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Book review: Sensual, political, obsessive writing

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Sigh, the Beloved Country: Braai Talk, Rock ‘n’ Roll and other Stories by Bongani Madondo

Pan Macmillan

502 pages

R240 at takealot.com

Let’s work this in reverse and start at the end of Bongani Madondo’s book, or rather, 502 page tome, Sigh, the Beloved Country.

Maybe this ending should not come as a surprise considering Madondo was 20-something-years-old when he came to mid-90s Joburg, carrying with him fiction-writer ambitions. In Sigh, Madondo describes his ambition “to go back to my first love: telling stories”.

But what is there “to go back to”? Anyone who has read Madondo’s work over the years knows that he is a storyteller par excellence.

With his new book, he proves that there is no one who combines the art of critique/discourse with narrative storytelling the way he does this side of the Atlantic.

In Sigh, you will find some of the most extensive, expansive, inciting, historical, historiographical, sensual, political, obsessive writing so far written on the African continent by an African.

In particular, Madondo worships at the musical altar of black women.

In Up in the Air with the Prophetess, he sings the gospel of music sensation Zahara, making an admittedly crass statement that “not since Brenda Fassie was born, nor since she has gone, has South Africa experienced anything like this”.

Before you can throttle him to make him account for such blasphemy, you read deeper into his works and you begin to see-feel that what Madondo is truly obsessed with is who he calls his “blues queens”, such as Busi Mhlongo, Billie Holiday, and Miriam Makeba.

These are women who have the creative capacity to deal with the darkness of being Frantz Fanon’s “wretched of the earth” in a way that is chaotic and freeing at the same time. In a word: gospel.

We are in the Fallist moment of our post-apartheid history and Madondo’s meditations on blues queens are even more fitting if we consider that part of the decolonisation effort is the work of reclamation.

If we allow ourselves to read deeply into the work, we begin to make sense of a major subtext: the reclamation of rock ‘n’ roll and punk as black art forms generated by black blues queens.

If we are to think more about decolonisation and black modernity, we must look at Madondo’s work as following in the Black Atlantic tradition of African American-South African relationships such as those between Miles Davis and Hugh Masekela, Miriam Makeba and Sarah Vaughan, Audre Lorde and the women’s movement in South Africa, and, of course, the relationship between the late Lewis Nkosi and James Baldwin, Madondo’s real life and spiritual mentors, respectively.

There are close to 50 essays on everything, including religion, money and beauty, in Sigh.

Part One dedicates three essays to race. Madondo lets us in on the internal dialogues and conflicts of a black middle-class man in this particular juncture of our post-apartheid apartheid, as he is ritually reduced to the figure of the Black Intruder in his piece Oscar’s Phantom Nigger.

One thing he does is to self-identify “sell-out” as a means to reflect on some of the contradictions of being black in an anti-black world.

The trouble with what Toni Morrison has named “the white gaze” is the power it has to distort and appropriate black people’s representations for its own purposes.

Look no further than the foreword to Sigh, written by Rian Malan, who latches onto Madondo’s use of “sell out” to mischaracterise Madondo, a writer who, even through his tendencies towards liberal humanism, has strong roots in the Black Consciousness tradition, as “not one of those who thinks racism is an exclusively white disease”.

Sigh. Likewise, the white female gaze on the black male body shows its slip as a recent review by Marelise van der Merwe zeroes in on Madondo’s meditation of the caricature of the black rapist. Sigh.

It’s not yet uhuru, so Madondo cannot just be a carefree black writer. Such is the burden. This is the world in which Madondo writes.

And it is within this sigh-inducing world that he beautifully narrates our contradictions and complexities, and our joys and anguishes, like no other griot we have ever had.

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