“…The struggle of black people inevitably appear in an intensely cultural form because the social formation in which their distinct political traditions are now manifest has constructed the arena of politics on ground overshadowed by centuries of metropolitan capitalist development, thereby denying them recognition as legitimate politics. Blacks conduct a class struggle in and through race. The BC of race and class cannot be empirically separated, the class character of black struggles is not a result of the fact that blacks are predominantly proletarian, thought this is true…”- (Frank Talk Staff Writers in ‘Azania Salutes Tosh’ – circa 1981)
front cover:
Tosh by Steve Gordon
back cover:
Kippie by Basil Breakey
The short stories of Archéologie des trous take place in a South Africa oscillating between fantasy and raw realism.
A narrator with piercing and dumbfounded eyes auscultates the holes, which are everywhere: in the bodies, the desires, the ransacked earth, the erased lives and memories, the forgotten loves and massacres.
In this hallucinated fresco, one can just as well autopsy one's own corpse, live inside a cow, foment a revolt of migrant workers, discover a fallen empire at the bottom of a wasteland, engage in the traffic of lice, exploring a black hole by digging in your garden, or being present on the day when the white people left by the sea.
Translated from English by Elisabeth Malaquais and Jean-Baptiste Naudy