No 50 - Great apes, experimentation and fiction

When several items concerning the same subject cross one’s consciousness at almost the same moment, what are you supposed to do? Except take it all as sign that you must write about it – which usually means needing to fill in one or two little gaps, which leads inevitably to a welter of extra reading, which reveals that the gaps are actually rather large, which necessitates yet further reading ... until you’re in a dizzying vortex of wondrous information – disguised as cumulative ignorance – from which you can scarcely extricate yourself.

In this case, it was the loan of a novel, the purchase of a book, a snatch of TV documentary, a student presentation – all about experimentation using chimpanzees.

Why do we conduct experiments on animals – some undeniably fruitful, too many revoltingly gratuitous, all in some way damaging to the animal, and all too often fatal?  Because we can. Because we are in the last analysis a self-serving species that can, whenever convenient, derogate other species to some ‘lower’ order, deny them a requisite degree of feeling, rationalise away their self-evident terror and pain. We have the physiological, technological, and psychological power to do it, so we do.

Or at least, certain highly specialised sections of certain societies do – essentially the scientific elite of the world’s most technologically advanced nations: the Europeans, the British, the Americans. And because chimpanzees and other great apes, already familiar from menageries, zoos and related prisons, came from the colonised corners of the globe, the animals found themselves shackled in an unholy alliance of experimental science and imperial power.

Donna Haraway, one of our most trenchant, idiosyncratic and penetrating writers on human-animal relations, sums it up this way in her magisterial history of primatology, Primate Visions (1989):

Monkeys and apes have a privileged position to nature and culture for western people: simians occupy the border zones between those potent mythic poles. In the border zones, love and knowledge are richly ambiguous and productive of meanings in which many people have a stake. The commercial and scientific traffic in monkeys and apes is a traffic in meanings, as well as in animal lives.

Haraway’s book unpacks in detail some of the sundry laboratories and enterprises set up over decades to study chimpanzees and other simians, often in cruel behaviorist ways, in order to ‘prove’ things that any observant field worker would find perfectly obvious. Haraway includes Henry Harlow’s infamous photograph of a tiny chimp clinging to a wire frame draped with a towel. Wow: an orphaned infant cleaves to anything that might resemble its mother – what an insight! Decades of traumatic experiments involving disease infection, toxins, forced organ transplant, crash dummy testing, and more, demonstrably yielded little of value to humans.

Less invasive ‘social’ experimentation tried to divine similarities between human and ape in terms of language acquisition, cognition, and socialisation – an obsession so pervasive that it can only evidence a deep-seated insecurity in ourselves, a defensiveness about the extent to which our language, our vaunted rationality, and our capacity for co-operation does or doesn’t transcend our “animal origins”.

The protagonist of the aforementioned borrowed novel, Karen Joy Fowler’s We are All Completely Beside Ourselves (2014), expresses a healthy scepticism about the intrinsic limitations of laboratory experiments. I won’t disclose more about the story, which is  doubtless roughly based on the monumentally botched case of trying raise the chimp Nim in a human family in the 1970s. The novel has a couple of nifty twists. I’ll just quote the protagonist on how pervasive is the presence of the ape in academic circles:

Take Introduction to Classical Chinese and find yourself devoting a week to Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, and the chaos he wreaks in Heaven. Take a European literature class and find on the syllabus Kafka’s “A Report for an Academy”, with its ape narrator Red Peter ... Take astronomy and maybe there’s a section devoted to exploration, to those pioneering dogs and chimps of space...

It was just such footage on a TV documentary about abandoned engineering projects that got me going on this jag. The project in focus was the Barcroft space research station,  out in the California desert, about as alienating an environment for chimps as you could imagine – but there they are, being crammed into 44-gallon drums in order to simulate life in a space capsule. I found it almost unwatchable; but there was a scientist stating that the US space programme could not have succeeded without these tortures – “sadly”. And did chimps themselves benefit from these advances? Not one jot.

To be fair, even laboratory scientists expressed affection for their kidnapped primate charges – yet I find the photo of two young chimps clinging to primatologist Robert Yerkes as heart-wrenching as Harlow’s. Yerkes claimed to have loved his chimps, but they were still a thousand miles from the homeliness of coherent chimp society. (The Yerkes primate research centre in Atlanta continues to house more than 50 chimps.) Even that lucid and humane researcher, Frans de Waal, author of the ground-breaking Peacemaking amongst Primates (1991) and Are We Smart Enough to Know how Smart Animals Are? (2017; my recent coincidental purchase), troubles me a bit in his own move from ethology (observation in the wild) to experimentation on captive apes – despite his own scepticism: “One can train goldfish to play soccer or bears to dance, but does anyone believe that this tells us much about the skills of human soccer stars or dancers?” And he let his chimps socialise amongst themselves. Jane Goodall et al have had their impact.

On the other side of the coin, fiction – especially after Darwinian theory placed humans and apes ever closer in evolutionary development – obsessed equally about the possibility of humanising apes – which is to say to eradicate that troubling closeness/difference border-zone. As Virginia Richter shows in her survey Literature after Darwin: Human beasts in Western fiction (2011), these tales ranged from the homicidal gibbon of Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Murders on the Rue Morgue” (1841) and the Darwinian experiments conducted in H G Wells’ The Island of Dr Moreau (1896), through Edgar Rice Burroughs’ ape-raised Tarzan to Franz Kafka’s seminal “A Report to the Academy” (1917) - all evincing what Richter calls the “anxiety of simianisation”.

