This morning I was listening to one of my favourite Internet Radio Stations, Pan Africa Space Station, where they mostly feature recordings of live performances that were either hosted by or attended by the station. Featuring exclusively African Jazz and World music, documentaries and interviews about giants in the scene, and performances by spoken word artists, the station pitches itself as lofty and Afro-intellectual and for the most part I enjoy the heck out of it.
But occasionally a spoken word artist will come on and just be tooo much.
Like, they’re trying too hard to flex their intellectuality by cramming everything they read and also vaguely heard about at university, together with their entire lifelong lexicon into each and every line, leaving the listener with an unnecessarily dense mental mangrove-swamp-root mess of piecing-together-the-layered-meaning at the lightning pace at which the concepts are being delivered orally in the heat of the performance, while failing miserably.
Only if you’ve physically read the piece and had the time and luxury of researching all the references for yourself would you have had any hope of being able to keep up in whatever public setting this morning’s example was delivered in on air.
And that got me triggered.
– TASK –
Write a long and unnecessarily verbose and dense piece of whatever style and format.
Note, you will learn in the following lines that I also know some Zulu
(*explanations/translations at the end).
Here is the result:
Â
Â
This flagrant parasol
An organic botanic
Vampiric alcohol
Succubus with
What's left of my soul
That even
A Noellian
Credit-card spree can't console
A money-laundered
Qatarian jet
Don't fill this hole
And a fresh hit on
5-HT2A
Won't help set a higher goal
'cos Medusa's got me beat
Looking back down her street
Ouroboros serve me up
At an all-you-can-eat
Inkanyamba won't let me
Cool off from the heat
Walala
Wasala
Wakala
'cos your saying's incomplete
Diasporian aesthetics
Hollow souls
Come across as fools
Migrant flows
No longer in stasis
Migrant labour
A cheap set of tools
Zero emissions
Calisthenics
Paid-for studies
Make for paid-for rules
Big tech stripping
Away our dignity
As we jump for shiny
Digital jewels
'cos Medusa's got me beat
Looking back down her street
Ouroboros serve me up
At an all-you-can-eat
Inkanyamba won't let me
Cool off from the heat
Walala
Wasala
Wakala
'cos your saying's incomplete
Competing ideas
Makes for democratics
When the town square
Don't dance to money rules
Ball rooms being built
For autocratics
Invading oil-filled "Narco" neighbours
To slow dollar's ruin
Scientists should stick
To the practics
And not be jacked
By metaphysical babboons
Nor should they cave
To the pressures of big money
And be made to look
Like b*tch and buffoon
'cos Medusa's got me beat
Looking back down her street
Ouroboros serve me up
At an all-you-can-eat
Inkanyamba won't let me
Cool off from the heat
Walala
Wasala
Wakala
'cos your saying's incomplete
There's a sinister
Side to the mountain
That Cape Town tourists
Are never shown
A clique-ey-ness to the people
Caused by incomers' constant flow
So many smashed-up dreams
On the rocks
From which the Table's side is grown
That it's impossible
To give your love
To every new person
You come to know
'cos Medusa's got me beat
Looking back down her street
Ouroboros serve me up
At an all-you-can-eat
Inkanyamba won't let me
Cool off from the heat
Walala
Wasala
Wakala
'cos your saying's incomplete
ZULU NOTES
Inkanyamba refers to mythical water monsters living in dams and rivers in Eswatini and elsewhere in Southern Africa where they are known by many names. I learned about them while camping on the bank of Maguga Dam in Eswatini, where I discovered that the locals refused to live near the waters edge for fear of being attacked in the night by the Inkanyamba. They would bring their livestock down to the waters edge with herd boys always nearby and always watching, and then they would retreat back up hill, way away from the waters edge for safety at night.
Fascinating stuff.
Walala
Wasala
Wakala
‘cos your saying’s incomplete…
Translates to:
You snooze
You lose
You cry
I say that “it’s incomplete” because the culturally correct saying in Zulu is limited to only: Walala-Wasala and yet it clearly benefits from the addition of the Wakala that was noticed first and only by this Scottish-Dutch African of incorrect pigmentation.