires, I believe, also simultaneously challenging the actual totalitarian ideology of our times. The neo-liberal world-view is often invisible because of its commonplace transparency, its quotidian obviousness. Neo-liberal ideology transforms the globe into a market, dominated by a handful of powerful northern corporations. It reduces all of us to buyers and sellers, or, and this is the fate of the majority of those living in the south, the marginalised.

The lyric, for me, provides possibilities to take on this double challenge. On the one hand the resources of humour and irony, for instance, can be used to challenge left-wing dogmatic habits, to reaffirm the provisional, open-ended, learning nature of any decent human endeavour.

On the other hand, there is the suffocating omnipresence of neo-liberalism. I do not know whether poets writing in other languages experience this concern as sharply. But as an English speaker it is hard not to notice how to open your mouth is unwittingly to let neo-liberalism pour forth--'core' and 'non-core business', 'right-sizing' and 'down-sizing' (but never 'up-sizing'), 'learning to package yourself', 'entrepreneurship', 'corporate culture', 'management by objectives', the very word 'globalisation' itself--out it all pours!

Lyric's love for the feel of words in your mouth, its insistence on the stubborn opacity of language, can force totalitarian transparencies to stumble, to think twice. The lyric can be a place in which to insist on the irreducibility of desire. It can evoke dialect, accent, the local and rooted in the face of a globalising, one-size-fits-all, so-called Washington consensus.

Gaff Gerhart: How does the South African Communist Party justify remaining in a political coalition with the ANC now that the Mbeki government has made clear its alignment with capital and hostility to organized labor?

Jeremy Cronin: I don't agree that there is a categorical alignment with capital and a concomitant hostility to organised labour from the side of the Mbeki ANC government. The ANC is not, has never been, a socialist organisation. But nor is it anti-socialist. It is, essentially, a radical democratic, Third World, national movement. There are many communists and socialists in its ranks, just as there are many in its ranks who are not socialists. We are all committed to democratising our society and to overcoming the terrible legacy of racial oppression. The SACP has, as you know, been in an alliance with the ANC since the late 1920s, and South African communists have learnt much from their non-communist comrades. Hopefully, communists have also had a positive impact on the ANC.

Since the 1994 democratic breakthrough in our country, the trade union movement has scored some notable gains--including massive labour market reforms. Notwithstanding significant job losses, essentially the consequence of a tough global environment, the trade union federation COSATU, which is ANC/SACP-aligned, has grown to nearly two million members.

The alliance between the ANC, the SACP and COSATU is, however, a real (and therefore often robust) alliance of three independent formations. There have been some sharp exchanges between alliance partners in the past few years. These mainly relate to the difficult challenge of assuming responsibility for governing, of not losing sight of our strategic objectives, while, nonetheless, also dealing practically and intelligently with powerful global forces that are not sympathetic to far-reaching transformation in our country. In the SACP we have argued that our government (in which there are several communist cabinet ministers) has sometimes been unduly naive about the possibilities of attracting foreign direct investment (which we certainly need) simply through stringent macro-economic measures. Our comrades in government have argued that we, in turn, are naive about the frailties of our economy, and about the dangers of over-exposing ourselves to a debt crisis that will open our country to an IMF-imposed structural adjustment programme. Those are the kinds of debates we have been engaged in, but we continue to share, I believe, a common strategic vision.

Sharif Elmusa: In your Inside and Out, the reader notices a change of outlook or even of world-view; yet there does not seem to be an explanation for this change. This is what happened with many Communists who were close to the Soviet stance. Let me give you an example. In the poem "The River That Flows Through Our Land," you express an orthodox Communist sentiment, "And a river that trickles/Down the worker's face./The salt river that welds tomorrow forward,/ Steel girder on girder and concrete." Whereas in a later poem, "Moorage," you have lines like, "To live close to every tree you had ever planted.//Our century has been the great destructor of that, "or "Nature: once a touchstone of truth for the romantics.//For the modernisers: more, an untamed invitation." In effect, you seem to be renouncing your earlier moderniser's stance. Doesn't this point to the danger of putting poetry in the service of a political ideology? Shouldn't the reflective poet have been questioning the man of action about the glorification of steel and concrete?

