You have described the poem, on occasion, as an epic. It seems to be part epic, part romance, part quest-story, part travelogue, part journey to the underworld, part historical journey, or family-memoir… Is it fair to say that your life and reading have come together here?
It certainly did feel, when I was writing, that I was throwing just about everything into the poem. It was, as Toni Morrison puts it, a story that needed to be told, which is probably how most writers feel about their work. It is a quest narrative – looking for home – a theme common to most quest narratives. But it is a modern version of it, the quest focusing on the modern-day migrant labourer who, after a while, begins to question where exactly home is. Travelling between South Africa and the Middle East regularly left me with a sense of dislocation that I think most expats and migrants feel and I began the work attempting to express the meaning of that dislocation. But it soon became too evident that my history as a white, male South African was affecting the way I saw the Middle East, and that my own ancestral history of migrancy was part of the wider story, that I was, in a sense, just repeating the cycle – another form of colonialism really.
Of course, part of this ancestral heritage is my education in the Western tradition of the literary canon and its own role in colonialism. I was surprised, in the Middle East, to discover that I was able, for the first time, to write about South Africa with some kind of distance, an outsider-insider at once. It gave me some freedom to see my own white male English, Free State history without feeling choked, through the eyes of the new “Other” that I suddenly became.
So, the poem (“sprawling” as it is, as someone said of it) is travelogue and memoir and quest and certainly a dive into the underworld, along with all the other ghostly expats floating around Arabia – going all the way back to Gilgamesh – and so also a kind of romance, the “hero” tackling his demons. And for me, it is also a kind of summing up. Where have we come after all this colonialist history, this up and down, all this blood and all these bibles? In a sense, we are all travellers, Musafirs, in the Arabic (versions of Musa – Moses still looking for his promised land).
Faith is also an important theme – how to have any kind of faith when religion, economics and politics have swamped it with self-interest and restrictive definitions. “Be this or else!” Ironically, migrant labour is breaking down those cultural and economic barriers.
I pick up, amongst other allusions, distant echoes of T.S. Eliot. Could this fragmented work be your wasteland?
Maybe. Of course, the title is itself an allusion to “The Hollow Men,” and The Wasteland is never far off – with its deserts and no water from the rocks and Moses not finding any Promised Land and the wounded king who cannot heal. If there is a wounded king here, it is probably Gilgamesh, whose Sumerian epic, as everyone knows, is one of the earliest recorded. I discovered that Bahrain (Dilmun) is the mythical place to which Gilgamesh is supposed to have journeyed. So, I found myself, in the Middle East, right back at the place of origins, and emotionally, right back in the desert without which there is no resurrection. The dominant myth of most, if not all, cultures is of death and resurrection. Wandering in the desert is central to that.
In my case, the deprivation was financial, emotional, intellectual, and even spiritual. I had lost my job as a lecturer in South Africa, mostly because of internal university politics, but also national politics – and felt like a castaway for some time. The desert was the only place to go, I realised, and Saudi is where I found a job, so it seemed ironically appropriate.
To depict such an experience is inevitably to use “fragmentedness”, less of a deliberate literary strategy than what simply felt natural to me. There are no neat conclusions, no nice rounding off, and even when you feel you have reached some kind of resolution – can begin to live with yourself and the world again – you suddenly discover a new sense of uncertainty, of limbo, creeping in. It’s symbolized in the plane journeys, in the tenuous relationships with children, in the expat feeling like just another servant used by the master.
Or your Pilgrim’s Progress – translated into Xhosa (Tiyo Soga in 1866) as Uhambo Lomhambi?
I had not been aware of Soga’s version of Pilgrim’s Progress, but it’s certainly appropriate, even down to the use of the Xhosa Umhambi, traveller or foreigner. I suppose we all feel like pilgrims in our lives, which is Bunyan’s point. But the experience of having to leave your country, your city, your wife and children, and trek off far away to earn a living, presents another kind of (mostly undesired) pilgrimage. For me, that pilgrimage led to some interesting discoveries, especially as a teacher of English in a foreign world. If whites in Africa had the power to impose their language and culture on “natives,” then we whites in Arabia had the opposite experience of being “natives” (the word used even in contracts) who were being hired to serve the young population of a foreign country – on their terms, not ours. You are a kind of privileged servant who can be removed at any time, at the whim of the master. So, the pilgrimage is economic and even spiritual, but it is also psychological – the master has become the servant and the student/locals have become the master. For white South Africans this can be a very sobering experience. There is no “final end” to the pilgrimage – unless returning home is seen as an end. But it isn’t really. The pilgrim has learned much more about his place in the wider world, and not to be so presumptuous about what he thinks he knows.
