By Mmathabo Maebela and Relebohile Mohapi
There were no page numbers, no poem titles, just brief pauses as Kobus Moolman’s steady voice carried the audience through the reading of his latest collection of poetry, Fall Risk. What last week’s event bore witness to was not a performance but an embodiment of the pain, beauty, and fragility of the human body.
In South African literature, writing the body has long been an uncomfortable yet fertile terrain used to reflect the weight of history. It has emerged as the witness of scars caused by apartheid and post-apartheid realities and their nuances of violence, gender, race, and power. Writers such as Sindiwe Magona, Bessie Head, and others have grappled with the politicised and political body, making it a familiar aspect of local literature. But few writers delve into the body’s intimate realities.
Kobus Moolman’s poetry pivots around this space, using the body less as a symbol and more as a medium in which humans experience the world. He carves a new narrative about writing the body that explores fragility, illness, disability, and desire. His new poetry collection deliberately embodies vulnerability without seeking pity or redemption.
In the opening address in the Amazwi foyer, publisher and author Robert Berold explained how Moolman interrogates his struggles while grounding himself beyond the body into earth’s elements (sky, trees, sea, rock, stone). The symbolism of these in his poems shows persistent conflict. Without being self-deprecating, Moolman is writing from the perspective of acceptance with short, stark poetry — not to shock his readers but to encompass his experience in a concise manner.
From the start of his reading, Moolman emphasised that he would not talk about the poems. The audience was thrown into the deep end, as he plunged into a sequence of poems that refused to be defined, resisting the urge to frame or explain the poems. From the first lines he read — “I am sitting all day / and I am sitting all night / on my hospital bed. I am not sick. / I am simply watching / and my mortality watches me back.” — he pulled the audience in, inviting us into a stream of consciousness where there are no boundaries and meaning is created through inhabiting the space and listening.
While the poems were written in simple language, they carry a complex meaning. In one of the poems, Moolman read: “There are holes in my feet / where the rain comes in. / And when I bend down to take off my legs / only the pattern of my socks remains.” He introduced us to legs that come off, bodies that leak cerebrospinal fluid, and crows that croak inside his mouth. He is unafraid to let the reader into the grotesque and uncomfortable.
Moolman described his writing process as drilling down. While some writers choose to go the horizontal way and expand, he is inclined to travel inward and downward into the self. Quoting C.S Lewis, who said that “eternity is a place where the inside is bigger than the outside”, Moolman said his poetry starts somewhere literal and leads toward “something on the other side”, a great darkness that is not sinister but rather expansive and infinite.
“I feel dizzy, and it isn’t the wine,” exclaimed one of the attendees.
This collection of poems hints at instability and decay. Yet, it is in this precarity that they embody the vulnerability of the human body. In one of his responses, Moolman said, “I’m not a cerebral writer. I’m not an intellectual writer. I write in a physical language.” With this and with his stark imagery, these poems reflect the quiet resilience of the body. They remind us what plain, truthful, and personal literature can do.
Fall Risk is published by uHlanga Press.
