No 91 - Owls in some southern African poems

A few years ago friends and I turned our car along a road near Beaufort West. It was dawn, a cold Karoo light. Something pale squatted in the middle of the road; a Barn owl. It just sat and looked into our headlights, then even when we turned them off. Not right. Nor did it move much when I approached; dazed, it had surely been hit by a vehicle.  Wary of talons and beak, I got a jersey over it, and scooped it up, hissing. I carried it away from the road into the scrub, and found a sheltered spot, and carefully unfolded the jersey. But the owl just keeled over slowly, and in a moment it was dead. Those extraordinary eyes closed; the feathers of its white breast as delicate as cirrus cloud. I laid it down, to be returned in time to the elements of which it was built.

The encounter seemed iconic of so much of what we humans are inflicting on the wild with our insensate machines. Not just one life taken, but a whole segment of an ecosystem disrupted and deprived. Like wolves or sharks, owls are apex predators, and their removal from a system has disproportionate cascade effects. My own little home locale would surely suffer more rodents and snakes were it not for the Wood owls who drift through the nights and call-and-answer with querying hoots.

According to birders’ bible Roberts, our subcontinent hosts a round dozen species of owl, ranging from the great ‘horned’ eagle owls to the tiny Scops owls no taller than the length of your hand. In their nocturnal discreetness, with their sometimes unearthly calls, it’s little wonder they’ve attracted superstitious awe in many cultures across the world. (Remember Shakespeare alluding in Julius Caesar to the forbidding sign of an owl flying in daylight?) No less so in southern African peoples, amongst some of whom the owl is regarded with fear, if not outright hostility. An owl alighting on a rooftop is often regarded as the harbinger of a death in the family, and some conservationists have deplored what they perceive as the consequent slaughtering of owls. Matthew Zylstra, however, is probably right in arguing that it’s more complex than that: attitudes within any given society are highly variable, and the killing of such animals, though technically at times taboo, results as much from the modern erosion of traditional reverence as from the implementation of ‘superstitious’ fear. 

South Africa’s premier eco-poet, Douglas Livingstone, touches on something of this in an early translation of Shona poet Noel Kashaya’s poem, “Owl”:

When the children are all asleep, all light

extinguished, he starts to wheel

the world: this son-in-law of darkness.

With silent senses, his eyes bambara –

groundnuts in a hollow stone, he knows

everything he sees, despite the darkness. [...]

No doubt it’s that eerie silence, punctuated by an unnerving screech or drum-like grunt, and the preternatural ability to navigate and hunt in darkness, that has prompted humans’ unsettled sense that the owl may be wiser than they are, privy to magical knowledge.

Oddly, I’ve found relatively few southern African poems centred on owls, though there may be many more passing mentions, such as this one from a stanza by unfairly-neglected Zimbabwean poet Rowland Moloney (from “Maleme”):

A shooting star zips over the hillcrest,

Trailing smoke. Leopard coughs, owl perceives,

Night snake slides into the leaves.

The prows of kopjes forge through seas of grass.

The owl is always there, penetrating us with those fierce, astonished eyes.  It’s indeed the eyes that transfix another Zimbabwe-resident poet, Noel Brettell, confronting him with himself, his own vulnerabilities and inadvertent cruelty. His poem “Wind and an Eagle-Owl” begins with the poet-speaker riding out into the hills in the wake of a stormy night’s quarrel with his wife, nature itself reflecting his mood, only to make a shocking discovery:

Crippled and craven, the plovers scattered crying

On the shouldering air, peevish, lamentable:

And in a fence, the great bird trapped and dying

With splintered scapulae spreadeagled there.

You luckless fellow of our night of wind,

Who through the breathing solitudes had hunted,

And blindly struck, like us, pinned

And broken on the barbs that we had blunted.

The poet searches for “a stick to kill you with”, and encounters only a terrible hatred in the owl’s “wildwood eyes”.

Though the imagery is viscerally immediate, Brettell’s owl is in a sense subordinated to the marital spat, becoming a symbol of it – unlike, say, Douglas Livingstone’s famous poem “Gentling a Wildcat”, which is wholly about the speaker’s relationship with the dying animal and its fundamental nature. The impulse to utilise the owl as symbolic of an inner emotional life also governs Peter Strauss’s lovely poem, “The Owl and the Moon”, from his 1999 volume of the same title.  The “insomniac” speaker strolls out into the garden, when

                                                an owl

Up in the righthand row of trees

Hears me, and hoots like a bicycle pump,

Protesting – his warning

Quite unmistakeably pointed my way.

Such singling out!

Such ominousness! I should be afraid.