In considering the notion of the pilgrim in the work, can you comment on those who are not depicted as pilgrims – “the locals” – those who dislike the foreigner. What is the dynamic between them and pilgrims?
This strong suspicion of foreigners, even if they are there to serve. As a white South African, one realizes something of how black South Africans must have felt for centuries. Tolerated. But behind this tolerance lies a deep insecurity, perhaps common to all groups in control of others – Hegel’s master/slave. But there’s a strange paradox in this “dialectic.” There is a certain freedom, a relief, in the removal of “baasskap.” You no longer have to wear the mask of superiority. You no longer need to pretend, even to yourself. You no longer need to apologize for your privilege because, for the first time in your life, you are among those more privileged than you ever were. The strange thing is that they take it all for granted. They take their privilege to be a god-given right. The more aghast you are at their attitudes (“we can have you fired if we want to,teacher”) the more you see your former South African white self in them. How relieved you feel not to be them. And how you smile at their efforts to maintain their masks of superiority.
You have what the apartheid government would have called a “mixed marriage”. I similarly have a marriage which has brought cultures and traditions together, so I’m interested in the extent to which your work talks about “mixed marriages” in the face of history?
Another great question. Personal too. You and I share an uncanny number of similarities. The race/class divide has always been the fault line of South Africa’s society. To marry across the old Apartheid “colour bar” is to attempt to contest that line. I am sure neither you nor I married Indian women as a deliberate attempt to break the racial norm. It was, in my case, more a refusal to allow racial difference to dictate personal relationships. But inevitably, the personal here becomes political. This was especially the case in the early 1990s.
So, to write about my own life (as most poets inevitably do) was also to write about the wider experience in South Africa. Is such a marriage just another attempt by white liberalism to appease its sense of guilt? I hope not. In any case, relationships soon become events between two people, not two cultures, even if the wider politics does invade, like it or not. The burden one places on one’s children, having to find identities in a bipolar world and make difficult choices – especially with religious divisions thrown in – is perhaps unfair. In my case, my refusal to convert to Islam caused serious difficulties with my wife’s family, and later, for my child. It was part of the reason for the breakdown, but not wholly the reason.
This is not to dismiss the very real struggle of the black woman in contemporary society looking to assert her value. My experience is that the wider racial and gender struggle women have can be brought into the home, perhaps more so in a mixed marriage.
The Middle East demonstrated similar pressures in mixed marriages – between Saudis and non-Saudis often. Conversion was a given, but if the marriage broke down the battle for control of the children could be painful – children split between continents, not just parents and cultures. Sheena, my second (Hindu) wife, worked with some western women who had married Arab men, and converted. Their lives could be complex. Inasmuch as the Arab world is changing fast with regard to women’s rights – there are more women in universities than men, for example – almost all the medical specialists at our hospital were Saudi women. The old gender fragilities are hard to overcome and Saudi law usually favoured the Saudi over the foreign spouse, whether male or female.
What is the role of the chorus of expats – “underworld guides” – with their “advice”?
I think you might be pointing to the feeling in the poem that the expats’ “advice” about how to live, what to do, is never quite clear-cut and cannot be taken as traditional “wisdom,” either to be accepted or countered. It may feel like a looseness of logic or argument, but I am happiest with it this way. No one assumes they have the final authoritative answer to how to live in the expat world (unlike in their home world often), and that helps one in returning to one’s own home world – as a different person, not making the assumptions one used to. Not surprisingly, many expats never return to their original homes, which often come to feel restrictive.
So, I would say that the “chorus” is a kind of foil for the protagonist, suggesting different approaches to the same issue, especially the issues of wealth, work, subservience and / or superiority. I hope that the poem does not appear to suggest that this chorus must be dismissed either as irrelevant or as some kind of authority. I wanted to leave it open, unfixed. Closer to the reality.
“For faith to grow,” you argue in the text “it must first become nothing”. This “the way up is the way down” descent seems to be an important theme in the work?
Yes, another quote from Eliot. I wanted to try to find some way of interlinking the dominant religious impulses – from Islam and Christianity, but also Hinduism and even Buddhism. In essence, they seem to me to be very similar – the need to give up self, to become “nothing” in order to emerge from the pupa of loss. This has dominated religious and mystical thinking for a long time, as much in Arabia as elsewhere. So, I used ideas from Sunni and Sufi mystics, even though there is this ancient battle between them.
In the African context, it seemed appropriate to ask the question about how so many African people allowed a small band of white marauders to take over their land, and that to suggest (dare I suggest?) that the only way for the present-day society to overcome this conflictual and ongoing aggression is for difference to be made “nothing.” I don’t mean difference must be eradicated, but that its role must change. Only from “Nothing” can we begin to become what we have the potential to become. It is a spiritual idea. But it is also a political and social one. Perhaps our mixed-race children are already beginning this process. What a burden we have left them.