Almost no subsequent imagining of the speaking ape can fail to refer back to Kafka’s “Red Peter” and his eloquent academy address about his transition from ape to (sort of) human.  Like both Haraway and Fowler, Will Self uses an extract as epigraph to his 1997 novel Great Apes:

When I come home late at night from banquets, from social gatherings, there sits waiting for me a half-trained little chimpanzee and I take comfort from her as apes do. By day I cannot bear to see her; for she has the insane look of a bewildered half-broken animal in the eye; no one else sees it, but I do and I cannot bear it.

Self imagines a whole literate, quasi-human chimp society, complete with chimp artists, doctors and academics, with one deranged individual suffering delusions of becoming human (humans are endangered in the wild).  These chimps substitute “huu” for question-marks, “pant-hoot” for phone, “sign” and “gesticulate”  instead of say and discuss, and indulge in varieties of gross and open sex (perfectly normal for “chimpunity”, of course). It’s a sardonic, heavy, clever, at times funny but oddly unlikeable novel.

There is Bernard Malamud’s futuristic novel, God’s Grace (1982), in which only a human and a chimp (who can speak English as the result of laboratory training), survive a nuclear holocaust.  Malamud’s novel exemplifies Haraway’s observation that primatology “is a First World survival literature in the conditions of twentieth-century history”. Except in God’s Grace, it isn’t the human that survives ...

Finally, the talking apes make their way into South African literature, too.  Red Peter reappears in J M Coetzee’s strange but highly influential  meditation on animal rights, The Lives of Animals (2009). In this country, of course, the ape of first encounter is not the chimp but the baboon, with well-known studies ranging from Eugene Marais’ classic The Soul of the Ape (1969) through to Fransie van Riel’s Life with Darwin (2003; this Darwin being a baboon, not Charles). Michiel Heyns’ novel The Reluctant Passenger (2003) features Cape Point’s  baboons being captured for an experimental facility. Most recently, Cape Town’s perennial ‘house-breaking’ baboon issue is revisited in Ken Barris’ new story, in The Life of Worm & Other Misconceptions (2017), in which a house-owner develops an awkward relationship with an invasive, but human-talking baboon. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t end well.

It may be impossible not to be complicit in animal experimentation: I have little doubt that some of the medical treatments I have benefitted from would have been tested on rats or beagles; I know that my cat’s pills have been tested on other unwilling cats. There are glimmers of relief, at least for chimps: much experimentation has stopped. The US National Institute of Health in 2013 withdrew funding for chimp experiments, though loopholes remain, and we know less about what happens in private enterprises. There are ongoing legal efforts to accord chimpanzees “personhood”, despite last month’s rejection by the New York appeals court to free two warehoused chimps on the basis of habeas corpus. Their argument? Chimps aren’t humans; simple. I agree: but the chimps should be freed because they are chimps. We have a way to go yet in the task of reversing the tide of human arrogance and exploitation; yet it’s increasingly accepted that we cannot (as Tennyson wrote in In Memoriam, hoping to become an angel) “let the ape and the tiger die”.

*****

No 49: A journey in twelve unanswerable questions

 

(c) Dan Wylie: "Siberia"

1 The first hurdle is to leave the cat. They have done this many times since she was hoicked, bedraggled and savagely spitting, out of the feral gutterlands behind Clicks. And he knows she’ll be perfectly safe – safer, probably, than at home on an ordinary day, raddled as it is with roaming dogs, crowned eagles, adders and the occasional caracal. Yet eight years hasn’t made it easier. He leaves her at the kennels with useless goodbyes snagging painfully in his throat and tears pressing up from somewhere behind the cheekbones. How is it that one can be so in love with that small animal, with a ferocity that exceeds, or at least is different, to any feeling extended to a fellow-human?

2 Why are people so stupid on the roads? On these roads in particular. He has a multi-stage trip to negotiate, but it’s a local mantra that this is the most dangerous leg of all, from his town to the airport. There we go: inevitably, some crazy wanker trying to pass a laden cattle-truck, reeking with fear and impending death, on a blind rise, the double white line as clear as a punch in the nose. He hoots, too late in his misanthropic rage, at the swanky double-cab, the driver a man in his thirties, wife and two kids in the back – what is the arsehole thinking?? He wants to turn around immediately and go home to the cat, all fur and purrs and warm isolation. But he cannot.

3 Having checked through security – take off your shoes, accused of carrying a waterbottle, accused of creating extra work for the X-ray man – he watches through the wide airport windows as his Airbus is prepared for flight. As a youngster he studied aircraft with obsessive intensity: he knows what a triumph of international collaboration this machine is: parts manufactured in the UK, the US, China, Belgium, assembled in France or Spain by workers from the Philippines and Algeria and Germany – now being fed with Middle Eastern fuel, tended by Japanese vehicles like beetles round a corpse, Xhosa and Cape Coloured and Afrikaner workers and security personnel and caterers loading boxes of hot slices of Italian pizza... If such fantastic collaboration is possible, coalesced into this single purposeful blast into the improbable air, why does it not happen all the time, and everywhere?

(c) Dan Wylie: "Trash Bonanza"

4 He moves through shiny impersonal tunnels from one incredibly speeding machine into another – from the airliner to the Gautrain, as if from one toothpaste tube to another. To get to his night lodgings in Rosebank he has to change trains. He waits at Marlboro station. The platform has been designed to be as repellent as possible, only shiny rails at bum height to lean on for a bit, nubbled flagstones painted yellow to warn you away from the rails. A telephone company promises the impossible: Travel far, stay close. Concrete, hissing neon and grey metal. Just the other side of the rails are homes: crowded together in dispiriting russet tiers, all the roofs carrying, like crones with bundles of wood, solar heaters – a good thing, no doubt. Heaps of forbidding trash in the open ground. Beyond that, a glimpse of highway, carved through a lowering sky, traffic bound for – he imagines – Hell itself. Who invented these soulless conglomerates, these labyrinths of insane speed?

