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Metelerkamp Interview
Metelerkamp Interview
1992
From your poetry it’s clear that your mother and your grandmother
allowed you to think of yourself as a free woman, someone with
rights. How did these two women ward off or keep at bay the
violence surrounding everything in this country?
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but because of the quality of voice. And Serote’s use of voice moves
me. The South African poetry that I’ve read and that I like is
contemporary poetry. As far as the tradition goes, I haven’t done my
homework. I’ve read Ruth Miller backwards but I haven’t read
William Plomer or Roy Campbell backwards.
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you take up in other poems like “Perfection for me has been shared
passion fulfilled” and “In my dreaming,” which is a poem about
limits, are more interesting. The same with the poem “Dove.” I think
that’s where your voice is, where your voice is more resolved.
That thing about the brilliance of men comes from Adrienne Rich’s
“Transcendental Etude” where she talks about the necessity of
moving out of the realm of men: she talks about moving quietly into
the kitchen and piecing the fabric of our lives together. I understand
the allure of this, and it’s what I want too, and it’s what I’ve done in
mothering. I also want to move into the realm of the brilliance of
men, but on my own terms. I want to be recognised as a woman and
for whom I am. An image comes to me of ... I want to dance without
my shoes on. I want to say “fuck you” at the same time as saying
“accept me.” And tying it through my experience, through my
grandmother and my mother: my mother was a clever woman who
never recognised her mind as being her legitimate domain, who
gave that up to go farming, which she also wanted. I’m not saying
she did it self-sacrificially. She needed that, she needed the
emotional sustenance of this close farming family thing with my
father. The strong man, the shining man. And what I want to do is to
integrate those two sufficiently that I can go into that domain and
say “I am who I am” and “recognise me.”
It’s the male part of the intellect as being the cutter, the surgeon,
someone who operates . . . it’s the brilliance of men. It’s the rational
part of the male mind, and here you’re seeing the women as
accomplices. It’s the men who use the scalpel, it’s the women who
hold the scalpel.
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preventing it being used. They’re saying “here’s this woman who’s
unable to give birth, cut her open.”
One of the central images of the poem is the woman unable to give
birth — it’s the male part of her who’s going to rip or cut open her
stomach, to break forth the fruit of her womb through caesarian
section.
The women are accomplices, and the men are doing what is actually
your task to do. If we take that out of the social realm and into the
psychic realm, what is this saying? Isn’t it that you are writing with
your male voice, whereas you feel it’s the female’s job?
It’s not a theme, it’s a struggle, it’s an issue. It ties up with dreams
of mine at the moment, of wanting the male to be just the scribe,
and the female voice to be the thing that, as you put it, brings forth
the fruit. I want that to be where the voice comes from. Not want in
the sense of willing it to be so — more like that’s where I feel it is.
It is. It’s funny. I was thinking about it this morning, that maybe the
issue of gender is a red herring, but it’s actually the burning issue.
Internally . . .
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I must say the emphasis on text at the expense of voice in academe
not only pisses me off, I find it philosophically scary. Its emphasis is
on absence and loss and substitution rather than on presence and
possibility and reality (things as they are, not as metaphors). The
metaphor of text, of ‘reading’ everything, is a post-modern silliness
at best and a sickness at worst; and I can only think it is a colonial
anxiety which has made it take with such power in South African
academe.
The image of the farm for me is safety — the place next to the fire,
the hearth if you like. The child’s voice. A contained poem, within
the home and hearth and the sphere of the child. Ja, playing. I
actually was knitting. I was knitting this most bizarre thing, but
that’s another story. The realm of knitting might have pattern, but it
doesn’t have judgement, do you know? The judging voices of the
brilliant men are not there. I’m just thinking — this way seems to be
like Adrienne Rich’s quilting, or piecing together . . . but not quite
like her way.
It’s more integrated — the two other people there are the men, the
workers, who’ve come in from a day’s work. The images of people
relaxing after working, women or men. It’s a shared place, not
saying “this is my domain, that’s yours.” The other difference is that
the men aren’t competitive, they’re playing with me, they say
“horses in a sea green field.” So it’s not an antagonistic poem at all.
Although the way I see it is that you’re trying to find some other
way, some other name for this urge towards perfection. Like in the
poem “Perfection for me is shared passion fulfilled.”
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I was grappling with the question of perfection. If you reject
perfection in order to turn to the quotidian, where does desire get its
image? I mean what do you work towards, what is the impetus for
desire? How do you charge the everyday with the god of love,
without believing in the capital g for god, or the capital I for love?
I have to say about three times he’s dead because I don’t believe it
in a way. I’m convincing myself: it’s dead, it’s dead, it’s dead, let go.
This poem is struggling precisely with that: it’s trying to accept, it’s
trying to see what the place of ideals and myths and symbols is,
within a materialist kind of framework. When I wrote this poem I
thought: you’ve just got to look at the everyday and accept that. I
still believe that, but I believe that these gods have different shapes
and forms and that they are a part of our dreams and our myths,
they’re not going to save us but they are going to help us—if they
are integrated in ourselves—to bring eros into the everyday.
Yes. But not our saviours. This thing came from a recognition that in
South Africa as well as in myself, there was a tendency to look for
ideologies, or people, as some kind of salvation. I’m trying to say
that those possibilities aren’t there.
Yes, we need the saviour, the father, the logos. His name’s probably
not Nelson Mandela. But in this country it is, and there is some
symbolic sense in the fact that he is let out of jail as father, logos
figure, saviour, and things do start to change actually.
Well, the interesting thing about Mandela is that he’s about as close
as you can come to somebody who does his best to live up to
the . . .
. . . wise, good, father, you know, and he may well be that person,
who knows? The fact is that he holds that. It’s good, as long as you
don’t think it’s just him.
Yes, and I suppose what I was struggling with in that poem was
exactly that, the problem of concretising it too much, of . . . my
lovers are going to save me, I don’t have to do it myself. They’re
going to give me another country, another place, the country of the
heart.
A different way which is the right way. Because our way here in
South Africa is by definition the wrong way. We’ve carried such
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darkness for everybody else, right? We are the wrong way to do
everything.
You decide that it’s just where you are, and you get on with it. The
first bit is accepting where you are.