Lesego Rampolokeng's reading last night [at the Head on Fire book launch on 7 June]was a deeply moving experience. I felt I was listening to an artist using his art form to break my habitual ways of relating to reality. This relationship becomes ossified over time and traps us in a world of limited possibilities.
Lesego Rampolokeng's reading last night [at the Head on Fire book launch on 7 June]was a deeply moving experience. I felt I was listening to an artist using his art form to break my habitual ways of relating to reality. This relationship becomes ossified over time and traps us in a world of limited possibilities. It's profoundly ideological and political — which is why I found his discussion of the fluidity of languages spoken in Soweto so interesting.
I could hear Rampolokeng's reading more clearly when I stopped trying to impose a singular meaning on what I was hearing. He was using exhilarating juxtapositions of phrases, with no obvious linear connection between them (although there were underlying themes) like a sculptor, using his words to chisel away at our certainties, exposing the gap between the mimetic relationship of the words we use to make meaning and the jumble of happenings taking place out there which lack inherent meaning.
There was also something profoundly musical in his delivery, reminding me of the 1950s bebop artists who used speed of performance to hammer away at and then break through convention. When I gave up trying to hold on to any sense of coherence for longer than a phrase or two, the experience of hearing his poetry was exhilarating — much like a whitewater ride when experience is changing moment by moment.