5 He realises that he has not flown into Harare since 1979. It wasn’t even Harare then. He has no memory of the airport at all. He has been going back to Zimbabwe once or twice a year ever since, but always overland. He has plenty of memories of the appalling border-post at Beit Bridge, of the baboons scavenging among the rusting girders of the bridge across the Limpopo. He has sworn never to go that route again, not ever. Now he looks out the aeroplane window and sees the Limpopo carving across the dry lowveld. There is not a drop of water in its ochre bed. You could walk across it at any point. People are walking across it all the time, mostly headed south.  Borders are, it seems, designed to be porous, sometimes more so or less so, but always porous. So of what purpose are borders? At least, at Harare’s swanky new airport building, where every passenger has to pause on a red mat to be photographed, the customs official is friendly, even mildly flirtatious.

6 The Chinese have refurbished the road from Harare to Mutare: yellow shoulder lines, new flourescent signage in international green-and-white, cats’-eyes all the way, and not a pothole for 256 km. In this one might discern evidence for Robert Mugabe’s claim that the country’s economy is recovering – though in truth there is little to recover from apart from his own government’s mismanagement. Or, as others argue, it’s a sign of another wave of colonialism, this time by ZANU-PF’s erstwhile wartime backers. Who is saving this country, if it is being saved at all? At any rate, he is glad he's not driving this time; his ride only gets to leave Harare at four in the afternoon, and into the dark they face the blazing headlights of dozens, even hundreds of heavy trucks heading, where? For a land whose economy has teetered for years on the brink of a ‘collapse’ that seems forever to recede, this is a phenomenal amount of traffic. Where is it all going, carrying what? The darkness does not say.

7 How can a great joy at the same time be the greatest pain? When it is visiting his mother. She was once a strapping and vigorous woman, who climbed hills and saved many lives and wrote her heart out. Now she is 88 years old, confined to frail-care, her back buckled into a hoop and her memory slipping its cogs every few minutes. But she knows him, keeps admiring his hard shoulders, can engage with old memories and topics of conversation for a while, then slips back into a few established tracks that groove deeper into her mind with each repetition: How are his students nowadays? Isn’t the tree outside her window beautiful with its pink flowers? Most frequently of all: “I always said, I don’t want to live with any What-ifs, to know I did my best, I think I can say that. There were failures, but no What-ifs.” She says this so often he begins to wonder if, deep down, she really does have regrets, and what they could possibly be. Is it possible to have honestly lived without, to the very end, having no regrets? But if anyone could, she could.

8 The next hurdle is a simple and practical one. The sole of his left boot has fallen loose. With dismay he discovers that Pitamber’s shoe shop, which has fixed his family’s shoes since his earliest years – half a century! – has closed down. It feels like an almost unconscious, at least unacknowledged, pillar of belonging has crumbled. This, he feels, is the true state of the economy. He has to resort to a man who works on the pavement outside his lawyer’s offices. The man says he can do it in half an hour; no, maybe an hour. It is now 9.30. He says to the cobbler, “Fine, do it now, and I’ll pick it up later, at 2 o’clock.” He consults the lawyer on his mother’s affairs, her finances, arrangements for her inevitable burial. Already suppressing tears, he visits her, holds her thin shoulders. They have lunch together, then he walks the kilometre back to town, the struts of his flip-flops chafing between his toes. It is one-thirty, but the boot has not been mended. “You’re early,” the cobbler accuses. “Please do it by two,” he demands, “I have things to do.” He wanders up and down the main street for a while. The teachers have been paid, and are queued up at every ATM; they can draw just $20; the whole country is racked by a cash crunch. There are more street vendors than ever, selling sunglasses, padlocks, eggs, sweets, shoes, battered school textbooks. They don’t hustle. At the corner of Robert Mugabe Way and Herbert Chitepo Street (the first the assassin of the second) two women sell newspapers, sitting on rough boxes and wearing iridescent green vests. Though it’s years since his mother bought papers from them, they remember her; they would always joke and she’d stroke their cheeks, marvelling at their lovely skin. And they remember him, and ask after her, and send their love. When he gets back to the cobbler he is washing a car, and the boot is still in two pieces. What rises in his mind is the ancient shibboleth, of racist Rhodesia: “Ah, typical bloody...” You know the rest. Why, try as he might, over decades, is it so hard to eradicate the prejudices instilled in childhood? He sits with studied (im)patience on a nearby concrete block and watches while the cobbler works away at the boot with small but evidently powerful hands. One hand is missing a finger. He doesn’t ask. The cobbler uses no glue, asks only two dollars, and offers no apologies. It’s not a great job. Well. He puts on the boots and walks away. Round the corner he ducks into the well-supplied MFS hardware store and buys a tube of shoe adhesive. He is going to personally glue the bejumpers out of that boot.

9 His mother asks after his students, admires the pink flowers on the tree outside, claims to live with no What-ifs. Again and again. Who created this pernicious, creeping apocalypse known as ageing?

10 Almost as gut-wrenching as watching his mother’s slow and inevitable, if relatively cheerful, decline, is what has happened to the elephants. Two elephants lived on a game reserve bordering town. One elephant had a weird, special and beautiful relationship with a Basenji dog: they would commune through the electric fence. You can watch it on the internet. But maintenance of the fences is poor; money is lacking; there have long been arguments about whether the elephants should be there or not. Now, border-jumpers desperate to make a living in these impoverished times have been transiting the reserve. A policeman chasing the illegal traders ran into one of the elephants and was trampled to death. The consequence was inevitable: the elephants were shot. Why is it that, in any human-animal clash, it is the animals that get it? How did we so badly lose the capacity to coexist?

