Xamissa sounds out Cape Town in a joyful elegy for the just city in the dream state, the city of alternate takes, which could have but has not come to be yet. A long poem, Xamissa adapts the mythical name for the springs and streams running from Table Mountain to the sea, under the city itself, since before the colonial Dutch ships came-the X of the title stands for the multiple ways in the languages of the Cape, past and present, the reader may pronounce the first consonant. A work of documentary poetics that investigates the cost of whiteness in South Africa, Xamissa code-switches at times into lontara, the subversive Indonesian script that undercuts the prevalence of Dutch in the colonial archive. Much of Xamissa depends upon a 1727 archival record, which suggests that a figure named Lena van de Caab, without precedent in her lifetime, marooned from the urban plantation of the Dutch East India Company to join a city of her making in the mountains beyond Cape Town and that 14 enslaved women and men, soon after, echoed her political action. Through serial questions around the ethics of its address, Xamissa probes the interrelation of language, sociality, and resistance, in its bid to interrogate the archive as a draft of the city's future.
Xamissa sounds out Cape Town in a joyful elegy for the just city in the dream state, the city of alternate takes, which could have but has not come to be yet. A long poem, Xamissa adapts the mythical name for the springs and streams running from Table Mountain to the sea, under the city itself, since before the colonial Dutch ships came-the X of the title stands for the multiple ways in the languages of the Cape, past and present, the reader may pronounce the first consonant. A work of documentary poetics that investigates the cost of whiteness in South Africa, Xamissa code-switches at times into lontara, the subversive Indonesian script that undercuts the prevalence of Dutch in the colonial archive. Much of Xamissa depends upon a 1727 archival record, which suggests that a figure named Lena van de Caab, without precedent in her lifetime, marooned from the urban plantation of the Dutch East India Company to join a city of her making in the mountains beyond Cape Town and that 14 enslaved women and men, soon after, echoed her political action. Through serial questions around the ethics of its address, Xamissa probes the interrelation of language, sociality, and resistance, in its bid to interrogate the archive as a draft of the city's future.
Proloog 1
Rearrival 7
The Dream of the Road 17
Doppler Shift 21
Folding Screen 29
Twin Soldiers 31
The Prisoner 32
Elegy for the Gesture 33
The Water Archives 35
helena | Lena 43
Lontara Translation 111
Sources 113
Notes 115
Acknowledgments 119
Henk Rossouw teaches at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. His poems have appeared in The Paris Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Boston Review, and other publications.
In Xamissa, Henk Rossouw writes the membranes that thrive between
the hyper-real of the culturally residual and the liminally sensed
real of the culturally emergent. His artistic vision isn't borne
out of the tyranny of spontaneous epiphany, but rather is carefully
fleshed out through a constructivist process of cultural
excavation. Writ large are luminous alter-selves from South
Africa's mist-covered past that get choreographed into what Aime
Cesaire once called 'a rendezvous of victory.' Nimbly threading
History's objects ('nation', 'city', 'self', 'peoples'), Rossouw
guides us into and out of Imperium's capture zones. The result is a
lived-life global poetics where the harmonic modulation from
nationalist myth making to a newly invigorated drive for
liberationist re-definition of 'citizenship', makes for a dazzling
music of our time.---Rodrigo Toscano
Voices in the singular and plural compel Henk Rossouw's Xamissa
with such 'ecstatic stride' as to match the intensity of human
spectacle advancing the procession of Cape Town's history. The
collective effect of alternating scenes and incantations reflect an
ethical imperative of uncertainty--destabilizing shifts of mood and
matter; of the external and internal viewpoint. With formal
ambition and acoustic scales of mind, Rossouw confronts a past
haunted by racial brutality, even as it imagines an eventual social
unity and the durational 'anyway' that poetry's historical
imagination is able to contain.---Roberto Tejada
In the 1990s, the poet Sandile Dikeni led Monday night poetry
readings at a place in the center of Cape Town called Café Camissa.
Both poetry and the capacity to recover history's untold cruelties
found a home in Xamissa, the name "crossed-out" beneath the one we
know, 'Cape Town.' In Henk Rossouw's stunning collection of this
name, Xamissa, crossed-out histories refuse their erasure, spill
their liquid meaning, and reclaim the name that means 'place of
sweet waters.' Eddying, disorienting, unforgotten, ceaselessly
coursing, the history that the city wants to lose returns liquidly,
wearing away, accreting, unburying. But because what you see when
you look at this place is too easy at first, you might miss that
its bright surfaces are like 'a beautiful wet bag over the mouth
of.' Xamissa misses nothing.---Gabeba Baderoon, The Dream in the
Next Body, A Hundred Silences, and The History of Intimacy
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