Posts Tagged ‘Literature’
The Movement by Gael Reagon
The Movement
migrare move shift evolve
conspirare breathe together co-conspire live
Where to start. With a story about the street. Any street in any city in the solar system as known.
We’ll walk Long Street, the one in the Mother City. Cape of Good Hope: south of South. Enclave
and alpha of the Atshuomato clan whose forbear surfed the seas from the Island out of first
captivity. Our ancestral spirits stretching from the Waterfront docks to Cape Point, ranging up and
down Huri!axa [Hoerikwagga, Table Mountain], swirling in the confluence of the rapids Indian and
Atlantic. Here I walk apex 21stC, urban nomad, and find:
Mimi
Ashraf Jamal, the Hanif Kureishi of South Africa’s literary scene
THE man who produced the first serious attempt to fictionalize Observatory and the Cape Town art scene in a contemporary narrative, was saved from the gutter by his wife Christine, a wealthy heiress who later took her own life in mysterious circumstances — some say a protest against a stifling academic environment and the constant globetrotting of her husband.
Ashraf and I sit down at a local café – Le Petit Paris. It is 1995. Fresh back from San Francisco, I casually mention a novel in progress, The Fleshiton, a surrealistic orgy that is part Science Fiction novel, part romantic disaster. My final break-up with Rehane Abrahams has had devastating consequences and there is only one thing to do, regroup, plan ahead. Write the “great novel”.
We arrange a reading in the Tamboerskloof home of my actress sister, Carolyn. Needless to say, the academic is a little shocked. I have painted characters from a post-gender existence with a landscape that cross-references pop-culture, Aushwitz and the blues. Lindzi Rabinowitz and architect Johnny Jacobson are there, but my kabbalistic erotic fantasy fails to impress them.