11 Driving with a friend back to Harare airport, he chatters aimlessly, trying not to recall the image in his mind of his mother, fragile and bent and bravely smiling, waving goodbye. Astonishingly, no road block stops them; at times, he knows, people get stopped up to twenty times on this road by the police and fleeced on trumped-up charges. Instead, he can admire the colours of the msasa and munondo trees coming out in vivid spring leaf, gold and vermilion and deep crimson and lime green, beneath them the sun glancing through coppery heads of rasping grass. His heart leaps and grieves. How is it that one’s sense of home is founded so fundamentally on the tangential and fleeting sense of a blade of colour, the hint of a scent of a certain soil?

(c) Dan Wylie: "Clay Pits: Aerial view"

12 Two flights reverse his course across the subcontinent. On the first leg he has an aisle seat and busies himself with a crossword, when he is not chatting to an American maths teacher who hopes to live in Zimbabwe forever: “The climate!” he enthuses. He sounds like an old colonial. He has a window seat, and regrets not bringing his camera: the unfolding geology, the snaking river courses, the patterns of fields, the mist on the far mountains, the strip of crisp dunes along the coast – all strike him with a shivery, heart-flummoxing sense of beauty. He has a suspicion that this has something to do with a deeper sense yet, a hollow at the very core of him shaped like the memory of his mother, whom he may never see again. In the car, driving home, he begins to compose a song: “I kissed you once, and then again... Then I had to let you go... What son am I, to leave you so? ‘Go on,’ you said, ‘lead the life you choose’...” A bawl, animal and unstoppable, wrenches itself out of him, hollows him out.  He has to pull over, shuddering. To his right stretches a vast area of

(c) Dan Wylie: "Dust Frenzy"

naked cleared earth, great machines moving through dust-clouds in monstrous silence. Why is ‘progress’ simultaneously destruction? Then he drives on, looking forward mostly just to picking up the cat. His beautiful, companionable cat who – in contrast to the journey out – will miaow loudly and continuously all the way home.

*****

No 48 - The Ecca Poets

In memoriam Norman Morrissey

(Quilt by Mariss Everitt)

Eastern Cape denizens often speak of the Hogsback with an obvious affection – its humped dolerite ridges, its forest walks and waterfalls, its eco-shrines and oddball potters and painters, its famously tiny chapel and soggy leaf beds and quaint seclusions. It’s one of the special little havens of green high leisure on the edge of the more gaunt Karoo.

It has also for decades been the haunt of a unique cabal of productive poets, who call themselves the Ecca Poets, after the name of the regional shale that undergirds much of the area, and the pass that curls through the dramatic hills between Fort Beaufort and Grahamstown. There isn’t to my knowledge another group quite like it in the country, at least not in the rural areas. (The Batsotso Jesters may be an urban equivalent.) Over many years they have produced almost annual collaborative volumes: they started up in 1989, and I suspect that the National English Literary Museum’s database is incomplete. NELM’s earliest record is of Cast (1996), followed by (amongst others) Holdall (2002), Passover (2003), Dispositions (2004), Keynote (2008), Spaces (2009), Brood (2010), Gold in Spring (2016). Add to the collaborative collections a number of  two- or three-partner publications, occasional pamphlets, and a goodly number of individuals’ volumes. There is a lot of very good poetry in this steady and devoted stream, amounting I imagine to at least several hundred poems. Yet the Ecca poets have been almost entirely neglected by the critical establishment. Even Jeanette Eve, in her sumptuous A Literary Guide to the Eastern Cape, while including some of the individual poets, makes only a passing mention of the group's earliest manifestation as the “Echo” poets. It’s high time someone did a major study.

I’ve known many of the poets, more or less tangentially, been to a number of their readings and launches, occasionally reviewed one of their volumes. Inevitably over the years the composition of the group has waxed and waned. Steady at the centre stands the owlish bonhomie of Brian Walter, in whose strongly ecologically-aware poetry I have taken most interest. Like other Hogsback residents and writers, he taught at Fort Hare University in Alice in the dry valley below, before some years ago moving to Port Elizabeth. Another is the robustly humorous Catholic priest Cathal Lagan, who brings a particular theological depth to some of the poetry. To judge by the number of poems these two dedicate to each other, they are especially close comrades. There was founder member Basil Somihlalo, the only other member of the band, as far as I know, to have passed away so far (in 1994). Mzi Mahola, once attending Fort Hare university, later mostly occupied with running a museum in New Brighton, contributed for a number of years, as well as producing individual volumes. Of roughly the same generation is Quentin Hogge, who a while ago was (at least by his own account in his recent volume, More Poems, Boet) ostracised for publishing a particularly non-PC poem. Hogge has a uniquely wry, colloquial and forthright – one might say distinctively Eastern Cape – voice. Norman Morrissey’s voice is not dissimilar: punchy, pithy, colloquial, at times sardonically wise.

Leavening the gritty voices of these older gents are some younger voices. Lara Kirsten, when she isn’t on tour playing the piano, contributes a vigour and theatricality in Afrikaans. Mariss Stevens (Everitt), on the strength of owning a Hogsback house, joined in for a while, until (despite having produced a lovely volume of her own, On Gardening) she decided she’s a better quilter than a poet. And in recent years Silke Heiss, already an established poet in the little journals, fell in love with Norman; together they energetically promoted poetry through readings and workshops, even as she supported him in his last years. Both their latest productions, including Norman’s last volume, Strandloop, are saturated with their love for one another.