Jeremy Cronin: Perhaps I've unduly glorified steel and concrete. Those lines do have a 1930s Soviet ring about them, no doubt. But the poem ("The River that Flows Through our Land") is, 1 hope, a little more complex than a simple glorification of industrialisation. The poem, which is also an imaginary river (out there, conjured up in the mouth, in here), begins, for instance, as "A swift stream in the high mountains, dropping dental, lateral/Clicking in its palate like the flaking of stone tools." These opening lines refer to the early San stone-age peoples of our country, who spoke languages with many click sounds. The people and their languages, having retreated into the caves of high mountain ranges in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, have now all but been erased by colonial occupation and deliberate policies of extermination. In this poem, and in others, 1 want to reflect on the continuities (and terrible genocidal discontinuities) in centuries of human effort in southern Africa.

But let me not be overly defensive. Yes, of course, my ideas should be up for debate and revision. I think, to return to the topic I've just been addressing, what the communist project in the twentieth century shared with its capitalist rival was a tendency to over-emphasise production at the expense of RE-production. This resulted in several things, modernisation without concern for the sustainability of the environment, in the first place. There was also emphasis on production without much validation of human activities concerned with reproduction--child-rearing, domestic work, household management. The productivist exaggeration also sometimes resulted in a certain blindness to the role of the south in the reproduction of the wealth and civilisation of the north (this latter was more a capitalist than a communist vice). It is easy to see that nature, women and Third World peoples are going to be marginailized in this modernising world-view.

However, I didn't and I don't believe that our response should be to fall behind the modern, to celebrate the archaic, which the European romantics of the nineteenth century tended to do. There is a similar tendency in many Third World countries at present, a flight into archaism, into traditionalism, into the mists of a mythical African past, or into fundamentalism. These tendencies occidentalise some homogeneous entity called the West, to which all evils are now attributed (just as colonial culture attributed venal sexual mores to an orientalised East). This contemporary Third World retreat into the archaic might be understood as a symptom of distress in the face of rampant globalisation, but it leads to a cul de sac.

Nor, by the way, do I think that we should throw away steel and concrete--even in the imaginary of poetry! If production tended to be over-valued in the classical liberal and Marxist approaches, in neo-liberalism it is once more occluded in the great wash of trillions of dollars of digitalised, virtual capital, flowing across the computer screens of the casino that is euphemistically called a "global village". Let's not forget steel and concrete, and the sweat that produces them, in this era of perspiration-free, speculative profit-taking.

Barbara Harlow: Your own poetry has found an important international readership through the publication of Inside (1983), Even the Dead (1997), and the recent combined collection Inside and Out (1999). But your poetry has also become known in South Africa in particular through your own public readings of those poems in various venues and in different contexts, for other poets, to student audiences, at rallies. Indeed one might perhaps even refer to a "performance" of the poems. And some of your poems are themselves about performance--such as "Motho Ke Motho Ka Batho Babang," (cited in "Appendix") "Walking on Air" and others from Inside, or "Running Toward Us," for example, from Even the Dead. Is there a difference between the poems read ("recollected in tranquillity," so to speak) in print and your own reading/presentation of the poems to a present audience?

Jeremy Cronin: Poetry performance needs to be understood, in part, in the social context of South Africa. There are very high levels of adult non-literacy in our society, but, on the other hand, there are strong oral performance traditions--singing, village meeting-place oratory, funeral speeches, and praise poetry. In the course of three centuries of European colonial occupation, these indigenous traditions appropriated and were appropriated by, for instance, Christian rituals--each swallowed the other. In the course of the twentieth century resistance struggles against apartheid, these traditions took a new turn, with oratory, song and poetry featuring significantly and organically in the campaigns and activities of the ANC, the trade union movement, and in other progressive social formations.