Comment briefly in the section called The Marooned Stoep – the title of the section itself implying a voyage (new pilgrims?) run ashore.
It is taken from a line in Section 1 which refers to the child (my four-year-old daughter) sitting alone on the stoep waiting for a parent to come and fetch her. I still shudder to think of it. The three children represented in Part 2 are my daughter – child of a divorce between mixed-race / mixed-religion parents; my step-daughter – child of a father who passed away when she was 11, and a mother who remarried a few years later, to a white man nogal, who had to deal with all those complexities; and then my nephew, who has been diagnosed with schizophrenia, also affected by divorce. So, each of them represents different aspects of what we as a nation, as a culture, are facing in this turbulent time of finding our feet again after Apartheid. While there is a lot of wonderful stuff, a lot of desire to love and make well again, there is also the experience, which most South Africans have now, of feeling marooned. The relationship between government and people is broken, like a broken marriage. The nation feels schizophrenic – paranoid and suspicious and afraid and angry. The father (all the fathers in the piece) is a version of government, lost and unsure what to do.
This section ends with suggestive phrases: “Forgiveness is home soil”, and “Without you I can never arrive”. These seem to pick up the theme of the Cavafy quotation at the beginning of the poem. Could you comment?
It is the nub of the poem, to my mind. How does a broken and schizophrenic, paranoid society heal itself, especially when trust has broken down? In the poem the words are in the mouth of the father, speaking to his son, who barely wishes to know him. They circle each other suspiciously. Someone must break the circle of suspicion. Perhaps inevitably, it must be the father who takes the first step. I can’t think of any other way of beginning the healing process that does not involve mutual recognition – “regard,” as Emmanuel Levinas puts it, and forgiveness. Someone I read pointed out that Freud never uses the idea of forgiveness in his writings, and that contemporary psychologists have learned that without it, there is no real progression. Harping on guilt and digging up the past doesn’t heal in itself.
To be “home,” really “home” is to live in a place of mutual regard, which includes forgiveness. This is not the experience of the sojourner in another land. It is also not the experience of so many South Africans who feel alien in their own land right now, whose “father” the government has largely stopped listening and because of the enormity of the problems he faces, has simply turned inwards. Without forgiveness and the asking of forgiveness, there is no healing and no home.
The last section is called The Unsettled Amphitheatre. In the context of the poem “unsettled” is a complex and suggestive word. Can you unpack it for us?
I hope the idea of “unsettled” is not simplistic. Of course it refers to “Settlers” who inaugurated colonialism, but also settlers in the contemporary, migrant world who find themselves on strange shores. But the most important meaning of “unsettled” is an emotional and spiritual one. We are not a settled nation or nations. We are still looking for some way to achieve that settled nature – and all our wars are just wild swipes in our attempts.
So, the final part is a kind of collage of disparate voices, ranging from local South Africans, to camel riders in Arabia, to fishermen in Goa and in Algoa Bay, to an imaginary person wanting to heal Saartjie Baartman (one of South Africa’s symbols of unsettled being) by anointing her body with oils. The voices are not meant to offer any kind of coherent logic. The logic of colonialism still rules South Africa, and as we see in Gaza, most of the rest of the world too. South Africa was colonized by the West because it was a sea-route to India. India features strongly in the poem, both personally and politically, but also because our colonization exists because of India. The Goa and Algoa link is, of course, Portuguese. So, India, Africa and Europe are combined. The poem is not intentionally responding to Camoens, but he does linger in the background. In the end, the “First Man” must begin his walk from both north and south, to meet himself, somewhere in the middle of the sea, for everything to begin again, perhaps a little bit less destructive this time.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Notes from the Dream Kingdom: A Story of Migration
If you do not forgive, or do not search,
or do not call my name at night, or wonder if | call yours – I will call anyway, forgive, and wait to be forgiven.
Forgiveness is home soil.
It is the only ground where your eye and mine can see each other, without doors.
I will make these my first steps.
I will walk alone, if I must, though without you, do not know the way.
Without you | can never arrive.
“The genesis of this long poem lies in a twelve-year sojourn in Saudi Arabia, where I worked, teaching at a university in the oil-rich eastern province of that country. It began as a meditation on the experience of migration, loss of home, relocation and cross-cultural encounters. Ultimately, the poem became an exploration of what it means to find “home,” both physically and emotionally, personally and politically. The first part alternates between Saudi (KSA) and South Africa (SA), which is something migrant teachers would experience at least once a year.”