Only an extensive survey could do justice to the range of voices, concerns, ideas, subjects, forms and settings covered by this vivacious bunch. Few of them do not ruminate at some point on the purview, power and purposes of poetry itself. Brian Walter, for example, sets out a succinct manifesto, or methodology, that would help many a baffled student, in “Memo”:

            Try not to say too much,

            but with a Keatsian hand of chance

            trace with a light touch

            a sketched instance;

            cut and shade, tone and hue;

            close with a Janus glance.

            (Bookmark)

Cathal Lagan ends his poem “Tickler” this way:

            I wanted to be a tickler of fish,

            catch the sprung muscle of it

            with a fearsome grip,

            but in that there was no art.

            Now it is mine to play with words –

            figuring them out.

(Bookmark)

That “sprung muscle" - lovely. But for now, the story is the celebration of the words and hefty presence of Norman Morrissey. In a poem dedicated to Norman, Quentin Hogge touches on a theme common to many Ecca poems – disdainful suspicion of corrupting urbanism and commercialisation in contrast to the rich organic belonging of the paradisal Hogsback.

            Paradise

Airports respect no dreams:

the taxi terminus

and subway stations stink,

these human sewers,

where canteens serve

soya sossige and acorn coffee.

Machines go berserk.

sensing steel fillings

in obsolete teeth,

while terror climbs aboard unnoticed.

CNN will take you there –

don’t leave your lounge.

Unless,

where you want to be

is where the loerie

floats the synapses of forest,

a scatter of scarlet wings

in the ganglions of light,

where the silent boomslang

rules,

a pause of utter command.

(Borderline 2002)

Perhaps in belated response to this, Morrissey wrote “Eden”:

 

(Quilt by Mariss Everitt)

My boomslang

would lie hammocked atop the hedge

- thick as my wrist,

two metres and more in the lounging –

and let me get near

as she basked.

Then I got a gardener

and she suddenly

disappeared

- which is a slash ahead of Yahweh,

he left the Serpent at least

at peace in Eden.

There’s that trademark wry humour, the little sardonic twist of wisdom. So although many of the Ecca poets might be regarded as modern-day pastoral organicists, they were hardly oblivious to the serpents in the garden – the technologies and politics that interpenetrate everything, the ills that bedevil the blood itself. As he aged (though he was ‘only’ 68 when he died), Norman attended to the voices of his own body. He wrote in “Just Sound?”:

There was a hip-replacement

then a long, deep pneumonia

that nearly got me – body and soul

- that set me on crutches.

The legs are weak and stiff

and the lungs I must have to walk again

need legs to strengthen them.

Doesn’t it all sound

just like life?

He wasn’t about to collapse into maundering self-pity, though, reminding himself in the very next poem in Bookmark, entitled “Bitching”:

Cervantes wrote Don Quixote

in a dungeon,

Malory’s Morte d’Arthur

came out of a gaol;

and here I am

bitching

about writing

from

a mere sick-bed!

There was always something of the twinkle-eyed grumble about Norman, as he delivered his poems with a ponderous gruffness from behind his whitening beard, affecting something of the air of an oracular sage. At the Grahamstown launch of his last volume, Strandloop, in May last year, he read more slowly and gruffly than ever – we were beginning to suspect even then that the sick-bed was getting the better of him. But so much of his poetry is about beauty, and love, and the holy delicacy of the natural world and its denizens. Like so many of his poems, “Wind” is as short and direct as a tossed pebble:

I once saw the wind

a stream

like crystal water

flowing

You may be out in the invisible wind now, Norman, but the words flow on, crystalline as a Hogsback stream.

*****

No.47 - Back to the Amazon

All photos: Dan Wylie

"The Amazon is dying!” trumpets one of the endless stream of online petitions. Corruption, greed, collusion between politicians and moguls hungry to cash in on beef or minerals or electricity ... Not much has changed over three centuries in that quarter. But at the same time – this time of global environmental crisis – many voices are being raised in a kind of love for ‘Grandmother Amazon’.

What a change this is from the attitudes of earlier European travellers, ethnographers and missionaries who, in their smug and self-sacrificial way, gave themselves over to trying to haul remote and isolated ‘Indian’ tribes bodily into modernity.  Those intruders, coming from an industrially-developing Europe which largely thought of wilderness as a blight to be conquered or held at a safe aesthetic distance, found the Amazonian jungle terrifying. And they took their fear out on the hapless indigenous peoples, even as they enslaved them to leach the forests of rubber.

Michael Taussig’s gritty and unsparing book, Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man, relates the cycle of violence against both nature and natives in the colonial Amazon:

[T]he image of stark opposition and of otherness in the primeval jungle comes forth as the colonially intensified metaphor for the great space of terror and cruelty ... working its way in the ancient forests of the tropics ... such that the brutal destructiveness imputed to the natural world serves to embody even more destructive relations in human society.

In the 1820s (just as Thomas Pringle & Co were settling in another wilderness in our own Eastern Cape), the British explorer Charles Stuart Cochrane experienced the jungle as a riot of predatory violence:

[E]ach shrub or tree weakens or destroys its neighbour, by its excess of produce, which is greater than the space will admit. One plant springs up to destroy its predecessor, and is doomed to the same fate itself by the growth of its successor. It appears as if a war existed amongst plants, similar to that which devastates the human world, and prevails even amongst brutes and insects. ... Why it should be so – what great or good object is gained by it, we know not; we only perceive that all are under some irresistible influence, and impelled by some invisible power.

And this thirty years or more before Darwin published On the Origin of Species.

