three - ‘Independence’ and the ambivalent poet
from part one
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 May 2019
Summary
In Chapters 1 and 2, I argued that Manisi's written poetry emerged out of an increasingly oppressive political and publishing context, and that the poet's book address of future readerships was less critical and immediate than that mandated by the poetic licence accorded to the imbongi in more democratic circumstances. The contorted stanzas of the ‘iRhodes’ poem, which failed to reach its intended academic readership, bear mute testimony to Manisi's manifold publishing frustrations. Principal among these were his isolation from a publishing community of Xhosa intellectuals, his failure to reach the audiences he wished to engage, and his difficulty in writing in terms that had been corrupted by the dominant politics. If political writing demands the freedom to revitalise discourse, then this was the freedom denied Manisi by his censors and his desired national audience. That Manisi continued to write in such circumstances might be regarded as highly ‘unnatural’ or abnormal. But, like the poet himself, we tend to believe in the possibility of recuperating and detaching written texts from their contexts of production. This is not how we think of oral texts and their contexts.
Distinctions are often made in studies of oral traditions between performance texts created in ‘natural’ contexts and those produced in ‘unnatural’ circumstances. This is because the shape and content of oral texts depend on the opportunities and limitations of peopled contexts, and encode within themselves their circumstances of production and reception. Categories of contextual naturalness or abnormality evidence critical concern with the local realities of performance: elements like event, audience composition and mood. The effect of politics is usually inadequately explained in accounts of particular performance contexts. Especially in relation to the deployment of political forms like izibongo in circumstances of coercion and isolation, such as those in which Manisi wrote and performed, a micro focus on the material context easily misleads by claiming that the poet produces in ‘natural’ circumstances, when in fact, in Manisi's case, his terms of expression are shackled to the dominant politics and his conventional licence is compromised by a totalising political horizon.
In the Introduction, I outlined briefly the categories agreed by Opland and Manisi to provide a theoretical framework for the poet's archived performance texts. ‘Performance’ describes those poems produced at political events or in social contexts in which Manisi's impulse was to comment spontaneously on, or contribute ritually or ceremonially to, proceedings.
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- Information
- Stranger at HomeThe Praise Poet in Apartheid South Africa, pp. 100 - 132Publisher: Wits University PressPrint publication year: 2011