Crystal Songlines in the Dust
Crystal Songlines in the Dust
Homes #1: Karoo Glimpses
I recently attended a thought-provoking play-reading/performance of three play extracts related to the Karoo, held at the ever-innovative Theatre Arts Admin Collective in Observatory (Cape Town); a place which, in revisiting it over the last few decades time and again, appearing there, participating there, witnessing there, moving across the sprung floor in different contexts and with different people, is itself a space that for me (and many others) is a kind of home.
On this occasion the conversation afterwards revealed a small minority of the South African audience – including, intriguingly enough, the director of the show – had never visited the Karoo, which remains an archetypal place of myth and ancestry in the South African psyche; and, as some observed, as a kind of trope in South African plays and other cultural works. “A place of emptiness that is charged and full,” was a refrain, when it is not just an endless vista from the N1 joining our two biggest cities. One of the extracts selected came from Athol Fugard’s ‘The Road to Mecca’, a piece about Helen Martins and her astonishing and often unsettling home-as-artwork in the small town of Nieu Bethesda, where Fugard lives these days, and where Martins took her life in an earlier era, swallowing caustic soda: a very Karoo suicide. Our most highly regarded playwright set many of his pieces in his home territory of the Eastern Cape. If South Africa is often marketed, geographically, as ‘A World in One Country’, the Eastern Cape is ‘The Country in One Province’. The subtropical Wild Coast is a world away from the dry lands of Nieu Bethesda, or nearby Graaff-Reinet. From the Sneeuberg, where jackals attack hardy hilltop sheep, and hardy farmers invest in hardier Anatolian sheepdogs, tough characters to warn children about.
Some old friends have a farm up there, halfway between Cape Town and Johannesburg, but so different from any urban area. Midrand it is not.* Making it there in a regular city vehicle, or indeed a VW Beetle as we once did, is possible but not always advisable. The rocks on the track pop up provocatively, like the whole landscape. Graaff-Reinet, of course, was once the furthest Dutch outpost, a final capitalist-colonial attempt to stamp Company authority far away from the Cape, to build genteel garden walls around the Drostdy. That authority trickled away like an ephemeral Karoo stream. From the air, dry tracks of ghostly rivers are everywhere, and somewhere down below hidden aquifers run slowly to distant coasts. Water brought up like oil by those iconic old wind pumps, amidst the occasional staccato sounds of Afrikaans, gravelly even in the mouths of suiwer-speaking, doily- making tannies.
And then there are the big boulders and the bigger hills. Up there in the Camdeboo, my partner and I drove last year up the Valley of Desolation, a typical Karoo name designed to put you off visiting. In fact it’s a symphony in rock, hauling shadows out to the plains below. The majesty of sunset helped; and then the night, the vast stars again, ancient stories above in concert with the stories of the geology below.
As the rocks danced their aeon-long movements, I saw stone plants on my first visit in the nineties, somewhere far to the west, where Bushmen had left murals again and again, time out of time. Tiny succulent pebbles, folded too perfectly in half to be rocks but doing their best to look like them. Plants mean water, of course. “The Karoo is a place of water”, was a more surprising comment that evening at Theatre Arts; but it is, really, just not of lush waterholes. In the Prince Albert of my memories, the little village’s pretty suburban ‘gardens’ are sandy places, Zen gardens of aloes, nobody really trying to recreate bizarre lawns so far from the coastal cliffs and the golf fairways of the south. Further north still, I once strayed from the dust to stay in a quirky mansion on the edge of nothing, rattling with skeletons, and yet the sprinklers tried valiantly to claim this was a lush place.