A hundred years later, responses remained often the same.  The Colombian Joaquin Rocha descended into the Amazon basin from the Peruvian Andes. Down in the jungle, he wrote:

The silence hangs heavy, broken only by the clanging clamour of the torrents, the growling of tigers, and the swarming of infinite vipers and venomous insects. In [the village of] Descanse begins the plague of vampire bats that extends until Brazil, treacherously sucking in the hours of dreams the blood of men and animals. There also, by the side of Brassymum galactodendron whose trunk when incised yields milk as delicious and nutritive as the cow’s, grows the Rhus juglande folia whose mere shade puffs up and scars the careless wanderer. There one begins to suffer the privations and calamities of the wilderness, that in the Caqueta and the Putumayo grow so as to at times make of life there scenes whose horror could figure in the Dantean pages of Purgatory and Hell.... There the person in perpetual contact with this savage wilderness becomes just as savage.

A strange mix of  botanical accuracy and revulsion.  It was the lack of controllable order that seemed to space visitors out most.  The indigenes had to be subjected to the same order, too (or elevated into it, as some thought of it).  The result, as Roger Casement was almost simultaneously documenting in both the Congo and the Peruvian Amazon, the impact on local populations was vicious to the point of genocide.

Oddly, at much the same time as Rocha was quaking in his boots, and Casement was irritating the British Government with the grim truths of colonial invasion, the great English Modernist writer Virginia Woolf was composing The Voyage Out (1915). The characters in this early novel voyage to a fictional holiday resort on the South American coast; most of the ‘action’ consists of intricate conversations about one another, but at one point some of them do take a boat trip up a major river into the forested hinterland. As one might expect from a writer who had never been there, the descriptions of the jungle are rather generalised. At first, this forest which, Woolf writes, had scarcely changed since Elizabethan times, overwhelms:

They seemed to be driving into the heart of the night, for the trees closed in front of them, and they could hear all around them the rustling of leaves. The great darkness had the usual effect of taking away all desire for communication by making their words sound thin and small ... The trees and the undergrowth seemed to be strangling each other near the ground in a multitudinous wrestle; while here and there a splendid tree towered high above the swarm, shaking its thin green umbrellas in the upper air.

And one character, Hirst, bursts out:

“It makes one awfully queer, don’t you find ... These trees get on one’s nerves – it’s all so crazy. God’s undoubtedly mad. What sane person could have conceived a wilderness like this, and peopled it with apes and alligators?”

But other characters do find glimpses of beauty in the forest, moments of meditation, fabulous butterflies. This party of displaced and introverted English makes a boat trip to an “Indian village”, evidently rather set up for the titillation of foreign voyeurs. A sad and depleted community, the scene saddens them, makes at least one character even more aware of the essential fragility of their lives.

Much the same happened to me when I descended on the Amazon almost exactly a century later in 2013. I had the advantage of a jet liner that landed me in Manaus, a city of half a million right in the middle of the Amazon basin. I shacked up at little tour outpost on a tributary of the Amazon itself, with a dining room mounted on great floating logs and reed-walled cabins. I was mainly there to research caimans for my book on crocodiles – which I did to the extent of going out with a guide at night, boating among the reeds with eyes gleaming back in our torchlight, until we caught a little fellow who had to suffer the indignity of being manhandled by everybody and photographed before being released. 

Like Woolf’s characters we also dropped in on the obligatory ‘Indian village’, watched women weaving house walls from palm fronds, lamented the thinness of the scabrous dogs, and felt obliged to buy a necklace adorned with a piranha jaw. It was all rather dispiriting and faintly artificial – a sense of a kind of “slow violence” (the phrase is Rob Nixon’s) inflicted on a reluctant people.

With motley international companions I also boated through various channels in the complex waterways, looking for grey and pink dolphins in the ochre waters, sloths and howler monkeys in the trees, jacanas in the water-lily beds. The river was in flood, so we could kayak almost through the lower canopy of the huge trees – what they call the varzea – where all horizons and directions and depths are lost in a shimmering maze of bewitching reflections melting into more reflections.

And we walked in the jungle. Unlike my predecessor travellers, I absolutely loved it. For all the sweat-drenching humidity, the startling thorns, and stinging ants, and tarantulas we coaxed out of their burrows, and the possibility of jaguar and anaconda (I didn’t get to see either, sadly), I felt utterly at home there. I was raised in forest – albeit nothing so gigantic as this – so my soul was prepared, despite the radical differences in vegetation. I couldn’t stop taking photos of light through palm fronds, and luminous fungi, and fringes of feathery leaves, and marvellously symmetrical creepers snaking up the massive buttresses of towering trees. We slept out, in a row of hammocks under a reed lean-to: I could scarcely sleep for the multiplex, layered sounds of the forest’s insects and frogs and creaking night birds and subtle whisperings of wind and nearby water. Struggle and competition there surely is out there, but also a riot of symbioses, mutualities, supports and sharings. What I could hear of it through the snoring, that is: I just wanted to be alone out there, in the not-silence.

Back in Manaus, I attended part of a jazz festival in the incongruously huge, gold-domed opera house – an opera-house in the jungle! This of course was the subject of Werner Hertzog’s film Fitzcarraldo, in which the hero Fitzgerald humps the materials for an opera-house over a jungle-encrusted ridge between rivers to construct his dream (wholly unnecessarily, in real life). Hertzog captured the experience of filming Fitzcarraldo in another film – a meta-film – called The Burden of Dreams, in which he had this to say about the jungle:

 

There is some kind of harmony. It is the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder. And we in comparison to the articulate vileness and baseness and obscenity of all this jungle.