Growing up as a young white South African in the granite years of apartheid, I was relatively removed from these realities. I discovered, and fell in love with poetry through books. The poetry I read at the time was mainly European and North American. I was recruited into anti-apartheid political activism in the late 1960s. It was at a time when the ANC-led liberation movement had suffered a major strategic defeat. Nelson Mandela and many others were in prison. What was left of the ANC movement was largely dispersed in exile. I was involved in one of a handful of very clandestine, underground units inside South Africa. Despite my political activism, I remained removed existentially from the broader cultural traditions of struggle in my country.

I was finally arrested by the security police in 1976, and sentenced to seven years imprisonment. It was in prison that my first seriously sustained, compulsive, effort at writing poetry took place. I said earlier, in reply to one of Ferial Ghazoul's questions, that in this period of writing I was trying to find a rather uncertain voice. I wrote without any real sense of eventual audience, I wasn't even sure if the poems would get out of prison.

I was released from Pretoria Maximum Security Prison in 1983, into a very different political situation. The resistance struggle had grown immensely, there was a South African intifada underway. Levels of mass mobilisation and participation were high. In the midst of mass rallies, protest marches, funerals for those shot at the previous weekend's march or funeral, there were many songs and speeches, and some poetry.

My prison poems were published in book form, before I ever tried to perform them into these contexts. But the word got around that, apart from being a 35-year old "struggle veteran", I was also a poet.

My first attempts to perform (it was more reading than performing) were very nervous, but I was encouraged by the generous response. I very quickly realised that some poems worked in a performance situation, others did not. Of course, the performance situation varied, but it was typically a noisy soccer stadium, or church hall rally. There would be police helicopters clattering overhead, tear-gas in the air, and those I was reading to were not exactly a reverential, hushed salon audience--they would be shouting slogans, singing their own songs, and the like. Poetry had to take its chances. The stylistic features associated with oral literatures around the world, which I had used in some of my poems, now began to have a functionality that I had not fully understood before. Repetition, parallelism, call-and-response possibilities, a strong narrative, perhaps, and the bodily presence of the performer to provide gestural and other props to the performance were not just stylistic features, but necessary for the poetics of communication. I began to add other features as well, background information, a channel opening joke that linked to the poem, the ironic reading from a reactionary newspaper report of that day, and so on--the kinds of things I have also tried now to introduce into my recent printed poetry collection.

Since the 1980s decade of the intifada, our country has been through two major (and considerably oral) events--the negotiation process (the 'talks', a kind of national talking cure?), and, after the first democratic election, an extensive and profoundly moving Truth and Reconciliation process. This TRC process involved victims and (less often) perpetrators coming forward to tell their personal and collective stories. On the poetry front there has been a small hiatus, a gathering of breath, and the need for re-orientation.

But progressive poets are starting to get the opportunity once more to perform poems to mass audiences in political contexts. In the past months I have performed poetry at the African National Congress national general council, and to the Congress of South African Trade Unions annual congress, involving, in both cases, thousands of delegates. In the 1970s and 80s the poetry was essentially about affirming solidarity, unity in the face of oppression.

Now, however, it's the conference hall rather than the street-barricade or soccer stadium that seems to be the principal place for this kind of poetry performance. The poetry I am trying to perform now is more self-reflective, self-ironising. Of course, other performance localities have also opened up in our country--including school class-rooms and radio stations--both the national public broadcaster, and a mushrooming network of community-based radio stations. In the case of radio, it is possible to perform quieter, more personal poetry.

Sharif Elmusa: One doesn't have to believe in pure poetry or the sublime to notice that there are some poems in your recent 1997 collection (Even the Dead) that run the danger of being reportage, e.g. "May Day 1986," and others of being social science statements, e.g. "Joe Slovo's Favourite Joke' (cited in "Appendix"). Why did you feel you had to include such pieces in a poetry collection, rather than in a collection of essays or a memoir?

Jeremy Cronin: I like your phrase "run the danger", because I do, indeed, want poetry to take its chances, to run the gauntlet, to find its feet in conversation and debate with other discourses--reportage, political speeches, advertising jingles, social science. I want to underline, rather than deny, poetry's interconnectedness with other discursive forms.

