a poetry reading by ingrid de kok
Date: September 18, 2006
Time: 4:30 PM
Location: Rm 215/216, The Women's Center, Kirkhof Center, GVSU, Grand Rapids, MI.
I urge all and every last one of you to take Monday afternoon off and go to this reading! I first came into contact with Ingrid not because of her amazing poetry but because I was looking for someone who could help me with a question concerning the wily Afrikaans sonnet. Not knowing who she was other than a professor at the University of Cape Town I sent off a letter full of questions and probably a few misspellings.
Then, one morning about two weeks ago in the Muskegon-Hacklet Library, I made a discovery. I had gone there, in part, to look at their copy of The Book of Kells and was delighted with a giant stain-glass window taking up one whole wall with the faces of Shakespeare, Goethe, Longfellow and Prescott in multi-colored glass. On the way out I happened to glance at the New Acquisitions shelf and there was Seasonal Fires (Seven Stories Press, 2006) by none other than Ingrid de Kok! I sat down and read the entire book that morning.
A few days later I wrote her back and told of my discovery. She said she was about to embark on her reading tour of America and would be stopping at Grand Rapids to give a reading at Grand Valley State University. Here is what their Women's Center has to say about her:
Ingrid de Kok is an Associate Professor at the Centre for Extra-Mural Studies at the University of Cape Town. She has published three earlier collections of poetry: Familiar Ground (1988); Transfer (1997); Terrestrial Things (2002). The U S edition of her new volume, Seasonal Fires, was published in May 2006. Poems by Ingrid de Kok appear in over 17 anthologies in South Africa and 14 or so international anthologies. She has been published widely in literary journals in South Africa and abroad, and her poems have been translated into eight other languages, most recently Turkish. She has been awarded the Carapace/Snailpress Poetry Prize (2000); Dalro Poetry Award (2002) and the Herman Charles Bosman Award for English Literature (2003).
I believe in some off-handed way picking up a book of poetry and reading the first poem you come to shapes one's whole view on all the other poems you might read. That might seem unfair if you chose a poor poem but what excitement to discover a new world in a dozen or so lines if the poem is splendid! That was the case for me with Dolphin Eater, a poem that caused all the hairs to go up on the back of my head.
There was nothing else to eat.
So I ate the dolphin
and asked my friend
never ever to tell.Like lightning
that night
sea struck me
and I screamed in my sleep
for a boat to take me back
to the first shore
where I had eaten no dolphin.In my eyes dolphins dancing
in the bay close to shore
a gift of the evening tide
to the strollers on the beach.
In my mouth, dolphin.I tricked the silent ferryman,
gave beads for land,
and the silver cargo of the dhow
discharged into my palm.Nothing will save me now
in the waves off the cliffs.
I will not be brought home
on the leeside of a dolphin's fin. (32)
The poem immediately places us in the heart of mythology. The dolphin is a mythic creature of good will in almost ever culture it is seen in. In Greece, Dionysus turned the Tyrrhenian pirates into dolphins for kidnapping him; a dolphin rescued Arion the poet from drowning and carried him to safety. In Hindu mythology there is a dolphin associated with Ganga, the protector of the Ganges river. Dolphin and whale gods feature heavily in Polynesian religion. So it is little surprise that the taboo of eating dolphin meat would be harsh; and like many other characters in de Kok's poetry, here too the speaker is damned.
What about this theme of damnation? Let us pause a moment and reflect on not just life under South African apartheid but also the shame and conflict its post-apartheid world created. de Kok's poems in Body Maps (the new selection of her work) range with titles like "Reparation," "Too Long a Sacrifice," "Child Stretching," "Death Notices" and "Kalahari Campsite." Each poem I turn to holds a sense of pressing dread, urgent anticipation, feverish alarm. I recall reading in college the Nobel Laureate J.M. Coetzee's book Disgrace (1999) and not getting it. True, the male protagonist was unappetizing and hard to sympathize with as he womanized his way through the story. But the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that caused him to do the things he did? I knew nothing about that so I could not understand his motives. And if you don't understand the purpose of the Commission or if you forget your history and pretend other things happened during South Africa's dark years, then as de Kok says in Bring The Statues Back, concerning the removal of the monuments of apartheid's architects such as Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd:
Let's put Verwoerd back
on a public corner like a blister on the lips;
let's walk past him and his moulded hat,
direct traffic through his legs,
and the legs of his cronies of steel and stone. (142 - 43)
To understand the conditions South Africa now lives under is to understand the narrator in Dolphin Eater as well. "There was nothing else to eat," we are told and yet still through this terrible neglect the narrator is damned. There is no innocence here, "the first shore/ where I had eaten no dolphin." It is impossible to return. You might be pardoned of your evil but what good is that if it haunts you daily; "in my mouth, dolphin"? You might be cunning. You might trick Charon, "the silent ferryman," who ferries the dead across the river Styx in the underworld of Hades. But even that is pointless when there is no self-salvation. Hearkening back to the Greek myth of Arion rescue, de Kok ends the poem with this apocalyptic pronouncement: "Nothing will save me now/ in the waves off the cliffs./ I will not be brought home/ on the leeside of a dolphin's fin."
I wanted to say something about Dolphin Eater because it is one of her earlier poems, coming from Familiar Ground (1988) and de Kok gets better and better with each book. There is a good chance that this splendor might get overshadowed by many of her newer more political poems. That would be a shame because this is just as good as anything else you will find in Seasonal Fires. I hope she reads it at GVSU next Monday.