This mythic dread does not quite persist in the “warm” evening, though, and the presence of the owl fades from the poem, as the speaker mulls over his life, feeling an obscure need to “confess” (to what we are not told, though “Venus” might have something to do with it). At any rate, the speaker concludes that his particular demons “are not of the dark”. The poem concludes with a kind of gentle mysteriousness:

By Marie-Lan Nguyen (User:Jastrow), 2009-02-28, CC BY 2.5,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6911343

This moon preserves recessions, reserves, profundities,

Secret darkness between the leaves. As if

A woodcutter were working there, the garden shouts and thunks

Like a pulse, like a heart in the ribcage –

An owl calls from the garden, the crickets cry:

My demons are not of the dark.

Not unrelated is the late Don Maclennan’s poem “The Owl of Minerva” – also the title poem of a complete collection (self-published in  2008; republished in the Collected Poems, PrintMatters, 2013).  The owl of Minerva or Athena, most famous from the tetradrachm image dating to the fifth century BC, was traditionally associated with wisdom and perspicacity; an owl flying over a battle formation was interpreted as Athena’s blessing. Maclennan prefaces the collection with a quotation from Hegel: “The Owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk” – meaning, it seems, that we understand things only on the cusp of their disappearance. More revealingly, a second epigraph, by Philip Caputo, reads: “Anyone who does not acknowledge the darkness in his nature will succumb to it.” Accordingly, the poem “The Owl of Minerva” is, characteristically, more about the recognition of our own pretensions and limitations than about either the owl or Minerva.

The signs of his life are

a white mound of excrement

below the tree

of fur and tiny bones,

and gentle, warning hoots

in the gathering dusk.

You cannot see

his predatory journeys

through the dark

to fill his maw with mice

and other lesser creatures,

only the chalky evidence

that something was alive

that thought its tiny consciousness

would last for ever.

Similarly, Wendy Woodward’s poem “Parallel worlds”, from her collection Love, Hades & Other Animals (Protea, 2008), draws on both the mythic and the natural cycles of predation, consumption, and defecation – the influence of the natural sciences making itself evident. In the poem, the poet-speaker, on her way to work, has been listening to Ted Hughes’ vigorous animal poems, then encountering two unexpected “avatars” of his unflinching vision: firstly a disconsolate feral kitten, secondly “a  spotted eagle owl, vigilant”:

The owl and I acknowledge each other

but the small cat muses on,

transfixed, apparently, by the terminal moraines

of the barren garden

After my meeting

the cat has gone from the quad

and the hills and plains of his wet desert

The owl, supreme, has marked the wall

with painterly excrement

white against the liver-dark bricks

If the owl has not already eaten the kitten, it seems only a matter of time...

Easily the most thorough-going use of the owl in southern African poetry is Michèle Betty’s recent volume, Metaphysical Balm (Dryad Press). The bulk of the poems are present-tense brief narratives, incident reports if you like, from the episodic ‘biography’ of a generalised, symbolically-laden “Owl”; the poems bear titles like “Owl’s birthright”, “The baptism of Owl”, “Owl confronts a crisis”, and “Owl’s alchemy”. That this is partly modelled on Ted Hughes’ volume of poems, Crow, is indicated by at least two poems, “Owl encounters Crow” and “Owl and Crow converse”. Betty is clearly offering a riposte of sorts to Hughes’ ugly, bloodied bird-character which, in that first encounter, sends Owl fleeing “in trepidation”.  But in the next two poems, Owl frees herself, or is freed by a “mystical creature” – Owl becomes a re-mythologised vector for addressing “spiritual longing”, for finding a “New Brain”, or Light itself. Betty draws on both modern neurological science and the “legion of old souls” embodied in numerous ancient traditions, from Athena to the Mayans to the Biblical, amplified by literary allusions from Hopkins to Zarathustra. These stories overlap and cross-fertilise, until one can, in a “utopian exhale”, find a kind of acceptance. The poem of that title reads:

Across the expanse

of a twilight sky,

a Sickle Moon

and the Evening Star,

Owl discerns mist

collecting resplendent

in humid air,

weightless as the down

feathers of her youth,

dispersing enigmatically

to settle in solitude,

refracted and reflected,

in puffs and pockets,

on each and every

shadow touched.

Owl becomes, in this view, a kind of embodiment of our kindlier, more spiritual natures. If only those of us who, intentionally or inadvertently, destroy owls or their habitats, would listen more closely.

*****

Visit Dan Wylie on www.netsoka.co.za

No 90 – Brian Walter’s new poems: Allegories of the Everyday

  

Wow, Brian Walter, what have you done??

