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GUAVA
JUICE Guava Juice
is coming to Warsaw and Krakow soon. Watch this space.
Poetry
evenings don’t present their audience with life-threatening situations
often
(enough). Guava Juice is different.
The words
of South African Struggle poets travelled, from pencil-scribbled
notebooks in
decrepit shacks, through the desperate hands of illegal publishers of
the 1970s,
over the African continent, to the minds of engaged students and into
the
hearts of the packed audience that attended the premiére of Guava Juice. But this event presented a
lot more than just metaphor and meter. Crossing the line between
audience and
performer, poetry stepped off the page to present something of the
reality
lurking behind stanzas like
We bring you the
grammar of violence
and the syntax of
destruction
from the tradition
of our firearms
you will hear the
verbs of retribution
stuttering.
(Breyten
Breyenbach, Language
Struggle)
As
is to be expected, the prevalent atmosphere of the works of poets
like Keorapetse
Kgositsile, Mongane Wally Serote, Mazisi Kunene and Breyten Breytenbach
from
this period is desperate, angry and verging on reactionary violence.
But every
so often silver lines shine through clouds of rage and despair to
illustrate
the power of literature to transcend time and politics. Charles
Mungoshi’s If you don’t stay bitter and angry
for too
long is accompanied by a lingering violin that says more
about the
experience of exile than any returning politician ever could, while his
words
remind us that revolution is but a means to an end:
the
pained look of your father
a look
that took you all these years
and
lots of places to understand
the
bantering tone you used with your
grandmother
and their old laugh
that
said nothing matters but death
If you
don’t stay bitter
and
angry for too long
you
might finally salvage
something
useful
from
the old country.
Standing
ovations and wolf whistles and more often the property of rock
festivals and
football games than poetry evenings. When a young audience reacts to a
spoken
word programme with shouts of ‘encore’, those who believe in the power
and
value of language take heart.
This is why
we have decided to offer a repeat performance of Guava
Juice, on Thursday, the 25th of March (further details
below). Entry is free.
Guava Juice will be served. We hope to
see you there.
Guava
Juice Starring: Natalia Durkalec, Wiktoria Ferenc,
Marcelina Hertmann, Ania Jasiak,
Karolina Drejerska, Irmina Kudrycka, Gosia Lipka, Zuzanna Gulczyńska,
Natalia
Skrzypczak, Cyryl Kwaśniewski, Kasia Sielicka, Tertius Kapp, Cormac
Anderson.
More info and photos:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/POZNAN/Guava-Juice-South-African-Poetry-Evening/270811088040?ref=mf
http://ifa.amu.edu.pl/~xolo/
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