H
ow I wish I could, like many,
pretend that the ethics of poetry
are engraved on a rock
somewhere at the centre of the
global village — an assumption that
downplays the fact that one's domicile,
environment and experience directly
informs his literary outlook. The poetry
landscape in South Africa is diversely everchanging, rendering the question of ethics
indefinite and extremely complex in its
simplicity. Ethics of poetry in a particular
place are inseparably influenced by the
social dynamics of that place, yet they are
never a one-way road.
ETHNICITIES
David waMaahlamela
In South Africa, a country whose identity
has been shattered and remoulded by the
successive evil-trinity of colonial politics,
apartheid and mass culture, poetry cannot
in its honest sense afford to distance itself
from the quest of reclaiming that which is
lost, or guard that which is under threat.
Realising limitations and unfitness of
language in its raw form, the politician relied
on poetry's ability to objectify subjective
experience in contextualising abstract
ideologies such as black consciousness
www.megaartists.co.za
and the African renaissance. As a matter of
fact many prominent politicians have, at
one point of their lives, tried a hand in
writing poetry, if not to strengthen their
speeches with it.
In times of crisis, poetry has a special and
crucial function completely unmatched. It
doesn't, therefore, come as a surprise
when Charles Bukowski refers to poetry as
“what happens when nothing else can”.
Poetry is, at its best, the highest literary
form of intense imaginative identity with the
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