Jeremy Cronin

 

To discuss other issues through other issues

 

I'm holding my breath. Can't keep my eyes off them.

This fascination for whales

Swimming up towards us, and the Truth Commission has completed its work, and my organisation, the ANC, has blown its response to the interim report by getting into a stupid argument with Archbishop Tutu, and I'm thinking:

Whales would take a longer view.

Or thinking about whales forces us to take a longer view - or something.

Not shoal fish. Snoek. Mackerel. Blue-fin circling through the canny wash of the Two Oceans Aquarium, fat tunny, yellow-tail, katonkel shoaling in the Kelp Tank (I think of it as the Washington consensus) propelling themselves by shaking their heads, setting up a jerky body-ripple that works its way continuously through to the tail, cuffed hands behind backs, mouths agape, always this feeling of panicky haste.

Whales, by contrast, hold a steady head, resonant for echo, blow-holes aspirant, backs rolling lazily over

Ma-meee-la, "listen up" (in Xhosa), a channel-opener, which, therefore, notwithstanding its consonants, its languid vowels, has nothing (perhaps everything) to do with the word for our warm-blooded, our suckling sister- and brotherhood, family of mammals.

"Mamela", Mosioua Lekota is berating me - he doesn't agree with my line on the Truth Commission. He's a large, whale of a man (did time on the Island with Mandela) with a squeaky voice and a fluke-like, generous hand-gesture, "No comrade, it's not helpful to discuss other issues through other issues."

He's right.

But then again, that's how this poem is going to work.

By fluke, the name for the lobe of the whale's tail is that, fluke, from the triangular plate on the arm of an anchor: fluke (I'm guessing, floc, old Germanic). Fluke is also the name for a flat-fish or flounder, like Flanders (place of flatness), "oor ons ver verlate vlaktes", "over our far-flung, unfrequented flat-lands" (apartheid's anthem - "unfrequented" - flatly denying genocide), in short, the fluke that propels whales sounding down to the depths bears the shallow name of flatness.

Ahab takes the rap.

Peleg and Bildad evade the Truth Commission.

Listed on the Nasdaq, the whale-hunt goes virtual, Pequod a cursor, Moby Dick the ultimate libidinal destination, the emptiness behind the next obsession after the next, where great symbols are flattened, resonance diminished, echo just echo, the T-shirt Save the Whale, and the T-shirt Free Mandela.

Off beaches of Indian Ocean islands, stone-age peoples hunted leviathan by paddling quietly alongside, hyperventilating into dizziness to become the rhythm of the deep, metallic phew-w-w-w-w

Then boarding with care, human embracing whale, and slamming a wooden plug into its blow-hole. Cry as it may try, wide as its maws might be, gasp as it could, the whale's mouth has never yet found a passage to its lungs.

At first, there was little international concern for human rights abuses. But that changed.

At first, the security police were amateurish in their torture techniques. But they learned.

Lieutenant Benzien would sit carefully on top, straddling, pulling the wet hood down over your head while your hands were cuffed behind your back. You'd gasp, kick, choking on less than a teaspoon of water. If you drowned, the evidence was negligible.

And now, breaching into light, exhaling other issue through other issue, letting it out, indigenous, vernacular, embodied knowledge, the stubborn irrelevancies from my childhood around Simon's Bay

Like the sides of the line-boats, named not "starboard" and "port" but, with a swaying gesture, swaaikant (for the right-hand side from which the hooked snoek-fish is swung across the body) and onderarm (port-side), to under the left arm, and then clubbed, and everywhere signs of the whale-hunt, Whalers' Way - the lane, the old blubber pot, thick with decades of black paint and a flat-side for pouring - still with us.

In the first twenty-five years of my life, through apartheid's granite epoch, pursued to near extinction, I never, once, saw a whale in this bay

But now, winters, coming on, dozens and dozens, increasing in number, the southern right whale making its come-back, sounding its own embodied knowledge, swimming up from Antarctica, to mate, to birth, to nurse, to breathe amongst us with a certain larger-than-life dignity, a ponderous, a back rolling overly over, a hey, a Mandela-like, mamela, onderarm, a deep metallic, a world-historic, whispered out--breathing, sw-w-waaikant.

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