I have always liked Brian – he’s like a cross between a burly bear and an owl with fierce eyebrows and an ineradicable smile. And I’ve always liked his poetry: I wrote in academic vein about his Swartkops estuary poems. I’ve had a weird soft spot for the Swartkops of Port Elizabeth ever since, walking on the mudflats with a friend many years ago in search of pencil-bait and flamingos, we came upon a human arm. Just the arm. I raise this grisly memory because it reflects Brian’s own primary concerns: close observation of the natural world, and questions of social justice. He knows his birds and watercourses intimately, describing them with the same empathy he accords our less privileged peoples.  Poem after poem, in his collections Baakens, Otherwise and Tracks, and the numerous poems he has contributed over the years to the Ecca Poets group, underlines the fact that these two realms are in fact indivisible. After leaving his teaching career at Fort Hare, and moving back to his native Port Elizabeth, he has been doing sterling work with youth poets from the township of Helenvale. One poem in Allegories of the Everyday describes this group locking themselves up in their reading venue, a defence against criminal elements more symbolical than effective – and reading on. It feels like a moment distilled from the national consciousness – it is an allegory of the everyday lives of so many – a poetic capsule. Oddly but crucially, an allegorical reading makes the courageous devotion to the poetic word all the more real.

In Allegories of the Everyday Brian does shift somewhat away from the presence of the natural world, though herons, crabs, wasps and forests make an appearance. As we are accustomed to, Brian’s subjects range widely, from the most intimate and homely – like a pot of African violets or the fate of the poet’s own bonsais, any of which everyday nuggets can be read as allegorical of our profoundest existential dilemmas – to the wittily metaphysical, such as the thought that “my living flesh ... is but someone else’s allegory.”  The concept of allegory – the deployment of word and image to reveal the deepest universal patterns – of course undergirds the collection. A bit like Christian in Bunyan’s allegory Pilgrim’s Progress, the poet is on a quest, by which he can

... recognise the elements, can know

the spiritual trek, the happy allegory,

and can plumb the grave and comic ways

our deep, and old, and endless pathways go.

The path is not always clear, never predetermined, and sometimes deliberately ‘lost’,

setting myself quite pointedly adrift

to wander amongst the quick mundane

so that our simple allegories can show.

Brian wanders far. A number of poems arise from travels, to France, to Guadeloupe in the Caribbean, to Lagos in Nigeria. Brian is as alive, varied and humane as ever, but through many poems runs a vein of new and different sadness. Utilising one of two main literary touchstones, Brian quotes Derek Walcott, wonderful Nobel Prize-winning Caribbean poet: “Spent with heat/ I brood on three good friends/ dead in one year,/ one summer’s shock,/ here where summer never ends.” Brian, too, writes of three recently-departed comrades – to judge by the poem “Thread”, these were Viv England, Mike Snyman and Norman Morrissey:

It’s the frailty

- the thin thread of life.

I’ve breathed words

from tentative scripts

at memorials for three friends

this year, alone

and my heart is as dull

as our hollow

water-tank [...]

This stricken realisation of our mortal fragility brackets and suffuses the collection. The elegiac note is, I suspect, partly responsible for the affecting lucidity and directness of this new collection.  In previous volumes, if I may venture a mild criticism, the poems often struck me as rather rough-hewn and shaggy, which has a certain honest attractiveness. But they at times also feel either slightly strained towards the obviously ‘poetic’ – awkward Hopkins-like portmanteaus, for example – or uncertain about how to end, sometimes finishing with an abrupt nail rather than a resonance which can carry the poem beyond itself. In Allegories, there is almost none of this: the poems ring like bells, or wells. Hopkins is still there (the Kestrel is “our windhover”), but so is Thomas Hardy (notably in the title of Brian’s poem “The Darkling Rainbow”) and Robert Frost (echoed in the lines, “I try to find a thought/ not taken”). It’s as if Brian has managed to combine something of the latter poets’ tight versifications with Walcott’s open but rich marriage of word and environment. Brian includes another Walcott epigraph: “Leisurely, the egret/ on the mud tablet stamps its hieroglyph.” This notion that the world writes us, that our signs and poetries are already implicit in the materials around us, suffuses a number of these poems, too, especially those set in Guadeloupe, in which Brian almost inevitably echoes Walcott’s world of oceanic islands, mangroves and sea-life. A section of the poem “Shell” exemplifies what I mean:

Here, a crab in a shell

tries to make me believe

this homely shell is but

a random thing, dead in itself,

using her house of metaphor

so well in her poetry

of the pathway

keeping herself safe

in a dead shell

alive

with suggestion.

And an enhanced lucidness in the poetry may be exemplified by this passage from “Rags of Time”:

Rare friends during this year of deaths

have gone down into the backward dark;

but here is an old colleague in her home

in a French village, with a fire lit, books

and artworks, masks, husband, daughters.

