Two Poems: South African Hip Hop and Glottal Stops of Militants

ABOUT THE POEMS In these poems by the British poet Raficq Abdulla, language works itself up into a giddy conviction, pulsing with the “energee” of the hip-hop that the lyric speaker admires so much. We are drawn in and won over as much by the speaker’s incantatory sound as by the progression of his thought, by the ringing phrases—“the springbok in your soul”, “our country’s deep serendipitee”, “militants/plastered with God”, “the mud of my mind-track”—rippling with alliterative and metaphorical exuberance. Here is a lyric voice that revels in its own “erratic print” (a fine image, incidentally, for the look of poetry on the page).

South African Hip Hop

Hey man what you doing, where’ve you been!

You need to check out the whip-crack scene

Hip hop in South Africa will tear you open tear open your spleen

It’s the wild world carnivorous playing on the esplanade

It’s more than smoke and a charade it’s the hunting parade

Where colour is choler make no mistake, anger and energee is within,

It’s written on the skin, it’s where young people meet to sing and see and be seen

Change your attitude slow and dreary stop your pesky reading

Suck the hip like heavy smoke scary into your breathing

Find a way to feel the core the throbbing beat, the springbok in your soul

That’s rapping like a stream, kasi to kasi—there’s no retreat

In our flowing country—each town has its style, the cream of sound

Hip hop’s been purring its stuff like a lion under and over ground

This is no botox, it’s the real thing, it’s our real pedigree,

It’s honey with a sharp heady sting, it sings and sings

Shooting and raising a tower of energee it brings us to our senses,

It’s not only about you and me it’s about style and synergee

The all-of-us the rainbow nation the silver spoon that

Feeds our dream—stop and listen become the tune

And you’ll learn to hip shout and shake off the monsoon

Be wild with style and find our country’s deep serendipitee

Hip on sister, hop in brother speak to one another learn to be free

Only then, only then you’ll learn to live and shine without mediocritee.

Glottal Stops of Militants

these monolithic methods of militants plastered

with God, these bearded saints of certitude

pitted with glottal stops, it’s not a language,

a battery that comes naturally to you I hope—

now you can see through the cardinal point of my life

if I have one—pusillanimity being the mirage

shimmering above the mud of my mind-track.

the schemes of militants don’t come naturally to me,

in fact I reject the mania of their millenarian plunge

into presumed purity, that backward-looking preening

place of stark origins tattooed with exploding myths of

non-thought, so I would like to think, but that’s another story—

thinking I mean, not my natural companion as fluent copy,

a flattery speaking with ease through me, if you see what I mean.

but you may read the erratic print of my voice differently

cite it better, sabotaged by the melt of my thoughts,

making them objects that demean with signs the almost-ecstatic

glimpse of the world in me, dreaming about me—if you can

make movies of my signatures with your reading, I mean yours

and yours alone, you may show their catastrophes to others.