During the apartheid period in the 1970s and 80s, there were furious academic debates concerning the merits of the exciting wave of new black poetry, much of it influenced by Afro-American Black Power ideas. Generally, the academy dismissed this, the most dynamic wave of South African poetry in many years. It was held to be 'crude', 'lacking skills', and so forth. Its oral performative skills, which were considerable, were unrecognised. An occasional poem from this ferment would somehow find its way into a university anthology or lecture course. There it would stand alongside Milton, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and a canon of white South African poets writing out of a European romantic tradition about the veld, the fauna and flora of our country.

I was struck then that the apartheid security police were often better anthologisers. Introduced into the many political trials of the time, was a mass of "evidence"--songs sung at rallies, slogans chanted, graffiti on walls, messages on T-shirts and buttons, pamphlets that had been circulated, things said in political rallies and funeral orations, and, often as not, in the bulky charge sheets, there would be lines from poems, lovingly transcribed from hidden tape-recorders. All of this was meticulously scanned, glossed, and interpreted. If only the literature professors had shown half as much textual thoroughness and inter-textual awareness!

Barbara Harlow: Speaking of anthologising, three of your poems have been included in the anthology edited by Carolyn Forche, Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century, Poetry, of Witness (Norton, 1993). The poems "The Naval Base (Part III)," "Motho Ke Motho Ka Batho Babang (A Person Is a Person Because of Other People)," and "Group Photo from Pretoria Local on the Occasion of a Fourth Anniversary (Never Taken)"--are taken from your first collection, Inside, and are included in the anthology's penultimate section on "repression in Africa and the struggle against apartheid in South Africa." The organization of the entire anthology is in itself quite interesting, beginning as it does with "world historical" events at the beginning of the century (Armenian genocide, WWI, the Soviet Union [1917-1991], the Spanish Civil War, WWII, the Holocaust/the Shoah, and then shifting from chronology to cartography--Eastern and Central Europe, the Mediterranean, Indo-Pakistan, Middle East, Latin America, United States, Korea and Vietnam, Africa, and China). Such a project as this one by Carolyn Forche raises many questions--as to selection, organization, to be sure--but also as to the role of poetry in the making up of historical narratives. Could you comment on any of these processes--poetry, anthology, history, dare I say "narrative" again in this context--and their connections and their potential for influencing further work.

Jeremy Cronin: It's pleasing to have been included in Carolyn Forchd's anthology, she's a very fine poet. I have not really thought about the broader questions you pose, at least not in the terms that you pose them. But I have become concerned about a related matter--the mapping, or if you like the anthologising, of apartheid into the twentieth century. Here in South Africa, one, perhaps dominant, mapping of our own recent past tells the story of a twentieth century that was characterised by three 'grotesque anomalies'--Nazism and the Holocaust, Communism and the Gulag, and Apartheid. The implication is that, apart from these anomalies, the twentieth century was a relatively normal place. Happily, so this narrative continues, the three great anomalies are now, at least in their grander variants, 'things of the past'. The end of Nazism means that Western Europe could return to its 'true vocation', home of democracy and human rights. The end of communism means that the East can become West. And the end of apartheid means that South Africa can now join the happy family of nations.

For me, what is deeply concerning in this narrative is not so much the assumptions it makes about Communism (with a capital C), but that it overlooks a major reality that shaped the world, not just in the twentieth, but also in the immediately preceding centuries. That reality is colonialism--whose impact and legacy continue to reverberate. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, living standards in Western Europe were similar, possibly lower, than in most other parts of the world. The abyss that has opened up between the North and the South over these past centuries is not accidental, it is the result of centuries of colonial dispossession, genocide, plundering, the slave trade, structural adjustment and generalised oppression. That abyss has widened and deepened in the supposedly post-ideological decade of the 1990s.

