Torn between poetry and politics
KEORAPETSE Kgositsile’s anguished sense of possessing simultaneously a plenitude of creative power and an excruciating incapacity for action breaks out again and again in his work.
In some of his best poems – The Present is a Dangerous Place to Live, Towards a Walk in the Sun, Requiem for my Mother, Sprits Unchained, My Name is Africa, There are no Sanctuaries Except in Purposeful Action – he speaks despairingly of impotence, in the broad sense of that word, a haunting sense that his vocation as a poet, even at its most intense, could not bring about fundamental change in the order of things.
Clearly there was in him, or so he felt, an all too human limitation which, when it came to bringing about fundamental change, caused his gigantic intellectual and creative energy to trickle away like sand. Perhaps this rather selfdeprecating tendency, enmeshed as it was with his sense of the limitations of creative power without political strength, can be attributed to the enormity of the struggle to achieve the full meaning of freedom as he understood it.
Kgositsile had a marvellous gift for metaphor. He could jot down a set of glittering metaphors conveying great tracts of experience. He could also define with exquisite exactness the minutest shades of emotional and psychological existence. But, like Can Themba, his teacher at Madibane High School, he craved a capacity for action which could sustain the liberation movement. The two sides of his nature ground harshly against each other.
A tension in composition and execution was an inherent limitation in his vocation as a poet. Certainly it was not just the simple dereliction of duty that Kgositsile at times assumed it to be. His poetic life was aspiring and extraordinarily intense, but the movement from poetry to politics was, as always, intricate and oblique.
The virtue of Kgositsile’s sense of impotence was intensity – an extraordinary concentration of light on a particular point – and an astonishing sense of urgency. Like Mbulelo Mzamane and Can Themba, his insights would occur suddenly and brilliantly, even in the most incongruous settings. Perhaps in an intimate romantic moment or perhaps in a flash of tender memories, his genius would be kindled, his wide-ranging creative capacities combined, leaving us dazzled by the radiance of his passionate intelligence.
A shaft of light – irony, humour, subtlety, profound meditation, all combined – and this strange combination still more strangely co-existed with self-depreciation, frailty and vulnerability, and the very soul of sincerity.
A great poet-soldier, he knew what the courage to be free was, and he was able to define it. But his definition, like aesthetic definitions even at their most articulate, proved to be inadequate, or so he felt.
If the courage to be free, as he asserted, was the knowledge of what to say and do in the heat of the struggle, then the question tends to become universal, for in order to answer it one must have a knowledge of the human condition at this point in history, and of the meaning of the courage to be free under such circumstances. This definition confirms his assertions throughout his work that the courage to be free is an essential virtue.
He never failed to define what the courage to be free really entailed. And this definition is fundamental within the frame of his philosophy and vocation as a poet. It is a profound understanding of what it is to be human. It presupposes an understanding of the human being and of his world, its structures, its predicaments and values. Only he who knows this knows what to affirm and what to negate. The ethical and political question of the courage to be free can be asked as the existential question.
The courage to be free shows us what to be human entails, what it means to be alive. Although it is extremely difficult to be human in this sense, the ongoing challenge, risking failure much of the time, keeps the Kgositsilean project alive. His work unites the three meanings of the concept of the courage to be free – the ethical, the political, and the philosophical.
The courage to be free is the universal and essential self-affirmation of one’s humanity in spite of those elements of our existence which conflict with our essential selfaffirmation.
Kgositsile’s three meanings of courage are evoked almost everywhere in his work, explicitly or implicitly. They are related to the will and the spirit, and both are related to the condition of Africa in chains. It is the reflective striving towards what is noble. As such it has a central place in the structure of the human; it bridges the cleavage between memory, fear, anxiety and longing. The bridge is hard to cross. The cleavage has ethical, political, and philosophical consequences. It is responsible for Kgositsile’s ethical and aesthetic rigour and his division of the human into feeling, thought, expression, and action.
The historical context in which the bridge occurs is well known. The canonical figures of the courage to be free include Lenin, Castro, Mandela, OR Tambo, Lumumba, Che Guevara, Fanon, Pablo Neruda, Malcom X – the representatives of what is noble and fully human.
Out of them the courage to be free emerges, adding wisdom to passion and conviction.
But he was concerned that this aristocracy and its values were disintegrating in the post-colony. The battle cry for the courage to be free remains even after independence.
Since the greatest test of courage is the readiness to make the greatest sacrifice of one’s life, and since the soldier is required by his vocation to be always ready for this sacrifice, the soldier’s courage is the outstanding example of the courage to be fully human. Such courage is the power of life to affirm itself in spite of the risk, while the negation of life is an expression of cowardice and profound existential failure.
On this basis, Kgositsile developed a philosophy in opposition to the mediocrity and decadence of the emerging consumerist society, particularly in the postcolony, whose coming was not easy to foresee. As long as the courageous, in Kgositsile’s sense, were the Lumumbas and Mandelas of this world, who embodied these values, the political and ethical connotations of courage merged.
Now that the heroic dimensions of the liberation movement are waning for whatever reason, courage can be defined as the universal courage to make sacrifices in order to achieve freedom from any kind of domination.
Courage and integrity converge and true courage – in the post-colonial context – becomes a variation of the soldier’s courage.
Courage remains political, ethical and philosophical, even if it is not heroic in the soldier’s sense.
Kgositsile lived in meanings – meanings found in that which was valid politically, aesthetically, ethically, philosophically.
His subjectivity was impregnated with a supreme vision.
The whole idiom of his poetry, the bias of his being, the focus of his vocation, all serve to affirm what was intrinsic in his consciousness.
The consciousness, over very difficult times, is a system of active connection initiated within the imagination, but not concluded there.
The courage to be requires the collaboration of others. It is not snapped off at the edge of individual consciousness. It is not conceivable without the action of kindred souls on each other, that is the modification of each by each, and of each by the whole.
We are apt to limit consciousness, the connection of consciousness, by taking it to be a derivation from memory. But there is also, Kgositsile claimed, a connection with the future. This is why Kgositsile integrated vision, memory and origins – functions of the past – with purposes and movement – functions of the future.