Like
most middle-class touristic people who visit Cape Town, I guess, I have now and then dunked
my semi-naked body in one or another of the surrounding seas. Always there is
someone in the water off Fish Hoek or Muizenberg, Kommetjie or Clifton Beach.
What does it all mean? Why do some perform this strange ritual, while others
are terrified? What is the social meaning of this liquid sensuality? How has
the sheer geography of this ocean-girt city inflected the behaviour of its
inhabitants? Can the disparate motivations of all those individuals add up to a
pattern, an identifiable ripple in the fabric of our society?
Naturally,
there are more writers in Cape Town than you can shake a fresh steenbras at,
and many of them have written about swimming off Cape Town – as far as I know a
wholly unexplored literary motif.
I
started thinking about this – or doing something in my head resembling swimming
more than thinking – because in browsing the poetry journals, as one does, I
couldn’t help noticing how many swimming poems there are. These are quite
distinct from poems about the ever-present ocean itself – what Finuala Dowling
called in one poem the “Mad Atlantic” – and distinct from perhaps equally
numerous beach-walk poems. It’s the act of immersion
that intrigues me, the contact of human skin and salt water, and the relations
of this immersion to gender, class and race, to sharks and gulls and kelp, to pleasure
and fear, to athleticism and escape, to baptism and reverence. Poems and novels
begin to hint at the layered meanings that swimming bears for its various practitioners.
One might start with two extracts from poems by well-known Capetonian
poet and academic Kelwyn Sole. In “Poems of the sea for me”, the ocean is both “motherland” and “fatherland”:
Here
to run closer
and dive in
means to
come to
a jolt of blindness
a mordancy of salt
that only shocks
until it passes, and
the swimmer
can perceive
differently
to before
- my fatherland’s the sea (New Contrast 39:48)
Sole’s
poem “Ocean” sounds more cynical about our condition. Perhaps the sea (as Natal poet Douglas
Livingstone repeatedly suggested) is our ultimate origin, to which we
subconsciously long to return – so we at some level feel weirdly in exile on land:
the
sea
does not coddle its children;
we hunker down through squalls,
trust to skidding compasses
past sleeting rain and windscream
merely to be exiled, again and again,
finally stranded ashore: and come
to ourselves walking upon doctrines
of rock or
sand
Often immersion in the sea is used as a metaphor for
something else – the progression of a love-relationship, for example. This is the case in Rosamund Handler’s “Letter from...”
the cowed hush of waves
made me feel
ephemeral at twenty-two
the lichened rock
to which I clung
rigid as the face of a dead man
winter again
so many seasons untraceable
yet I recall how it was:
how I could have let go
if only you had held fast
(New Contrast 148:19)
Sarah
Frost’s “From the sea” takes this kind of figuration a bit further, here depicting the struggles of the poet herself:
You, poet, alone, immobile, at your keyboard,
the night sighing, a stranger at your back.
You wrestle the anger of the invisible,
lay it down. Stop picking at the scab of ‘not good enough’,
that makes you mute, look around.
Poets shoal within reach,
also surfacing to breathe. (New Contrast 151:11)
This makes for a nice segue to a novel which is also
centrally about a poet and the sea, Finuala Dowling’s lovely What Poets Need, whose cover actually depicts
a man swimming. The novel’s protagonist, struggling poet John Carson, regularly
escapes into the water. Sometimes he has kids in tow:
Another still, hot day dawned, buzzing with the
expectations of school holidays. This morning I took Sal, Harriet and Vera’s
Alan with me when I went down for my swim at Dalebrook pool. Alan so loved it
he stood before me shivering and thin in his towel, asking could we stay there
all day ... On the slippery back wall of the tidal pool, Sal fights with him
(hand to hand combat) but then steps back in her little Speedo costume and
says, ‘I’m the princess. I don’t fight’. (176)
The
following passage is particularly suggestive.
I swim there [Fish Hoek] at least once a week, usually
because the tidal pool here is empty of water or too full of people. The men
who swim at Fish Hoek corner in the morning are very interested in the water
temperature. ’16.9’, they like to say, heartily, reading from a thermometer
pendant. The women just stride in, adjusting their bathing caps and laughing as
they catch waves on their boogie boards. I’m sort of friendly to them, but
quite relieved once I’ve passed the breakers and am alone.
I thought
today about those few seconds before you’re properly ‘in’ cold water: how
unpleasant it feels as you stand there clutching your unwilling sides. It must
be fear of the evolutionary step backwards: back to the old amphibian life.
Then, when you’re in, how lovely it is, all cares gone.
