3 - Songs: Native Sons Dancing Like Crazy

Summary

The previous chapter saw Kgositsile mobilize the names-songs-places dynamic to anchor his work in the bedrock of his beginnings, the homeplace of his formative years, in a poetics that centralizes the body as the most intimate of contact zones from which to foster revolutionary poetry and political solidarities. The matriarchive informed, shaped, and held together the zone of relationality and Black radical sociality through the internetworked bodies of the mothers, bodies of land, bodies of water, bodies of knowledge, and celestial bodies. In setting up this chapter's concerns as being continuous with the previous one, here I offer a recap of my findings from chapter 2. Kgositsile settled on the umbilical cord as a connective tissue between his mother and himself, the son, while birth rituals generated a poetics of relation between the mother, the land in which it is buried, and the son. Further, in his shifting and sifting, he linked the bodies of his mothers and bodies of land with celestial bodies: ‘the son must move on to set like the sun and lie buried in the west, or rise again to burn in this place with newborn fire’ (1973a: 64). Here the son is exiled from the land and enlists imageries from cosmological phenomena to transubstantiate himself from the son to the sun, setting in the west, and returning with ‘newborn fire’. The choice of ‘newborn’ sets his meditation up in a dialogue with the matriarchive that makes it possible for the new-to-beborn, ‘rising again’, a (re)birth – ‘Mother, what is my name?’ – to undergird his liberatory purpose that must always be tied to the collective.

The bodies of water, central and fundamental to these relational poetics grounded in the matriarchive, are the principle of creation and creativity, recreation and regeneration that make it possible for Kgositsile to fashion poetics of death and rebirth, destruction and recreation, and flowering creativity and creation in the desolation of exile. The bodies of water in the previous chapter located the matriarchive of his formative years in continuity and locution with those encountered in exile. These were understood as held together, or, to harness the uses of the coil, gathered together by forces of the Limpopo and Mississippi Rivers, which confluence in the Atlantic and other oceans.