Hillbrow, Poems from Stranger than a Sun

The Pakistani doctor from Faisalabad practices on a busy street at Hillbrow. His surgery is full of people, white, black and coloureds. They all want to live. Like an overshadowing doom with scratches of light now and then he tries to pick and choose. Hillbrow is in his vein too. It runs in virulence, speeding in hopeless strides. His patients too change their gasps before moving on. I think of him. In days bloodied with endless motorcades and streets hanging on desperately to a fast moving train, he sometimes tries stretching himself to people he had left. The Nigerian mafia at times pushes an unwilling customer from the seventh floor. The train doesn’t stops. There is a big hole in the sky here. The sun always forgets to pass by. I live a life somewhat closer to breathing somewhere close by. In evenings when a storm takes familiarity of a lost vengeance, I believe I am still alive. The heart throbs bridging living with those dying and the dying with those who have just survived. In our many lives, we always shared this beating heart, dying is the stream of light, a train running over a slumber unhinged to our other lives. We do wake up finding ourselves cornered by time’s insistent pursuit. Living and loving at Old Delhi was not just an end to a despairingly belief. I still see them through window panes when evenings rush in colouring your whispers again.

Excerpts from Stranger than a Sun

To be free is all we ever need. These age old streets at Johannesburg are the same as in Delhi. One reflected its own reflection of the conqueror and the vanquished and the other spoke of once rusted rivers now barely an overcrowded thread. Each in its own way remembered their ancient strife; season in layers resented the estrangement of evenings and darkness. Today as I stand on a Dutch sounding street at Johannesburg, evenings of jacaranda flowers reminds me of its age and many such lost livings. Like me, you too might have been on an endangered street; saturday reasoning at dusk might even have the aroma of karims at chitli qabar. We once talked about freedom here while watching pigeons fly. You said how can we have freedom when there are so many threads pulling the kites and so many skies living our lives. Brimming with tears from the hot kebab, we laughed the sunset of many such small beginnings.

Watercolor Drawing of Old Delhi by Amitabh Mitra

High Street, Grahamstown

Watercolor on Handmade Paper by Amitabh Mitra

Hon. Noxolo Kiviet, Premier of Eastern Cape visits Accident and Emergency Department of Cecilia Makiwane Hospital

With the Hon. Noxolo Kiviet, Premier of Eastern Cape today at our Accident and Emergency Department of Cecilia Makiwane Hospital, Mdantsane. A wonderful gesture from the Premier on the morning of Christmas day. Accident and Emergency Department is a specialty department with all my doctors and nurses been trauma trained, it caters to the community of Mdantsane and its surrounding areas.

Stranger than a Sun

Gouache by Amitabh Mitra

Poems from Stranger than a Sun

And then finally when night stood still, an evening, its reign of suntrance years, of wealth, wilderness and glory of many campaigns left in a river of subterfuge, its long sinewy columns rolled down the glitter in a night borderless on stealth and stubbornness. I have been living years of such understanding, that one day in a cover of duress and despair, time might conclude a hasty retreat, its tiny droplets may not even join and sections of unrepaired horizons would differ as nights and evenings revise a no dissolving pact. The Volga at Tatarstan had refused time and again of curtailing the living with the living, different voices share a confluence of similar strengths, Tartar warriors stood on banks stretching to sea and the sea to many skies holding aloft such spoken memories such relived lives. I had even forgiven you, you who once called upon words to reopen old forgotten closures. In an ageless complete, you are the reversal, you remain the scroll, and you are the substrate of my many lives.

Hillbrow at Johannesburg faces darkness with such ferocity; lights clamor over each others shoulder, holding a falling sun, for here there can never be any nights. Forever evenings scream in shrill rejoinder, a clay complexioned Ethiopian girl with long neck revises proximity from a cabaret number. Men from Abuja listen with shaking heads, some even recite silently. Colors of evening find asylum on foreign surfaces. The scarred white girl rolls her eyes and gives voice to expanding vessels. Living is defiance. Illumination is not just a street here and curtains part revealing revelry of age old explanation. It cannot be the same as in NoorGunj at Gwalior and Shafiq Manzil,Old Delhi. Each living stays far behind in closed alleys and assembling them leaves foot steps that can never return.

Nolutshungu Avenue, Poems of Simphiwe Nolutshungu

Simphiwe Nolutshungu's poetry book NOLUTSHUNGU AVENUE
Publisher - Aerial Publishing, Grahamstown, South Africa
Cover art by Amitabh Mitra

Book Launch at

NELM Eastern Star Hall

Anglo African Street, Grahamstown

5.30pm Monday 10 December 2012

On this Avenue                      

The moon and sun are single

Each day harbours its night

The night makes love to the day      

And we are the offspring of the day       

And the children of the night.

This Avenue strews poetry and hymns

No funerals tread on our paths          

Divorces are scared of breathing

But weddings fill our stomachs

Young graduates adorn our streets

Welcome to Nolutshungu Avenue

Simphiwe Nolutshungu is the author of three novels in isiXhosa – Amathunzi ezolo, Induli yexhala, and Iingceba zegazi (shortlisted for the 2012 Sanlam Prize).  His poems have been published in local and national journals. He has worked as a clerk and a freelance journalist, and has worked as a schoolteacher in many parts of South Africa.  His home is in Queenstown.