In
that, you can feel the subtle pressures of gender roles, tensions between
companionship and solitude, dress fashions, the imprint of scientific models. And
there are more (so to speak) undercurrents in the next extract: sensitivity to
seasonal changes, seaborne occupations, modes of leisure, the interface of sea
and human architectures – and the internally liberating effect of the swim
itself:
In October, you can still see whales breaching, and hear
them blowing. Always on calm days there are kayaks gliding, and in almost all
weathers, a fishing boat near the horizon. I rest my arms on the wet wall, look
across at Simon’s Town bay in the distance and the harbour with its protective
dolosse in the foreground, and say to myself, This is your life. It is hard to
believe I am so lucky. (195)
The
assumption that “swimming is always therapeutic” can be deceptive, though. John
Carson takes his ailing 70-year old mother swimming:
... I stayed with
her till she seemed to be swimming at her ease. Then I struck out as usual,
aiming for the round house at Sunny Cove as my marker. I turned back at one
point to check on her, but she wasn’t there. I was puzzled, peering. Something
was wrong. I swam back inshore as rapidly as I could. Two men – a father and
son, I think – were lifting my mother’s frail, limp body out of the water. She’d
decided to cut her swim short, she’d been returning to the shore, when a wave
had come from behind and felled her.
We helped
her to her feet. She spluttered and staggered ... She hardly spoke again after
that, though she lived another two weeks. (204)
The antithesis between the therapeutic and the dangerous swim
is also featured in perhaps the best-written of the novels I touch on here:
Justin Cartwright’s White Lightning (2002).
The rather unfortunately-named James Kronk has returned from England to the Cape
to tend his dying mother. He tries to reintegrate by, among other things,
connecting with ‘nature’ through mountain walks – and swimming:
The fuzzy lights on the lower levels of the mountain are
visible in the biscuit twilight as i enter the water. I catch a wave easily –
they are strong but benign, rolling resolutely to the beach – and then another.
The water always feels warmer after the sun has set, warmer and more viscous. I
emerge from the waves a better man, towel myself, and sit at the water’s edge.
(180).
But the
mad Atlantic is fickle, and late in the novel Kronk’s own internal and societal
unravelling (I won’t reveal too much) is reflected in turbulent weather. He is
chased into the sea by some angry pursuers. This is escape for real, rather
than escapism:
The grey waves are huge. The wind is holding them back so
that they rise and fall sharply, their crests dispersed by the wind. Gulls cry
in their cold-hearted fashion. Here on shore the rain and the mist are so low that
the tops of the sand dunes are obscured, but out to sea, some miles away, a
filtered light strikes the water, forming a silver island within the bay. ... I
run in up to my waist and then dive into
a breaker. As I emerge from this mountain of water, another huge wave follows
and tumbles me over, so that I am rolled towards the beach, where the seven men
are waiting. ... I am beyond the breakers now, swimming steadily,
breast-stroke. My plan is to swim far out of sight and wait until night falls,
perhaps an hour away, and then come ashore in the dark. ... I keep swimming ...
out to where my father nearly caught the biggest Red Steenbras ever seen ...
(237).
I won’t
spoil the ending for you. But it’s a reminder that for all the swimmers taking their pleasure, there are those who failed to swim, and died: so many shipwreck
victims, the Xhosa chieftain Makana, who drowned trying to escape from Robben
Island in 1819, to the famously suicidal Afrikaans poet Ingrid Jonker, who walked into the ocean to drown in 1965.
In the very first poem of AndrĂ© Brink’s selection of translations, Black Butterflies (2007), entitled “Escape”, Jonker wrote of death in
water as a liberation from her own mental distress:
From this Valkenberg [mental hospital] have I run away
and in my thoughts return to Gordon’s Bay
...
Washed out my body lies in weed and grass
in all the places where we once did pass.
So,
more or less, it transpired. But let’s end on a more cheerful note – a scene
from, of all places – Agatha Christie’s one southern African-set crime
thriller, The Man in the Brown Suit
(1924):
I caught a fast train to Muizenberg and got there in about half an
hour. It was a nice trip. We wound slowly round the base of Table Mountain, and
some of the flowers were lovely. My geography being weak, I had never fully
realized that Cape Town is on a peninsula, consequently I was rather surprised
on getting out of the train to find myself facing the sea once more. There was
some perfectly entrancing bathing going on. The people had short curved boards
and came floating in on the waves. It was far too early to go to tea. I made
for the bathing pavilion, and when they said would I have a surf board, I said
“Yes, please.” Surfing looks perfectly easy.
It isn’t. I say no more. I got
very angry and fairly hurled my plank from me. Nevertheless, I determined to
return at the first possible opportunity and have another go. I would not be
beaten. Quite by mistake I then got a good run on my board, and came out
delirious with happiness. Surfing is like that.
You are either vigorously cursing or else you are idiotically pleased
with yourself. (94)
So much for being at sea on a “plank”.
*****
Excellent article Dan. In Ariel's song, 'Full fathom five...' Shakespeare uses the sea to define the creative process. I have a preference for strong, brown fivers.
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