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Abstract
Critical responses to Rustum Kozain’s This Carting Life (2005) foreground the poet’s archaeologies, geographies and landscapes to rehearse familiar land-based narratives regarding South Africa’s history of dispossession and disavowal. In this way, they render proverbially “dark” the ways in which the collection’s water and water-related conceptual grid animates affective and conceptual potentialities set resistantly adjacent to terrestrially mediated genealogies of exploitation and suffering. By contrast, this essay undertakes a three-part analysis of This Carting Life’s poetic hydrography. It first investigates the way water mediates Kozain’s apprehension of the interplay between local and global economies of extraction, displacement and dispossession. It then examines how his presentation of pluvial and nival temporalities challenges time scales conventionally desired by the nation-state. Finally, it considers the ways in which Kozain’s deployment of an aquatic bestiary for metaphoric, allegorical and material use animates more-than-human alternatives to human-centred economic, historical, ontological, and political assumptions. By reading This Carting Life “for water,” the essay reframes a collection of poetry located within the arguably hydrophasic context of the postcolonial South as an important literary precedent to a globally emergent hydrocommons and its concerns with relational ethics both within and beyond the limits of the human.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Frenkel and MacKenzie identify “post-transitional” South African writing’s “reduced obligation to the logics of political commitment” and its purposeful contestation of “the national as its overriding context” (Citation2010, 1, 4). Because “post-transitional” unsettles and contests identificatory assumptions familiar to South Africa’s national imaginary, I hesitate to frame Kozain as either a reductively Muslim, “Cape Coloured,” or “Black” writer, while acknowledging that these (and other) codes suggestively inform much of his literary and intellectual preoccupations.
2 I follow Deloughrey and Flores’ description of Kamau Brathwaite’s tidalectics as a concept that “acknowledges both the universal and the particular and recognizes the multiplicity of knowledges and experiences without producing an easy synthesis” (Citation2020, 138).
3 This Carting Life’s publication in 2005 marks it as a collection composed under the sign of the Growth, Employment and Redistribution plan (GEAR), a macro-economic policy that Narsiah has described as being “decidedly neoliberal in form and substance” (Citation2002, 29, 34).
4 I regard Kozain’s hydrological bestiary as more than metaphoric. Its materiality does not only analogize abject expressions of affect, nor does it act solely as Jamesonian (Citation1991) allegories, projections, or symptoms of the otherwise indiscernible complexities of capital.
5 Though it retains the racist connotations familiar to its American usage, Kozain’s “laughing coon” denotes the “Kaapse Klopse” or “Cape Minstrels,” performers in Cape Town’s “Tweede Nuwe Jaar” carnival. The festival is traditionally associated with 2 January, when Cape slaves were given a day off to celebrate the New Year. Rather than celebrate the carnival’s more radically eruptive association with Cape creolization and countercultural transgression (Battersby Citation2013, n.p.), Kozain here resists the stereotyping of the Cape’s “coloured” community as “song-and-dance” men.
6 See “Afrikaans Language Monument” (Citationn.d.)
7 Marieke Norton describes “the Cape snoek (Thyrsites atun) [as] a species of fish that has a significant presence in the histories of the Western Cape and Cape Town,” noting further that it “is especially closely associated with the Cape’s so-called ‘coloured’ population” (Norton Citation2013, n.p.).
8 Nixon draws on Ramachandra Guhar and Madhav Gadgil’s description of “‘ecosystem people’ [sic], dependent for their survival on the seasonal cycles of a web of ecosystems and therefore often living in circumstances of adaptable mobility” (Nixon Citation2010, 63).
9 Habermas imagines the public sphere as a space “made up of private people gathered together as a public and articulating the needs of society with the state” (Citation1991, 176).
10 “The Western effectively served the function of first reaffirming and then patrolling the borders of hegemonic masculinity, that is to say white, US born, heteronormative” (de Basio Citation2015. http://www.journals.openedition.org/ejas/11155).
11 An alternative reading might suggest that Kozain’s deployment of the term muchachos signals either a reappropriative identification with the Western’s conventionally heroic (and largely white) cowboy, or a potentially rebellious alliance with its Mexican other, stereotyped as outlaw yet justifiably reinscribed as a figure resistant to American imperial expansionism.
12 Kozain’s depiction of wasted time departs from Adorno’s analysis of leisure time as that which “denoted the privilege of an unconstrained, comfortable lifestyle,” or free time which, due to its conscription by the demands of the culture industry, represents “nothing more than a shadowy continuation of labour” (Adorno Citation1991, 162, 168).
13 Samuelson, in a voice note prepared for the Reading for Water project, wonders “what [we] might come to apprehend about water as both ‘universal solvent’ and index of inequality on a blue planet that is simultaneously, and in uneven ways, becoming more aqueous and more parched.”
14 In Kozain’s next collection, Groundwork, the tiger-fish returns as panthera tigris in “Kingdom of rain II,” where “with muted plash surprising for its size, / a lone tiger breaks the algae on the water / and swims to the other side.” Here, the creature redeems the poet from the burdens of time, prompting the admission that he would “like to see … it rise / with its wet fur onto the far bank, / turn once, its whiskers dripping, to look at me here outside of history” (Citation2011b, 77).
15 Kozain’s ambivalent portrayal of the sea recalls Freud’s discussion, in “Civilization and Its Discontents,” of the oceanic feeling’s linkages to both “the instinct to preserve living substance and to join it to ever larger units” and the death instinct which seeks “to dissolve those units and to bring them back to their primaeval, inorganic state” (Citation1930, 118–119).
16 Alongside anemone, Deckard and Oloff site octopuses and giant crabs as part of an oceanic bestiary signifying radical non-human otherness resistant to incorporation by capital.
17 Overfishing has decimated local crayfish populations and thrust desperate communities to turn to poaching – a manifestation of resilience that only intensifies precarity and violence. See de Greef (Citation2016); Green (Citation2016).
18 Consider, for example, former President Thabo Mbeki’s suggestion at the 2002 United Nations World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD), that “[a] global human society based on poverty for many and prosperity for a few, characterised by islands of wealth, surrounded by a sea of poverty, is unsustainable.” A similarly optimistic pronouncement by another former President, Kgalema Motlanthe, accompanied the opening of the Berg River Dam, located less than 25 kilometres from Kozain’s Paarl. Initiated in 1989 by the apartheid state’s Department of Water Affairs and Forestry, approved in 1999 by the post-apartheid state’s Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism, and officially opened in 2009, the Berg Water Project exemplifies the continuance of neoliberal modes of development across ideologically differentiated historical periods. According to Motlanthe, the Berg Water Project would “contribute to better water security for Cape Town and its surrounds … [facilitate] the general improvement of the quality of life … and stimulate sustainable economic growth and contribute to job creation.” See Mbeki (Citation2002); Motlanthe (Citation2009).