Moira Richards is a South African poet and author of various schools business and accounting textbooks. She reviews (mostly poetry) books for a number of print and online journals and is part of the review staff of moonset literary newspaper (USA) and of the e-zines, womenwriters.net and moondance.org. Richards co-edited Letters to the World: poems from the Wom-po Listserv, a collection of 259 poets spanning 19 countries and five continents, published by Red Hen Press in California in 2008. She is currently helping to organize an internet festival of women's poetry

Review

Seasonal Fires

Written by Ingrid de Kok

Published by Umuzi

ISBN: 1-4152-0018-1

Reviewed by Moira Richards

Seasonal Fires is subtitled, New and Selected Poems, and the book includes pieces from Ingrid de Kok’s three earlier collections as well as a selection of new (post-2002) work. The poetry spans a writing period of at least two decades and of South African history ranging from the Sharpeville massacre in 1960, to the present. It is the dozen or so poems in the middle of the book to which I return again and again.

These poems are from de Kok’s 2002 collection, Terrestrial Things, and they address some of the testimonies laid before South Africa’s post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) which sat for a two year period in the late 1990’s. And the poems mean that the writer must have read the transcripts of the proceedings or paid close attention to the daily news reports during the time of the commission. I couldn’t. I knew I ought, but every evening I turned on the news and then switched over to a music station.

A few years later, I read and reviewed Hilda Bernstein’s The World That Was Ours *. Hilda was an activist, the wife of Lionel ‘Rusty’ Bernstein, one of Nelson Mandela’s co-‘Rivonia Trialists’ and she takes her readers behind the public face of that historic trial. I wrote then that,

“Her book often reads like a fictionalised story of intrigue and danger. But what spy in a storybook ever felt compelled to get that last load of family laundry into the washing machine before slipping out the back window to escape the enemy? What secret agent ever risked capture to honour a promise to her small son that she would be back at home to kiss him goodbye on his first day of school?”

and

“In our post-apartheid years, when white South Africans now apologise for their past actions, or deny them or refuse to examine and engage with the effects of this behaviour, The World That Was Ours raises impossible questions about that dark time. When I read about how Hilda Bernstein’s activism and commitment to social justice led to her being banned from attending even her child’s birthday party. When I understand that she acknowledged unflinchingly that her activism could, would lead to her imprisonment without trial or recourse to a lawyer, perhaps even to her assassination. When she describes the burden to her school-going children of owning socially unacceptable and non-conformist parents, when she tells how she risked the possibility of never sharing in her youngest son’s childhood, and recounts the ways her eldest daughter had to shoulder the responsibilities of adulthood before she was even out of her teen years... It is then that I wonder whether I myself could have been any better a white person during those apartheid years? Would I have been prepared to make even one of those sacrifices, or to take any such huge personal risk for the principle of human rights? I pray that no one will ever ask me to answer those questions.”

No one has asked me to answer difficult questions about being a white person in apartheid South Africa. There have been no demands on me to think about commission and omission, ignorance and not wanting to know. I had read (small bit by small bit) Country of My Skull, ** Antjie Krog’s 1998 book based on her journalistic experience reporting on the TRC’s two-year hearings. Her book bore a dedication,

         ‘for every victim who had an Afrikaner surname on her lips’

And I was glad then, to be a Richards neé Smith. But now the poems in the middle section of Seasonal Fires will not leave me be. The first is narrated with detachment. Nothing much happens in the poem and it begins much as it ends,

          and after a few hours of testimony,

          the Archbishop, chair of the commission,

          laid down his head and wept.

          That’s how it began.

(“The Archbishop Chairs the First Session”)  

Many of the commission’s testimonies came from women, mothers. One tells of  

          the breathing of a boy deep asleep

          the way the young, even the watchful young, sleep;

          the window splintering,

          shaking shack walls,

          raked breathing of the shot, same, boy.

          The mother and her spreading blanket.

(“How to Mourn in a Room full of Questions”)

Another woman, incoherent, says,

          “They came for the children, took, then me,

          and then, then afterwards

          the bucket bled. My ears went still.

(“Tongue-Tied”)

A third mother apologizes to the commission, to God, and to the imagined white parents who might have employed her, because, to avenge the killing of her son she,

          … in the nursery of her imagination,

          before God stays her mind, her hand,

          puts rat poison in the ribena of the four-year-old

          and in the schoolboy’s warm breakfast milk:

(“Revenge of the Imagination”)

I don’t suppose Margaret Madlana would have cared whether those imaginary parents had an Afrikaner surname or an English surname.

I try to imagine my imagination, if my son’s head were deliberately broken against a rock by a policeman.

I know that I know, that those policemen were security policemen, paid with my tax money, paid to protect me.

The entire Truth and Reconciliation proceedings were recorded on tape and then transcribed into written text. The transcriber had no escape from any one of those millions of words of testimony and questionings and answerings and remembrances. A job difficult enough to have to do, yet Ingrid de Kok’s poem points to more:

          But how to transcribe silence from tape?

          Is weeping a pause or a word?

          What written sign for a strangled throat?

…

          Was it my job to conclude:

          “The witness was silent. There was nothing left to say?”

(“The Transcriber Speaks”)

A witness, a self-confessed torturer in another poem, is unable to answer his victim’s question, our question, What kind of man are you? And the poem’s speaker replies instead,

          This kind, we will possibly answer,

          (pointing straight, sideways,

          upwards, down, inside out):

          this kind.

(“What kind of Man?”)

An inability to answer that question – this is one thing, I have in common with that police captain. These poems in Seasonal Fires make that much clear to me as read, and read them again.

* The World That Was Ours by Hilda Bernstein

Published by Persephone Books Ltd, 2004, ISBN: 1-903155-401

** Country of My Skull by Antje Krog

Published by Random House, 1998,

ISBN: 0-95841-951-5