Lavatory poets, guns… green-eyed beauties
KILROY was one of the best known people in Chatsworth. Wherever one looked in my beloved Bangladesh Market district, one could not escape the reminder that “Kilroy was here”. We often read it as a threat that Kilroy had marked his territory and wasn’t to be messed with.
What was baffling, though, was that Kilroy seemed to spend an awful lot of time in the lavatory. As one settled down to one’s business, one could read about his various adventures in the lewdest, rudest language.
He seemed to be getting it on with just about all the beautiful girls. Sometimes their telephone numbers were weaved into the rhymes of Kilroy’s army of lavatory poets. A mention in a poem could destroy a young lady’s reputation without so much as question.
Sometimes the anthologies would be scrawled over a period of time. It was fodder for the langadas or local gossips.
Each day there was an addition of something salacious or until there was no longer space on the wall or the back of the toilet door.
Kilroy’s poets competed with the tearful windbag, “Brokenhearted”, whose description of his motions routinely stopped short of evacuation.
Now it’s not that we were starved for good poetry. Our municipal libraries in Woodhurst, Havenside and Croftdene had decent fare, so did our school libraries.
It defies logic that the rhymes of Kilroy and Brokenhearted are more memorable than the eloquent Shabbir Banoobhai, Maya Angelou or Mongane Serote let alone Tennyson, Blake or Browning.
Lest I be confirmed the snoot I pretend to be, let me confess to having relished both the lavatory poets and those that found a home in the library catalogues.
My own bookcase boasts a hefty volume of Professor Michael Chapman’s edited collection, A Century of South African Poetry.
It lists Banoobhai’s for my father which brings back the fond memory of the day my father delivered a little transistor radio, “when your father brought the radio, he had promised so long ago, and the laughter of the child rippled in his eyes”.
A less welcome and ugly recollection of when the notorious Black Jacks used to harass Africans in Chatsworth is told by Mafika Gwala in Kwelaride, “Dompas! I looked back, Dompas! I went through my pockets, Not there.”
It is the same ugly black boots that used to throw struggling vegetable vendors and their goods into the back of the police van in the area that defiantly remains as Bangladesh Market.
The jazz maestro Dollar Brand in Blues for District Six recalls our own music making up against the wall of the six family cottages, “tenored a bawdy banjo, strung an ancient cello, bridged a host of guitars, tambourined through a dingy alley”.
Nearby Chapman’s anthology resides the Irish poet Seamus Heaney’s New Selected Poems 1966-1987. In Digging, Heaney captures my favourite posture, “Between my finger and my thumb, The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.”
Back in 1984, I wished I’d had a gun to shoot Kilroy when one of his poems was trained on a green-eyed beauty I was sweet on.
• Higgins promotes #Readingrevolution via Books@ Antiquecafe in Windermere and #Hashtagbooks in the Shannon Drive Shopping Centre in Reservoir Hills.