For me, apartheid is not some singular and absolutely exceptional reality, it was one more brutal variant of colonial, semi-colonial and neo-colonial domination. When the North calls itself the West, it too easily renounces any complicity in the widening abyss between most of the North and most of the South. When my own country too easily speaks of a 'post-apartheid' rainbow South Africa joining 'the family of nations', we ignore the persistence of the apartheid legacy in our own society, and we easily forget that the world itself is divided by a gap as wide and as brutal as any dreamed up by the architects of apartheid.

I suppose, in answer to your question, if anyone is kind enough to anthologise some of my poems, I would like them to be thought of, primarily, as voices, among many, in a centuries long struggle against this systematic, unjust division of humanity. I hope this applies to my love poems and my performed, mass rally poems, to the poems of record, and to the quieter poems to be whispered.

(*) The interview was conducted in writing in Fall 2000.

Appendix *

THREE REASONS FOR A MIXED, UMRABULO, ROUND-THE-CORNER POETRY

   i.

   A poem is meant to stand upon its own
   Like a Grecian urn in some colonial museum,
   The object of a contemplation
   (Thou still unravish'd bride ...) that obscures:

               The mud of its production;

               The complicity in our gaze.

   ii.

   Between, let's say, May 1984 and May 1986
   (Speaking from my own limited, personal experience, of course)
   There was a shift out there
   From lyric to epic.

   iii.

   Our contemporary, the great northern Ireland poet,
   Writes from within and for
   A culture that assumes Homer, Spencer, Yeats.

   I live in a country with eleven official languages,
   Mass illiteracy, and a shaky memory.

   Here it is safe to assume
   Nothing at all. Niks.

(Jeremy Cronin, Inside and Out 92)

* The three poems included in this "Appendix" by permission of the author, Jeremy Cronin, are from his Inside and Out (Cape Town: David Philip Publishers, 1999), pp. 92, 120 and 14.

JOE SLOVO'S FAVOURITE JOKE

'It's Cuba, you know, 1959. The guerrilla forces have just taken power, and there is a hurried meeting of the leadership in the newly liberated Havana. Afterwards, shaking his head, a bewildered Che Guevara takes his friend aside: 'Comrade Fidel, why on earth have you made me Minister of Banking?'

'Well, you put up your hand when I asked: Who here is an economist?'

'Oh my no-o-o,' groans Che, 'I thought you asked: Who here's a COMMUNIST?'

   The struggle calls for more than laughter.
   But also laughter. History can advance on its funny side
   By freak, frailty and unplanned--Joe understands that.

   As he understood the imperative of the plan,
   Decisive action, the general line, which is why

   In the last years of his life, it wasn't the collapse
   Of the wall of stone certainty alone,
   But something deep in his personality

   That led him to recommend both
   Socialism and the market.

   I imagine now him saying: The plan
   Is the plan, and the market
          Is a joke.

   Under capitalism--a bad joke.
   Under socialism ...
   who knows?

(Jeremy Cronin, Inside and Out 120)

MOTHO KE MOTHO KA BA THO BABANG (A PERSON IS A PERSON BECAUSE OF OTHER PEOPLE)

   By holding my mirror out of the window I see
   Clear to the end of the passage
   There's a person down there.
   A prisoner polishing a doorhandle.
   In the mirror I see him see
   My face in the mirror,
   I see the fingertips of his free hand
   Bunch together, as if to make
   An object the size of a badge
   Which travels up to his forehead
   The place of an imaginary cap.
                (This means: A warder.)

   Two fingers are extended in a vee
   And wiggle like two antennae.
                (He's being watched.)

   A finger of his free hand makes a watch-hand's arc
   On the wrist of his polishing arm without
   Disrupting the slow-slow rhythm of his work.
   (Later. Maybe, later we can speak.)

   Hey! Wat maak jy daar?
             --a voice from around the corner.

   No. Just polishing baas.
   He turns his back to me, now watch
   His free hand, the talkative one,
   Slips quietly behind
                --Strength brother, it says,

   In my mirror,
                A black fist.

(Jeremy Cronin, Inside and Out 14)