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Abstract
This article analyzes how the notions of what counts as ‘performance poetry’ and who counts as a ‘performance poet’ differ according to context, and its focus lies on how these terms are postulated and disseminated within the South African literary scene. It offers an analysis of circumstantial factors within the South African literary community, which is explored as a site of epistemic violence. This epistemic violence unfolds through the racial micro-invalidations which are produced each time academia and media use the terms ‘performance poet’ and ‘performance poetry’ in relation to black poets and their work, without being aware of the negative implications of this. This pernicious ignorance is exposed and addressed, and so too is the conceptual system underscoring an approach that sees poetry as synonymous with the written word and which privileges the written over the oral, thereby relegating ‘performance poetry’ to an indefinite space, existing somewhere outside the national written traditions.
Notes
1 For J.M. Coetzee (1993: 10), a classic is a piece of art that has ‘presence in society’, is ‘canonical’ and ‘bear[s] the weight of having read into it a meaning for [the author’s] own age’. Putuma’s poem subscribes to this point of view.
2 Interestingly, Putuma responded to this post, with the following comments:
Putuma: How do I like this a million times!
Mashile: I feel a silent rage burn every single time.
Putuma: I know exactly what you talking about. Literally felt heartburn when I read this.
Mashile: I get tired of correcting people, but it is latent racism, whether you know you are engaging in it or not.
Putuma: It is.
3 Galgut (2017: 43–44) reviews three collections of poetry. In order to validate her overall dismissive critique of Katleho Shoro’s Serubelele, she promptly warns the reader that the author is a ‘performance poet’. As such, ‘her poetry is vivid and expressive, alive to the changing rhythm of language … impossible to read … without wanting to vocalise’. A kind of poetry that is ‘mainly, though not exclusively, social and political’ and ‘relies so much on rhythm’ (… which poetry does not?!? …). This document well illustrates the platitudinous approach to ‘performance poetry’ analyzed in this article.
4 Noma Dumezweni’s excellent rendition of ‘Daffodils’ confutes this argument. http://www.bbc.com/news/video_and_audio/headlines/39325952/actress-noma-dumezweni-reads-wordsworth-s-daffodils.
5 From haiku masters to iimbongi, from kids engaged in a cypher to Poet Laureates, from troubadours to bertsolaritza champions (Fowley Citation2007), poets know that a poem performed skillfully establishes a connection with the audience, regardless of its length, style, form, etc. Open-minded critics know that (apart from very rare exceptions) poets compose their works with the ultimate intention of performing them, sooner or later, on a stage. Therefore, as stated in one of the following sections, all poems are – potentially – ‘performance poems’, with one exception: some poems, in fact, are unfit to be shared in public, not because they are poorly written, but because their language and/or content is so shocking that most audiences feel disturbed by them. By exclusion, one can argue that this subcategory of poems cannot be defined as ‘performance poems’, because they work as written pieces, but in a live performance they do not, since they tend to disconnect the poet from the listeners.
6 Ezra Pound (Fisher Citation2006), Basil Bunting (Black Citation2014), and KRS-One (2010), among others, have studied this connection with finesse.
7 Mashile also recalls how: ‘I get called “slam poet” all the time. Then I have to explain to people that I have been on stage for 17 years, but I have never been in a slam.’ (Mashile 2017).
8 Anyone familiar with the stage acts of poets such as (to name a few) Charles Bukowski, Yusef Komunyaaka and Keorapetse Kgositsile (who read exclusively from the page), but also Jayne Cortez, Patricia Smith, Myesha Jenkins and Phillippa Yaa de Villiers (who alternate readings and recitations) would easily identify these acts as complex performances.
9 In this interview Ferrus is presented as a ‘performance poet’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v = i4GSeB6BWqg. The same definition appears in an article by Harriet Box titled ‘Passionate poet speaks to the heart’, published in the UWC Campus Bulletin on 18 November 2016.
10 Exception to this norm are the poems which, in some cultures, are still passed orally from one generation to generation the next, and improvized forms of poetry composed during the performance like ‘talk-poems’, freestyle, and the various expressions of poetry battles.
11 Personal conversation with the author.
12 Kyle Allan is a white poet in his early thirties. Very active in the poetry scene of Kwa-Zulu Natal, he is an event organizer and the author of two poetry collections; Diana Ferrus is a black woman and one of the living legends of South African poetry. Her iconic poem ‘I’ve come to take you home’ started the process of restitution of Sarah Baartman’s remains to South Africa; Koleka Putuma is a black poet in her mid-twenties. The impact of her debut collection Collective Amnesia has been discussed in the introductory section of this article. Karin Schimke is a white woman and a veteran of South African poetry. She is the winner of the 2014 Ingrid Jonker Prize. Kelwyn Sole is a white poet, an esteemed critic and a retired Professor of English Literature at UCT. Athol Williams is a 48-year-old black poet, and the two times winner of the Sol Plaatje Award; Phillippa Yaa de Villiers is a black poet and playwright with more than twenty year-experience in the arts. She is the 2014 Commonwealth Poet, and teaches creative writing at the University of the Witwatersrand.
13 In the biographical notes printed on the back cover of Collective Amnesia, Putuma is presented as an ‘award winning performance poet’. As her comments in this article reveal, it is unlikely that she endorsed the definition.