The following is the transcript
of a discussion set up during the DCS Crossings project.
We took Tatumkhulu to Westerford High School in Cape
Town where he discussed his poem about District 6, Nothing’s
Changed, with three fifteen year-old students,
Robert, Anwyn and Mark.
Tatumkhulu
Every time I pass through
the old District 6 I’m bitter all over again. You
wonder why I’m so bitter about District 6? I went
to live there in 1964 about two years before they
started to bulldoze it down. It had that Oriental
flavour about it which I had missed for most of my
life. There’s a travel author, I can’t remember his
name now, who described the smell of Cairo as being
the smell of leopards and lilies, very poetic and
very accurate. The stink among the fragrance. The
incense amongst the bile. And I immediately grew roots
in District 6, and I stayed there ‘til the very end,
until the last house was bulldozed down and then
I
moved into Woolmer estate which is alongside. But
I was there until the very last walls fell, clinging
to it. Desperately.
I’m going to ask you
a question. In the first stanza it says, ‘Tall, purple-flowering,
amiable weeds.’ Why did I choose a metaphor like that
? Why ‘purple-flowering’ and ‘amiable’? Remember,
the stanza begins with all kinds of objectionable
things ….. ‘small round hard stones click under may
heels, seeding grasses thrust beaded seeds into trouser
cuffs …’ I’d like to ask you that also, why the staccato?
Anwyn
Movement ?
Robert
Staccato …..
Tatumkhulu
Resistance.
Robert
Resistance!
Anwyn
Aaah !
Tatumkhulu
The words are resisting
my entry into hallowed ground. But then, all of a
sudden, I talk about ‘tall, purple – flowering amiable
weeds’. This sounds more romantic, almost beautiful
!
Mark
Well, I though it was
almost as if you were remembering, because you’ve
now returned, and you’re remembering, trying to see
everything ….
Tatumkhulu
Yeah … it’s true, I was.
But why am I remembering those particularly almost
contradictory plants ? I’m talking about tins, and
seeds that are obstructing me, now all of a sudden
I’m talking about something quite beautiful !
Anwyn
Well ….
Tatumkhulu
‘Purple-flowering, amiable
.."! Friendly.
Robert
Maybe … you talked about
resistance to coming back, and resentment, maybe,
to returning …
Tatumkhulu
Uh huh …
Robert
… and I think maybe towards
the end of the first stanza that resistance has …
you’ve overcome it ?
Tatumkhulu
No!
Robert
No? Wrong?
Tatumkhulu
Anything but !
Robert
Anything but….(laughs)
O.K. !
Anwyn
Well, I’ll take a guess.
The weeds themselves are plants, and, although they
seem like an obstruction to people, they are a sign
of life and they stand tall even tho’ they seem to
be an obstruction and they’re just living like any
other plant and although they seem to be less than
the other plants that people have in their gardens,
they grew in the most unlikely places and the purple
part…. I don’t know, this is just me, but purple is
both red and blue and people talk about being blue-blooded
and red-blooded and it doesn’t really matter because
all together it forms one colour anyway.
Tatumkhulu
No, it’s much simpler
than that, or not, I don’t know. Look, weeds grow
anywhere, that’s why they’re amiable, they don’t care.
They don’t care whether it’s your private garden or
a municipal empty lot, they just grow. They’re quite
happy about it. And they don’t, they’re not particularly
hostile to you. And purple is beautiful, except for
one instance, purple is the colour of death …..
Robert
Yes
Tatumkhulu
So this is both beautiful
and deadly, and friendly. It is all three. It is
a complex, three faceted metaphor. It means that
even
in the midst of obstruction, even in the midst of
resistance, even in the midst of discontent, hostility,
something beautiful and subtle and strange can
exist.
Now I warned you, this poem is very complex; it’s
not what you think it is.
Robert
In the third stanza you
make a reference to incipient Port Jackson trees …
Tatumkhulu
Ah hah. Mmm
Robert
Now Port Jackson trees
being an alien plant from Australia introduced last
century, they invade our natural indigenous surroundings
and destroy it and, I was thinking, you find them
in District 6, they are everywhere…..