We walk the woodland roads. A fence

at times keeps our way, or we baulk

at some beguiling path. Blackberries

and rosehips, perhaps a few mushrooms,

or hanging yellow leaves of the season

all tell how the earth rides the heavens [...]

The evenness of the line-lengths, the rightness of the line-breaks, internal rhymes of Yeats-like subtlety, the gently insistent alliterations and assonances (French village, with a fire lit; leaves of the season), and the sheer simplicity of action, brings out a rhythmic quality I’ve not seen so much in previous poems. Not that all poems do, or should, achieve this mellifluous resonance; others rather approach the dark and rough provisional quality of the Rodin statues Brian experiences in Calais. So, in “Rodin”, he writes:

Love here is hefty and never-ending,

the large-limbed suffering is fixed,

the burghers still brood loss of town and being,

of citizenship and dignity, their bodies

tongues for pain:

I feel part of this drama

and yearn to speak to you

but language is stilled in my head,

forms fix, only the leaves of my mind

dry slowly, and darken. Allegories shape,

large and flesh and static.

In this garden enclosed,

I stand before The Gates of Hell.

The parallels with the lives of many South Africans hardly needs underlining. “Here”, “this garden”, can be anywhere. The insoluble tensions here between love and suffering, the Garden and Hell, echo throughout the collection, as does a renewed probing of the role and value of the poet and his art. A number of poems are explicitly about this, such as “Art on Art” and “Metaphors”. I am attracted to any number of lines, gently oracular near-aphorisms which describe Brian’s methods and motivations, a potential manifesto for poetry itself:

... words packed like parcels

[Philomel’s] art-voice

straight and true ... picking and unpicking

silent screaming art.

... it’s the chaos of things

that’ll flush out the hidden.

There are also spasms of doubt. Both the journeys to other hemispheres, and the deaths of loved ones, threaten to turn everything “upside down” (he uses this formulation several times), and the value of the poetic life is paradoxically both intensified and undermined. Sometimes, Brian seems to feel he has himself already gone beyond the Gates into “Deads’ Town”, as Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola terms the afterlife in his famously phantasmagoric, creolised novel The Palm-Wine Drinkard.

Alongside Derek Walcott, Tutuola is the other important literary touchstone. Brian connects his younger and more recent drunken revels – and griefs – with the dreamy dislocations of the novel’s palm-wine tapster. Imagined forays into Deads’ Town, which both underlies and mirrors the land of the living, provide points of leverage to re-evaluate “our naked world, our unbuilt labyrinth”. So the poet-tapster has

                                    ... borne the world’s egg

and becomes such a judge that he can steady

earth and sky, setting the world in its place

below in balance. But our man-judge-god

won’t crack the unsolvable mysteries

but passes them to us, living readers,

passes on his old quest to visit death

and grapple with our unknowing, as all

good story tellers do, or fine drinkards,

on this laughing, trying and troubled earth.

It’s worth reading Allegories of the Everyday just for lines like that last one. The collection is, in my view, easily Brian Walter’s best.

***

Allegories of the Everyday is published by Dryad Press, www.dryadpress.co.za

***

Visit Dan Wylie’s webpage www.netsoka.co.za

No 89 - Captive elephants: what next?

I recently attended an indaba on the state of captive elephants, run by the EMS Foundation at Hermanus, on 6 September: "Taking the elephant out of the room:... Africa's role". Here's what emerged for me.

The logo of the EMS Foundation is inspired – an elephant profile deftly doubled with a human figure, arms spread in flight or embrace. The Foundation was started up by Michelè Pickover, whose work to support vulnerable groups, both human and animal, exemplifies this union: I last encountered her in person when she was still archivist at Wits, and involved in a project to record the post-traumatic experiences of soldiers from all sides of the decades of conflict in Southern Africa. As has been conclusively demonstrated again and again, elephants and humans share all-important familial bonds, hefty pre-frontal cortexes housing deep memory and communicative complexity – and therefore suffer similarly from orphanhood, isolation and enslavement. In a crucial sense, elephant welfare – all animal welfare – is human welfare; environmental justice is social justice.

Yet for the vast numbers of people who have not grown up with animals, let alone wilderness, and see no particular reason why they should, let alone feel extraordinary compassion, it’s still a hard sell. In many such minds, animal, environmental and human concerns exist in largely sealed-off silos. Michelè, author of the go-to text Animal Rights in South Africa, elected to hold this indaba, “Taking elephants out of the room”, in Hermanus, partly because a local entrepreneur named Craig Saunders has been flighting a controversial proposal to import elephants to an ecologically sensitive area near the resort town. This deeply unwise scheme was raised by Michelè in her opening remarks, but thereafter disappeared from the programme. It was meant to be a touchstone for the indaba, which was aimed at promoting a coherent refurbishment of government’s Norms and Standards for elephant management, especially those in captivity. But neither the relevant government agencies, nor Cape Nature, which would presumably have jurisdiction over Saunders’ idea, saw fit to accept invitations to attend. When the ministries of power will not even join the conversation, let alone do anything proactive, one’s optimism for the future wavers.