            We in comparison to that enormous articulation, we only sound and look like badly pronounced and half-finished sentences out of a stupid suburban novel, a cheap novel.

            And we have to become humble in front of this overwhelming misery and overwhelming fornication, overwhelming growth and overwhelming lack of order. Even the ... stars up here in the sky look like a mess. There is no harmony in the universe. We have to get acquainted with this idea that there is no real harmony as we have conceived it. But when I say this, I say this all full of admiration for the jungle. It is not that I hate it. I love it. I love it very much. But I love it against my better judgement. ... fornication and asphyxiation and choking and fighting for survival and growing and just rotting away...

Some love. Obscenity and fornication – really? I suspect the problem was that the jungle, unaccountably, failed to stroke Werner’s overweening ego.

Likewise even the most lyrical and insightful of all Amazonian ethnographers, Philippe Descola, whose book The Spears of Twilight relates his time of living with the fabled Putumayo people. He cannot but feel rebuffed, his very sense of self disintegrating, if he approaches the forest wearing European artistic lenses:

Submerged in its green monotones, nature here is not of the kind to inspire a painter. Only at twilight does it deploy its bad taste, in line with Baudelairean aesthetics, exceeding the artifice of the gaudiest of coloured images. The inhabitants of the forest become exceptionally agitated during this brief debauchery of colour. The animals of the daytime noisily prepare for sleep while the

nocturnal species awaken for the hunt, their carnivorous appetites whetted. Smells are also more definable now, for the heat of the long late afternoon has given them a consistency that the sun can no longer dissipate. ... [T]he sensual organs are suddenly assailed at dusk by a multiplicity of simultaneous perceptions that make it very difficult to discriminate between sight, sound and smell. Thanks to this brutal onslaught on the senses, the transition between day and night in the forest acquires a dimension of its own as if, for a brief moment just before the great void of sleep takes over, the human body is no longer separate from the environment.

When acres of clear-felling (for rubber and hamburgers), pollution from mining operations (mercury turning up in the tissues of caimans), and proposals to build dozens of dams on Amazonian tributaries, this sense of being overwhelmed is waning. The ecological consequences of decimating the “lungs of the world", and the planet’s highest reservoir of biodiversity, are one thing. We are also destroying the very sense of mystery on which our psyches seem to long for, like an inner Eden.  Michael Taussig is sensitive to its fragility, but even his perception is shadowed by a sense of threat:

Yet all around in the forest nothing is fixed. The rain is beating. The water drips off the shining leaves in the dark forest. Rivulets form into streams and rivers gather force to form the muddy Amazon swirling past the Italian marble and Polish prostitutes of rubber-rich Manaos ... Onward swirls the river to the sea close by where Columbus’s boats met the heaving chop of the currents of the Orinoco, one of the four rivers of Paradise...

What have we come to, when the very health of our planet is perceived as alien to us...

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No 46 - Cobras and poems

Snakes and judgement:
my imagining of Dante's imagining of Minos, the judge of the Inferno

Cobras: such beautiful and energy-efficient animals, but not to be trifled with.  I recall one vivid evening when I was a boy. I was pacing the lawn in front of our Vumba house, in discussion with my father, when we suddenly heard my mother bellowing for help from down the hill.  For my courageous and powerful mother to scream like that was unprecedented – we ran.  Fifty metres down the driveway we encountered her, staggering up and clutching her face. She had gone down to tuck our free-range chickens into bed in the hen-house; counting them in she had spotted an aberrant dark shape in a gloomy nesting-box, bent down to look – and was treated to a dose of cobra venom smack in the eyes. We flung her down next to the fish-pond and hosed her face; got milk from the kitchen and splashed that under her lids. The three dogs were all over us with worry and excitement, lapping at the milk and getting shrieked and snapped at by the banded mongoose Chiri.  It was a riot.

            Loaded up with antihistamines and eye-wash, mum’s eyes came right eventually.

Naturally dad went down immediately with the .410 shotgun and blew the Mozambique spitting cobra’s head to bits.

            It’s an age-old conflict, or course, and the cobra’s venom and spectacular hooding behaviour have made it a vector for legends and religious ritual for millennia. In India, Shiva drapes a cobra round his shoulders for protection; the Egyptian goddess Isis was just one of a complex of ancient Egyptian to feature the cobra, its gilded hood overseeing the passage of souls to the afterlife, among other spiritual duties.

            In sub-Saharan Africa, the cultural significance of the cobra seems poorly explored, at least in comparison with the python. An admittedly quick shimmy through the internet hasn’t turned up much: an article on African snake myths dating back to 1929, a few fragments scattered largely through tourism websites.

            Snakes, both real and imagined, often appear in our literatures, including many stories based on misconceptions which the conservationists are still frequently at pains to debunk. Cobras spray rather than spit with aim; and no, the mate of a deceased cobra will not ruthlessly hunt you down.

            As with my mother’s cobra, it’s the snake that usually comes off worst in encounters with human fear and misunderstandings (the mythology of cold predation and even judgement that goes at least as far back as Greek legends and to the Biblical Garden of Eden). Yet in more modern poetry, distinctly different, more knowledgeable and compassionate strands of feeling emerge.

As a young man Roy Campbell (1901-1954) injected a vivid and sinewy new strand of poetic diction into the South African literary scene – which he despised.  This disdain is the driving force behind an early cobra poem (I’d be interested to know if there were any earlier ones), “To a Pet Cobra”:

With breath indrawn and every nerve alert,

As at the brink of some profound abyss,

I love on my bare arm, capricious flirt,

To feel the chilly and incisive kiss

Of your lithe tongue that forks its swift caress

Between the folded slumber of your fangs,

and half reveals the nacreous recess

Where death upon those dainty hinges hangs.