Tatumkhulu
They are … Mmm …..
Anwyn
…’incipience’, referring
to just starting to grow, young Port Jackson trees.
How… what significance does it have for you ?
Tatumkhulu
Come on, you tell me,
because you’ve given the answer already ….
Anwyn
It’s the alien trees
and the alien buildings.
Robert
It’s the alien … ah …
I see … OK.
Tatumkhulu
That’s why the word ‘incipient’ is
used, the beginning of the invasion, of an alien
species, which is the white take over of District
6. Congratulations !
Anwyn
You just talked about
the white invasion and … can I just see on the other
page where is it … here … your various references
to the colour white in the poem. Are those meant
to
be angry references or were they just passing references,
or were they intentional in any way ?
Tatumkhulu
Oh no. Oh white is very
venomous. Sorry !
Anwyn
That’s O.K. !
Tatumkhulu
I hammer it. It also
is like the incipient Port Jackson tree.
Anwyn
Intrusion …
Tatumkhulu
‘A single rose’, also,
is not a beautiful metaphor. You don’t find people
in District 6 sitting at tables with a single rose
on it. That was an entirely alien practice. It’s a
foreign thing. There’s no beauty in the plant at
all.
Anwyn
I think, when I talked
about how I felt about the poem that verse about
the sophisticated sort of foreign existence against
the
working man’s café ….
Tatumkhulu
The next stanza contrasts
that sophistication, so called, with this almost,
what?
Anwyn
Humanness ….?
Robert
Reality?
Anwyn
Yeah. Reality …..
Tatumkhulu
Umm … hooliganism … something
like that really … bad manners and good manners, but
that’s done intentionally yes, but that doesn’t mean
to say that this hooligan here is approving of the
sophistication of them or vice-versa, oh not at all
… Not at all.
Anwyn
It’s just a contrast
.. ?
Tatumkhulu
That’s why the final
stanza lets the cat right out of the bag, you see
?
Robert
I think that sums up
your anger. It’s shown in that exchange. I mean, here
you say your ‘hands burn for a stone, a bomb to shiver
down the glass’.
Tatumkhulu
Maybe that’s a bit too
act emphatic, I don’t know. But it sounds nice !
Robert
Oh, certainly. But I
mean it’s just … and even again at the beginning of
that last stanza ‘I back from the glass, boy again,
leaving small mean O, of small mean mouth’,
I think that’s a beautiful stanza. It sums up, I
think, in my opinion your whole feeling of the poem.
Tatumkhulu
Why ‘boy again’?
Robert
Why ‘boy again’ ?
Mark
I was going to ask about
that. Is the reference to ‘boy again’ because non-whites,
the males, would be called by whites ‘boy’ in a derogatory
manner ? Is that a reference … since they’d say, ‘Hey
boy ! Do this … Do that !’
Robert
‘Garden boy.’ Also the
for the chars … the domestic workers …. were called
‘girls’.
Tatumkhulu
It’s a good interpretation,
yes, I wouldn’t fight about it, but it goes deeper
than that. In fact, it’s a much more complex metaphor
even than that. It is more …
Robert
Can I ….?
Tatumkhulu
Go on, try …
Robert
I think … are you trying
to show your longing for the past … and going back
to when you were …
Tatumkhulu
You’re getting one facet
right …. Yes.
Robert
.… you know, by saying,
‘boy again’, going back to your youthfulness, being
in District 6 before it was bulldozed and people
had to move away.
Tatumkhulu
You’re getting one facet
of it right … except I wasn’t in District
6 as a boy ….
Robert
Oh no ….
Tatumkhulu
It doesn’t matter. It
doesn’t matter. It doesn’t destroy your answer.