As all who attended the conference knew, elephants are in dire straits across Africa: some 70% have been killed by poachers since the ivory trade exploded in 2008. Paradoxically, of course, here in the South, we have arguably the opposite problem: too many elephants crammed into inadequate spaces, and therefore threatened periodically with culling, or the non-lethal but still traumatic experiences of forced contraception or translocation.  Indeed, it can be argued that all elephants in South Africa are captive in varying degrees, from the reportedly appalling treatment and condition of Lammie, a sorry elephant imprisoned in Johannesburg Zoo, to even my favourites, the calmly meandering, but still fenced-in herds of Addo. Even the vast space of Kruger has its limits: elephants everywhere are subject to forced removals, breeding regimens, harassment by noisy tourists, isolation from herd life, and being hunted; and at worst brutal taming, reduction to paranoid behaviours in confined and impoverished spaces, and subjection to the humiliation of performance on command and being ridden by jabbering humans. Don’t get me wrong: I understand that there are genuine orphans who could never rehabilitate to the wild, that there are sanctuaries whose methods are as humane as can be achieved, and that snuggling up close to an elephant, being intimately considered by that ruby eye, can be a life-changing experience. But the substrate on which the indaba was premised is an achingly sad one.

The pathetic – or dangerously ignorant – non-response from government aside, the indaba was not as well attended as one might have hoped: the plush Overberg Auditorium was less than half full. I didn’t encounter any actual zoo, circus, elephant-park or sanctuary people, though the Western Cape holds the most captive elephants of all our provinces. Moreover, there was almost no representation from South Africa’s majority populations. Though plenty of useful information and heartfelt intervention emanated from the dozen or so formal presenters, it was largely preaching to the converted. I hope the live streaming of the event was, and will continue, to reach a wider audience. As Marion Garai, head of the Elephant Specialist Action Group (ESAG) stressed on her skype appearance, this needs to be the start of something much greater. What was said here – though there was not much that is radically new, and we surely now possess all the research data necessary to do the right thing – needs to have real impact on the various authorities. (The opinion of several scientists and experts, backed by 300,000 signatures on a petition, failed to persuade Johannesburg Zoo to release Lammie.)

All that said, the indaba was interesting, rich, and replete with expertise. Two premier researchers and activists from the US, Joyce Poole (author of Coming of Age with Elephants) and Gay Bradshaw (author of Elephants on the Edge), joined by skype to lay in the ground-strokes for the gathering, outlining who (not what) elephants are in terms of their capacities, sensitivities, and fundamental needs (those routinely denied them in captivity). The Chief  of the South Peninsula Khoi Council, shoulder draped in springbok hide, delivered a vigorous, even angry paean to the historic linkage between Khoi people and the totemic elephant: “If you kill the elephant, you kill my people!” Simplistic, perhaps; I found his promise to “fight to have the elephants freed” over-aggressive, and his mantra that elephants “rightfully belong to the Khoi nation” over-narrow. But chair Don Pinnock opined that this is exactly the kind of voice that needed to be heard across the world. Indeed, perhaps ears have become dulled to the litany of science, emotion and legalism that indeed characterised the presentations that followed, excellent though they were.

As befitted the policy aim of the indaba, several of these came from the legal fraternity. David Bilchitz, a professor of constitutional law as well as director of Animal Law Reform SA, argued lucidly for an ‘integrative’ rather than an ‘aggregative’ approach to elephant treatment, one that respected the individual, even within a ‘sustainable use’ model. He argues that a notion of ‘respect’ for animals is implicit in the Constitution itself, and that National Parks, for example, would be contradicting their own mandate if they did not include explicit animal welfare in their policies. Two legal minds from north of the border were also impressive: Lenin Chisaira is fighting what sounds like a lonely battle on behalf of animal legal rights in Zimbabwe, where the wholly disgusting and unacceptable (and ongoing) export of captured baby elephants to China and Vietnam was another abusive touchstone for the conference. (Chisaira was equally courageously backed up by Lynne James of the Mutare SPCA.)