This is Campbell, in his characteristically flamboyant way, flirting with death, apparently (I don’t know if he really had such a pet). Whatever the case, there’s a distinct admiration for the reptile that informs the sounds and rhythms: I love the quick “i” alliterations in the phrase “chilly and incisive kiss”. The contrast between “deadly” power and a “dainty” beauty are reinforced in a later stanza in the poem:

Dainty one, deadly one, whose folds are panthered

With stars, my slender Kalahari flower,

Whose lips with fangs are delicately anthered,

Whose coils are volted with electric power,

I love to think how men of my dull nation

Might spurn your sleep with inadvertent heel

To kindle up the lithe retaliation

And caper to the slash of sudden steel.

The contrast of fangs and flowers is perhaps not entirely convincing (I have a sneaking suspicion it was impelled by the rhyme that occurred to him between “panthered” and “anthered”), but interestingly informed by the relatively recent advent of electricity. Then Campbell reveals his hand: he want to be like the cobra, to be the cobra, a potentially deadly but aesthetic force in the “dull nation” of letters: he could then, he later puts it, “sting these rotted wastes into a flower”.

            In other poems, the cobra still suffers.  Campbell got fed up and left to live in Spain, but Grahamstown doyen Guy Butler remained, meditating obsessively on the place and role of the English-speaking settler in South Africa, and in the Eastern Cape in particular. In one such poetic meditation, his well-known poem “Myths”, the cobra makes a brief appearance, victim of unthinking settler violence:

 

(NELM)

Alone one noon on a sheet of igneous rock

I smashed a five-foot cobra’s head to pulp;

Then lifting its cool still-squirming gold

In my sweating ten separate fingers, suddenly

Tall aloes were also standing there,

Lichens were mat-red matches on glinting boulders,

Clouds erupted white on the mountain’s edge,

All, all insisting on being seen.

“Sweating ten separate fingers” – wonderfully captures the heightened awareness, the sudden revelation of the there-ness of the whole landscape; it’s not quite compassion, but a recognition of a certain illegitimate sacrifice that has been made before the poet-speaker really looks at what’s around him, demanding to be seen.

Butler’s friend and part-contemporary Sydney Clouts (1926-82) also saw the cobra as iconic of an Africa – or at least a localism – that resists European imperialism: it’s best captured in his famous, uncharacteristically sardonic poem “Salute”:

Very Profound Men have lived in Europe.

On the world’s perimeters, sharkfins, anteaters, kangaroos,

            pearloysters, bears,

and others (fit for smiles).

It was the Wolf of Europe that went prowling.

Good morning, gentle cobra, are you well?

Who speaks that final line?  Is it threatening, appealing, fearful? Satisfyingly ambiguous.

Douglas Livingstone remains our most ecologically-aware poet, and he wrote a few times about snakes. In “The Killers” there is no doubt as to which creature is the more dangerous, the human or the cobra:

You know how it is – fishing – your bare feet

in the warm mush of dead leaves near the edge

of the water, back against mossed tree-bark,

beer cooling in the river, and a wedge

of sandwiches, wondering when to eat.

Then this small crackling move in the steamed air,.

Out one eye-corner: seven feet of snake,

of black-necked cobra, smoothly slickly dark,

moving slowly down to drink, half-awake,

her dusty brown eyes dim and unaware. ...

I chose my time and jumped past the fanned hood.

I got the shotgun and blew her head clean.

I watched her lively dead knottings.  High birds

began to sing. I had to shoot: I mean

that now her limp grey life lies understood.

Isn’t that just typical of modern culture: things only regarded as a comprehensible once they’re dead?  Livingstone extended these thoughts in the haiku-like, suggestive stanzas of “Thirteen Ways of Looking at A Black Snake” (modelled on the American Wallace Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”).

II

After the barbecue, a hubbub:

someone has caught a black snake.

The half-drum of coals is still glowing.

XI

A pair of youths find a black snake.

There is stick nearby. One has a plastic bag.

At the other’s home there is a microwave oven.

XII

After the day’s grime: a shower, a drink,

the campfire, a meal:

an exhausted slide into the sleeping bag

which resists with a chilled muscled presence.

Part of it all is surely that snakes retain a certain mysteriousness, an impenetrability, a resistance to anything we might call ‘communication’.  And why should they be so dangerous anyway? What god endowed them with fatal venom?  How on earth did it evolve?  Cyril Edelstein in his poem “Venom” writes:

When one begins to think

About strange phenomena of Nature

Such as the venom of snakes

Among thousands of instances

One finds one’s amazement

Subverted by claims

That these are no more

Than might be expected

Theirs being an inevitability

Arising from mutated genes

And continued by natural selection.

... they speak far more strongly to us

Of mystery than of sequence.

All too often, we give in to fear and an unwillingness to live alongside such danger – but now (perhaps ever since D H Lawrence regretted his killing one in his famous poem “Snake”) the death of a snake induces guilt and regret – the polar opposite, it may be, of the moral implications of the Eden story.  Thus Karoo poet Clive Lawrance echoes Livingstone in “Cape Cobra”: his caring is implied in the uncaring exposed by the poem:

They caught sight of him outside the village,

head high and proud, like the prow

of an ancient craft

sailing through waves of sand...

The blood of their first mother stirring,

with curses and blows, they scuttled him

and beached him in dense bush

where his venom could evaporate,

his long hull crumble in time...

Will we humans ever be able to hold our heads up high and proud in the grand unfolding of Earth’s nature – or will the cobra have the last laugh, and scuttle us?

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