Robert
Well, what I mean is,
by saying ‘boy again’ you’re referring to when you
came there first as maybe a person who was born there …
Tatumkhulu
Yeah … now you’re getting
it right again. What does that mean ? That
means I’m universalising the boy … anybody … that
is why it is complex. I am boy again. Not me really,
but everything that is human and decent, according
to the poem, is the boy there, angry at what is being
done. A universal boy, angry at what is being done,
by a universal community. But there’s also an explicit
aspect to this that the kids, in the struggle years,
they used to throw bombs and stones.
Robert
Yeah.
Tatumkhulu
There’s that explicit
aspect of it as well. It is both implicit and explicit.
It’s a difficult one to explain. You must look at
it not in terms of me, that boy, but in terms of
a
universal boy. Any boy who grew up in those circumstances,
and who had that experience.
Anwyn
Why did you, if it’s
the universal boy, how come not ‘child again’ ?
Tatumkhulu
Well I am now acting
for him. I’m feeling as he would feel. That’s what
you call adoption of a persona. When you’re slightly
fictionalising. Well in fact I am fictionalising,
because I wasn’t there. But the fact remains you
assume the character you are trying to interpret
and therefore
you are that character in your own mind and
the more you can do that the more convincing that
persona becomes and that metaphor becomes. That’s
another reason why you must intensely feel your metaphor
and the passion and the meaning of it.
Anwyn
And with your last line, ‘nothing’s changed’.
Tatumkhulu
Nothing has changed.
Anwyn
About how you feel
?
Tatumkhulu
I’m still an angry little
boy.
Anwyn
Is it only about your
feelings ?
Tatumkhulu
I’m adult, I am boy and
I’m still angry. Nothing has changed. Neither internally
as far as my spirit is concerned. It hasn’t changed
externally so far as the beer-garden is concerned,
and my old bungalow house. It’s still the same. There’s
still difference, the division, the unfairness is
still there.
Anwyn
It still exists.
Robert
Tatumkhulu can I ask
how do you feel with other people’s interpretations,
such as the ones you just heard from us ? Do you consider
us to be wrong ? I think we are wrong in terms of
… I mean, you wrote the poem, naturally what you
say is correct, but do you find that with all poems,
do
think that their interpretations can be wrong ?
Tatumkhulu
Oh yes, I think they
can be horribly wrong, but if they are, unless they’re
offensively wrong, then I couldn’t care less. In fact
what I do feel is that I feel flattered that anybody
should wish to interpret my poems. Just to read them,
I mean, that’s nothing. You can read a poem and not
understand a word of it and say "Oh I’ve read your
poem", but when a person does me the favour of saying,
"Look, I’ve tried to analyse your poem and this is
what I think it means", I’m tremendously flattered,
but that doesn’t mean to say I agree with their interpretation.
Robert
Oh no, sure..
Mark
Do you think that it
will change eventually ? Just a question. Do you think
that it will change eventually ?
Tatumkhulu
It is already
changing.
Mark
It is changing already,
yes, but do you think there will come a time when
you will be able to say ‘What they did was wrong but
I think that now I’m ready to forgive them?’
Tatumkhulu
Will I change, or will
the situation change ?
Anwyn
Both.
Mark
Both sides.
Tatumkhulu
Both sides ?
Mark
Will they be ready to
accept that they were wrong and will you be ready
to say ‘OK I accept that you are saying you were wrong
and I can forgive you for what you’ve done ?’
Tatumkhulu
I think I will be able
to change once I see that the old friends and faces
that I used to know are moving back in which is
now
imminent. But while I still walk through there and
I see only the technician and the lonely mosque
I’m
afraid my own feeling have not changed. But yes I
believe that they will change, those circumstances
will change, I believe that I will change. If I
live
long enough. (Chuckles). Not much time left.
Mark
I’ve talked with my family
members who came from District 6. You always get
the feeling that there was something there was
a vibe,
an atmosphere that was destroyed when the people
were evicted and that something you will never
be able
to put it back into District 6. You can put all the
people back in, you can give them back their houses,
but that feeling, that emotion, that atmosphere
is
gone.
Tatumkhulu
Well said. Well said.