The Kenyan delegates

Jim Karani of WildlifeDirect in Kenya, touted as Africa’s first ‘animal lawyer’, ‘staged’ his presentation as a kind of legal case, with audience as jury, and received huge applause for his critique of current ‘conservation education’ and promotion of an extension of notions of ‘person-hood’; if there can be such a thing as ‘corporate personhood’, why on earth not elephants? His compatriot Kahindi Lekalhaile, director of the Africa Network for Animal Welfare and recipient of conservation awards for his elephant work in Samburu, raised some of the most challenging questions: How are policy-makers to be included in the conversation? When ‘public participation’ is called for, who is that public, with what requisite diversity? Most importantly: where are the ‘wilds’ we would like to see elephants returned to? In almost all of them, people live too.

In conversation, I asked the tall, angular and voluble Lekalhaile if Kenyan conservation still experience echoes of old colonial structures, as we do in South Africa, what with the racially-skewed formation and maintenance of ‘fortress conservation’ areas – to which he replied, No, but the present government was worse! Indeed, my impression was that the Kenyans are operating on a different level to us southerners: certain hang-ups have been shed, new issues tackled with an eloquence, self-awareness and sharpness we have mostly yet to match. Such animal activists remain rare and embattled in Africa, their courage inspirational. Which is not to belittle any of the work being pursued by local organisations or the odds they’re up against, in a somewhat different register.

There was much more, including some bright spots. Brett Mitchell, who like Lekalhaile moved out of tourism into elephant affairs, founding the Elephant Reintegration Trust, which claims some success in the tricky task of reintegrating human-habituated elephants into the wild. Twitching his big shoulders in self-confessed discomfort with public speaking, Mitchell presented detailed figures from around the globe of captive elephants – where they are housed (1770 elephants in 468 facilities, 1228 of those wild-born, the US and China the biggest culprits); recent exports to zoos (South Africa and Zimbabwe by far the biggest suppliers); life expectancies (much lower in captivity); and so on. The good news: there has been a 23% reduction in captive elephants in South Africa from a few years ago, mostly due to closures of facilities. I wonder where the surviving elephants went, though? Another encouraging sign: several speakers had been at the most recent gathering of CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species), which has barred further transportation of live elephants other than in ‘exceptional circumstances’. Almost all the delegates here seemed suspicious of CITES’ bona fides; it’s both toothless and, allegedly, too financially beholden to the very traffickers they are mandated to control. Be that as it may, this prohibition is a step in the right direction. 

What direction, though? Crucial issues remained, or were only tangentially raised. Is it time, as Bill Smuts of the Landmark Foundation advocated, for much more aggressive litigation? How best, asked a representative of Voices for African Wildlife, to reach the minds of the young, who will inherit the losses we have inflicted on the world? All but unspoken, there’s the insoluble tsunami of human population growth and associated habitat constriction. Nor is the grand problem merely about saving elephants; as Oxford-based ecologist Keith Lindsay noted, it’s about whole ecosystems, all of which, however one defines them, have become both polluted and fragmented. Elephants are just the biggest symptom of runaway anthropogenic damage.

As the whole hubbub closed, Don Pinnock asked from the chair for one-liners that would capture what should be the clarion message from the indaba. I don’t know what people wrote on the pieces of paper that went forward – for what it’s worth, I  wrote something utopian about the need to abandon an attitude of capitalistic profiteering for animal-based luxuries – but most of those that were broadcast echoed Joyce Poole: Return the elephants to the wild! I agree – but Kahindi Lekalhaile’s words keep resonating: Where are those wilds?

****

 For further detail and some presentations, go here and here.

*****

Visit Dan Wylie's website for books and art, Netsoka.

No.88 - "Wild Deer": The nature of neglect

Ethelreda Lewis ....

– huh? Ethel who? Exactly.

Ethelreda Lewis, née Howe, born in England in 1875, married and settled in South Africa in 1902. She got deeply embroiled in trade union politics, and produced several books, short stories, poems, and essays on the psychology of race. She published her South African-set novel Wild Deer in 1933. It was not a financial success. By the time the publisher David Philip re-issued it in the Africa South series in 1984, it had fallen into almost total neglect. That neglect has remained: Lewis does not appear at all in the regular literary histories by Michael Chapman, Malvern van Wyk Smith, and Stephen Gray. Wild Deer is overshadowed on the one hand by Lewis’s own three-volume Trader Horn (1927), a best-seller; and, on the other, novels of the same period such as Douglas Blackburn’s Leaven, William Plomer’s Turbot Wolfe, and Sol Plaatje’s Mhudi. I have found no critical treatment devoted to the novel apart from historian Tim Couzens’ excellent introduction to the 1984 edition.

