KHULILE NXUMALO
“…There is nothing like art – in the oppressor’s sense of art. There is only movement. Force. Creative power. The walk of a Sophiatown tsotsi or my Harlem brother on Lenox Avenue. Field Hollers. The Blues. A Trane riff. Marvin Gaye or mbaqanga. Anguished happiness. Creative power, in whatever form it is released, moves like the dancer’s muscles…” – Keorapetse ‘Willie’ Kgositsile
Ed Pavlic’s Winners Have Yet To Be Announced is a monument to the soul of Donny Hathaway and it is as disconcerting as the above simple need, outcry of the normative languish, that one finds inside the hearts of a hymn, dare that you actually take it, at a surface level.
WINNERS HAVE YET TO BE ANNOUNCED – A SONG FOR DONNY HATHAWAY
Ed Pavlic
University of Georgia Press, 2008
A delicate, yet not so simple, talking to a ghost, telling its tale in a yarn that tingles like the strings of the heart, reminds me of Kgositsile’s This Way I Salute You and ‘Ma Boy Star’, Seitlhamo Motsapi’s tribute to Marvin Gaye: “they seh mahvn/had all the rainbows/reclining cool like storms/in the engine rooms of his voice/i yagree/ like all niggaha/started sinning in church/ velvet staccato baptist holler…”. These are all records of the pain that the quest bequeaths to those who dare choose to carry the burden and get themselves wrapped up in its forest of thorny trails. Donny Hathaway’s flame was emptied of its flicker when he was only 33 years old. Now, that is very sad. Very painful, in fact.
This book immediately challenges you with questions around form and craft, just immediately by how one considers as a work what is called making poems. Making poems is indeed, a craft, and here I salute the efforts of the Black Consciousness school of the 1970s, from which came the idea of proemdra. Or Coltrane or Miles or Ali Farka Toure or Sade – what they created by making the form bend to what they wanted it to say. And then, do the enlisted enter the Golden Gates of the Pantheon of The Superior? Moreover, to have to carry that same, overweighed timbre is already an endless task.
The narrative structure is at once a conversation between a presence, a persona and the idea of Hathaway, mixed with real-researched content, interviews, diary entries, interpretations, conspiracy theories and some of the most beautifully long sketching draftsmanship I have read, like in ‘Interview: Cause of Death’:
“… A chipped brick suspended in a bright angle-beam of low/ winter light, halfway out of the kitchen window with a wooden spoon,/ singing, “Hold me down…Falling backwards in from the ledge… Cold falling over the windowsill, spilling over him/ on the floor. Tears running down, filling his ears.”
So the words’ arrangement is both conversational, positioned for the flight in the colour, the spread of the wings of the emotion, as well as expressing the daring braveness to tempt the end of all explanations. With engagements with the various personas of Hathaway, at many locations, over different time spans (though in no chronological order) Pavlic utilises predominantly the modes of the dialogic communication, usually in reference to some moment in time (real or imagined, at this point it does not matter), and the voice of the poet/ narrator – lending spectra of lights through which we see Donny Hathaway constantly anew.
In order to achieve these modes, Pavlic would have had to conjoin shards that at times appear as impossible to make to become friends in the word, the relaying sense of a story that does not finish, like Motsapi when he says in ‘earthstepper/ the ocean is very shallow’: “… i have one eye full of rivers & welcomes/ the other is full of flickers and fades…”
In ‘Sack full of dreams’, Pavlic writes:
“Trouble is, every real thing is a weave of pleasure and pain. At every/level, both. Water most of all. What’s the difference between water/ that warms and water that burns and water that saps heat from your/ body and turns your lips blue? Very little. Water that fertilizes the fields and water that kills thousands…”
Winners is a book of pain strung and hung on the washing line. It is a faithful admiration and at times a tortured flagellation that traces and follows the shadows of the wick of that candlelight. And it sustains the conversation with a ghost, at times through gales of a tempest, that ask: what is the matter? Is it the poet that now cries, or is what we hear breathe from the timbre of the word on the page, the haunting hover of a soul that did not finish, what they came to this earth to do? Whose pain is this in Winners?
As everybody can agree by now, with China’s dragon’s nostrils in a flare, post the post-millennium; post the age of America as The Great Ruler of the World; post the façade of digital monetary units of the Western Financial Systems; post the promise and appeal of a simple-dancing-man and ordinary State President; post the enigma that will of course remain, and here soon to come, the world after Nelson Mandela, Winners Have Yet To Be Announced!
Yet the harmonic and melodic weaving of the tapestry of pain is something for which Africans are famous for having immense patience. You mostly can pick it up in the church hymns that are derived from a strong traditional root. I am reminded here of the tagline that is displayed on the Orlando Pirates Football Club fleet of motorcars, from a hymn that I know as a Wesleyan type of thing – Hae Duma Ya Tsamaya. Literally: when it hums it goes.
The hymn refers to Elia or Elijah from the Old Testament, who departed this earth upon the wings of a chariot of fire:
Koloi Ya Elia,
Hai Duma Ya Tsamaya,
E ya halalela…
I am taking a wild leap around this thing that comes from African Americans that is generally called soul music. My leap around soul music is this: it is a quest kinda thing. It is a journey into the forest, where none is guaranteed return. Hathaway was schooled in music in church, as was Marvin and his lineage – D’Angelo, and even Whitney Houston.
After all these centuries of pain in the heads of its many-headed hydra, and of gain at the greedy/greasy mouth of their rhizome/ root, for me, after Winners, I am emboldened further in my beliefs around this thing called soul music. There is still a long way, historical quandary to go.
Listen here, to Pavlic in ‘Sack Full of Dreams’:
“Listen to him sing “Sack Full of Dreams…Echoes and undulations… Liquid smoke. He told me once, that when he was / a little kid, he’d realized that’s what “Washed in Water” really meant… He told me these were prayers. In other words, like all others, / desperate expressions of loneliness”.
This story, and others, features in Chronic Books, the review of books supplement to Chimurenga 16 – The Chimurenga Chronicle (October 2011), a speculative, future-forward newspaper that travels back in time to re-imagine the present. In this issue, through fiction, essays, interviews, poetry, photography and art, contributors examine and redefine rigid notions of essential knowledge.
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