Yet as a novel it is not half bad. In my view, Lewis’s insight, political complexity and stylistic flair are as good as those of her much more famous near-contemporary, Olive Schreiner, if not better. Like Schreiner, the outsider Lewis saw all too clearly the abuses colonialism and capital were inflicting on black people; like Schreiner, she detested Cecil John Rhodes and his money-grubbing, territory-grabbing ilk. Lewis got more directly involved in politics, repeatedly over-stepping the Colour Bar, and had a serious influence on the nascent trade union movement. She made particular friends with Clement Kadalie, an avowed communist and also an outsider (from Nyasaland). Her liberal, anti-establishment views found their way into several of Wild Deer’s characters, who range from communist activists to missionaries to an idealistic nature-lover. To Lewis’s credit, she does not come down simplistically on any one character’s side, not even that of her protagonist, a visiting African-American (in the parlance of the day, Negro), globally-successful singer named de la Harpe. (He is probably partly based on Paul Robeson, lines from whose song “Waterboy” form the epigraph to Part One.)

In his introduction, Tim Couzens (who later picked up Lewis’s subject of the semi-mythical traveller Trader Horn to write his own book, Tramp Royal) devotes most space to the complexities of the trade union movement and the obsessive racial dynamic. He makes only passing reference to literary quality and to the dimension that most interests me: the pervasive presence of the natural and animal world – starting with the title. But I don’t think one can make full sense of Lewis’s treatment of racial politics without incorporating animality and Nature (she always uses the capital N). In short, I’ll sketch the beginnings of an ecocritical reading of the novel.

Cartoon of Lewis cradling 'Trader Horn'. aka Aloysius Smith.
(courtesy Africana Museum, via Amazwi Museum of 
Literature [NELM]. Thanks especially to Marike Beyers.)

The title page carries an epigraph from her favourite poet, William Blake: The wild deer, wandering here and there, Keeps the human heart from care. Thus Lewis introduces a Romantic theme – the seeking of escape from industrialised civilisation into the sweet bosom of Nature – and it is maintained through to the end, though constantly modified, even contradicted, by reality. From the first page, de la Harpe, still on the boat headed for Cape Town, is becoming aware that his dream of reconnecting with some authentically “savage” African heritage, some pure precursor to his own slave history, is doomed. Just a week’s contact with English and Dutch South Africans had “wilted” a sentimental belief that he might encounter men “still free to wander up the centuries from savagery in Nature’s way, not the white man’s way” (16). In his journal he scribbles: “Oh God, have we lost our human joy in the solidity of rocks, the life in trees, in the rivers, in the seas...?” Too long enslaved, black people find their scope for discovery pre-empted, usurped: “Never shall a negro stand at his ship’s rail, discoverer of new lands on this earth ... The waterways are crowded. Savage man, the jungle beasts, look up and see the airplane staring into the inmost shrines of Nature ...” (14).

These early comments introduce at least two dominant ideas which might be regarded as deeply problematic nowadays, even offensive. One is an equation the characters (and/or the author) often make between pre-colonial people and wild animals.  The American de la Harpe feels Africans are “brothers [who] are in the hands of spoilers as a wild deer struggles in the mysterious muscular contractions of the python” (103). Though the Reef’s mines are no worse than Europe’s, the mode of oppression is unique, as if “bright zebras, great horizons reflected in their wild eyes, should suddenly be set to do the work of blind pit-ponies ... the innocence of Nature about to be outraged” (109). This naivety about the innocence of an Arcadian and animalistic “kraal” life cannot survive, however: de la Harpe wants his ideal Africans to “wander free as elephants”, but realises they would also fight one another, albeit never on the scale of Europe’s Great War of 1914 (165), as well as predatory aspects of nature. Lewis does appear to interrogate her own idealism.

The animal-savage equation is thus not as simplistic as it might seem. Unlike later derogatory usages, in Lewis’s formula it is always positive. She applies animal metaphors to almost all her characters, black and white; there are dozens throughout the novel. Her narrative technique is also slippery, often ventriloquistic, the point-of-view shifting between interiorities in a manner more Modernist than anything Schreiner ever attempted, so that one can’t always be sure what is a character’s ideas, and what the author’s, and what might shortly be undermined or contradicted.

A second governing idea draws a stark dichotomy between ‘nature’ and ‘civilisation’. De la Harpe brings with him an illusory image of Africa as a palm-fringed bucolic Eden, “primitive” and “savage” but naturally liberated, which is starkly opposed to a white-imported “civilisation” which is predatory, racist, and riddled with its own problems. Thus he is disappointed by Cape Town, a “low-built nondescript town sending its feelers between fir-clad mountain slopes. He had not wanted to see firs in Africa” (36). Deep into the novel, despite a series of troubling and hurtful incidents of both white racism and black suspicion – his colour does not automatically act as a bridge to an African identity – he clings to the illusion, if only in a moment of transcendent singing in which

he plunged deeply into the mood of the homeless patriot, articulate and seeking. ... It was the mood in which he had come to Africa, sought out this town, these cold enemy eyes. It was the mood in which he would presently flee this town, these troll-like eyes, to the secret wild places where black men still dwelt in happy oblivion on the breast of Africa... (195-6)

If we regard de la Harpe as a vehicle for Lewis’s own views, we might suspect her of the most gauche and romanticised version of ‘primitivism’. She is canny enough, though, to make her hero both different from herself, and often palpably deluded. Nevertheless, the novel is acidic in its criticism of industrial modernity. Its physical pollutions are symptomatic of a whole mentality that is mechanised, pessimistic, cynical. Interestingly, Lewis expresses this in terms of water-control:

Ethelreda Lewis
(courtesy Africana Museum, via Amazwi Museum of
Literature [NELM].)

System ... As if good-will could grow out of system. It is true that a river grows strong because it has cut itself a channel, but surely the channel must be cut wildly, impetuously – here a deep pool, here a violent, curve, here a headlong plunge over a precipice. The stagnant canals of Holland have no force; the water, the spirit, decays, it is divorced from Nature.(18)

This ‘natural anarchism’ will still appeal to those who feel trapped in modern over-regulated crowding and to advocates of ‘re-wilding’ as a counter to enviro-spiritual damage. At other points, Lewis bemoans the pollution generated by the mining around ‘Goldburg’, her name for Johannesburg.  Another idiosyncratically well-meaning character, Father Macmichael, tells de la Harpe that in his view “it would be nearer to the way and the will of Christ to keep Africa immaculately heathen rather than spread Christianity that comes tainted from the mines” (114). Together they gaze over “the repellent substance of a slimes-dam” where the natives, wrenched into the wretched near-slavery of the migrant labour system, “become part of the residue, the unusable waste of humanity” (115).  Father Macmichael fulminates:

In the compounds the sin against the Holy Ghost, against the innermost shrine of Nature, sweeps like a germ-laden breath from the deep sewers of civilisation ... Not a savage boar, not a venomous snake, not a cannibal spider, not a carrion vulture, not a lascivious baboon but is cleaner than primitive man forced by his chains to defile the laws of Nature. There is only one creature lower, and he is the white man who, in pursuit of gold, will thrust a young savage into the atmosphere of perversion ... (111)

Just the other day I was watching a documentary about Johannesburg communities of today suffering health issues from those very same mine-dumps. Little has changed in ninety years – or, to put it another way, Lewis was nothing if not environmentally prescient.

So, late in the story, de la Harpe does escape the city, largely through the efforts of a character named Brand Colenbrander. Colenbrander espouses a philosophy perhaps closest to Lewis’s own, a philosophy gleaned in part, probably, from James Stevenson-Hamilton, first warden of Kruger National Park whom Lewis had met, and in part from the natural mysticism of Jan Christian Smuts. Colenbrander summarises:

De la Harpe, the dominant race in Africa must be black. Not to-day. Not to-morrow. Ultimately. The white man must let Nature have her way – let her keep her black children where he found them. There’d be more harmony in the world if that were so. ... You know what old Thoreau said: ‘In wildness is the preservation of the world’. By God, he was a prophet. It’s time we remembered the Thoreaus and the Blakes before it’s too late... (272)

A century later, that last message is arguably more relevant and urgent than ever.

Like Lewis herself, Colenbrander swims against the tide of white supremacist racism, using his wealth to buy up land to preserve one last haven for both wildlife and a more or less still independent and pristine tribe, the “Macas”. (Lewis probably bases them on the actual people of Tshikedi of Bechuanaland, whose proud independence she admired.) He knows that this haven is doomed, that white capitalist ‘progress’ will overwhelm his vision of any separate evolutionary development towards an authentically black Africa.

Yet the novel itself, with its tenuously positive if Quixotic ending, suggests that the dream is worth preserving, even if only symbolically. Perhaps not coincidentally, Colenbrander’s natural haven seems set somewhere around the North Coast, not far from where Laurens van der Post would portray a similar remoteness in his novel Flamingo Feather. Van der Post would go on to promote an analogous set of views, critiquing modernity through valorising indigenous peoples’ closeness to Nature and its slower, more subtle and sustainable rhythms. For all her political rebelliousness, some of her views were widely shared. Ethelreda Lewis was a woman of her time, drawing on terminologies that now might seem to us dangerously quaint; in Paul Rich’s view, she “represented the last phases of the old post-war urban settlement liberalism rather than anything substantially new.”  But in her conjunction of ecological concerns and race dynamics, she seems to me strikingly in touch with identity politics which have acquired renewed currency today.

*****