This weirdness, an echo of modern Arabian excess perhaps, reminds one that the Karoo is also “a place that was never meant to be stopped in.” Settlers are travellers who got stuck, the ones our Paleolithic forebears would look at askance: the Karoo is all about movement. Those First People knew that; they spoke geography, because that was what mattered. Place was important because you would spiral around it, explore it again for the first time each time, as it changed with the seasons and the years. This is why I can also call the Karoo itself ‘home’ without ever having ‘lived there’ – I’ve never been ‘resident’ in the way a census would pick up, but there’s a relationship there, between the land and my organic mind. It was something in the remotest part of the Karoo, in fact, that first called me to South Africa. Whispers in the mid-nineties, of a Desert Storm: not the ghastly US-led carnage in the Middle East, but a party in Verneukpan. Verneukpan is a crazy, desolate salt pan in the Northern Cape, which Afrikaans accuses of being a cheat, misleading thirsty travellers – and here was a wild and mythical rave, which dimly entered my consciousness and called me Home, even though I’ve still never been there. Said rave called the young Saffers in a friend’s Sarf London house, and others who would end up being so important in my life. The Groot Karoo is a place where poems are written in dust clouds and rock curves; a place that is loved and yet unloved. First Worlders passing through our land will see Table Mountain, Cape Point, and then fly upcountry to Highveld Game Parks, neglecting the dust bowls en route. The lions in the Karoo National Park yawn, unspotted, as they no doubt prefer it. And over the mountains is the Klein Karoo. We walked on a rainy September day last year on the Warmwaterberg, the flattish mountains (they’re all flattish in the Karoo proper, the number of Tafelbergs another source of intrigue). There the thermals trickle out from their magical hidey-holes, all sulphurous and fabulous. The succulents were in bloom: vibrant, weird, a scrubland Amazon to match any fynbos collection. South Africans love the Karoo because it’s alien, undiscovered, even as we ache for it to be discovered. To spend time with the field mice, even while we tell you all to keep out with names like Pofadder.
Really, it’s the one place where if you speak no Afrikaans you might end up very very lost. Afrikaans has always struck me as closer to rocks than Engels is. There’s nothing terribly comforting about the Karoo, and we need that discomfort, that ordeal. Though Cape Town meditators headed out to grow vegetables there once, and sang Vedic mantras over them to make them super-boosted organic marvels. And we shrug: anything’s possible in the Karoo, even fecundity. Spaciousness, stillness, listening.
Once, with small children, we rose up into the hills of Nieuwoudtville, scraping the borderlands of the Northern Cape. We drove around looking at fantastic bulbs popping up in bloom. Hardy flowers, and 4x4s stopping to look, as if they were seeing warthogs or buffaloes. And old, abandoned adobe brick buildings. Another place to wonder at untold stories, written in the landscape. Story is not story without land; consciousness is always meeting land. With this in my mind and heart I can come home, to this house that is a place of mud in the city. But I go there, I realize, to find myself; I need that geography writ large to help. When this is published, I shall be there in the Karoo once more, in a familiar-unfamiliar location, revisiting it again in the cycle of my year. Seeing the spoor of animals in their own perambulations; and the fresh splurge of green by the winter streams. A delicate place: klipspringers and rock rabbits can testify to that. Rotting hulls of rusty farm equipment; and beautiful hardwood furniture, brought in by cart long ago, somehow lasting longer in this cold, high air. Nothing and everything. Home, because there I can sense the rich infinity of my personal circle, when I’m silent, still, moving, echoing in this massive secret land.
Home, too, in that ancestral sense. The place between; the tracks of the ancestors to follow, the place where trance and magic is much more than the daily phone trance I will have switched off from, however briefly. In places, archaeologists find ancient stone tracks aligned to the east, from some forgotten religion that still resonates in our bones. Crossing, moving, breathing, flowing; being part of the Karoo’s symphonies. There in the mountains between Klein and Groot I will be closer to the land, doing the things that make me feel at home in the wild. Talking in circles of listening; watching swallows over dams; singing across the peaks. Speaking and climbing. Smelling the air, feeling cold water on my face and chest, eating with fellows, splashing in the kloofs where the ants build palaces. The imaginal world feels strong out there. Caracals in the dark, or leopards, peering out at the night, watching. And owls, guarding invisible portals perhaps. A place, though, of frugality, that quality we are urgently re-learning, even as the Piles of Stuff in the city get bigger.
In truth, as I came over Sir Lowry’s Pass for the first time, travelling the N2 back to Cape Town from the coastal, forested parts of the Southern and Eastern Cape, I felt my breath warm at the sight of the only Tafelberg the world knows about. But I like to delve a little deeper. Doing so once on a Karoo mountain path, pulling at rocks with my hands, a large scorpion scuttled past. Is transformation truly possible when we’re also feeling ‘home’? Of course; always it’s a double-sighted experience that’s necessary, enough comfort and camaraderie created to allow for the discomfort to take us travelling, journeying forward round the next bend back to the ultimate beginning. Enough connection for us to realize we are held, even in places that seem harsh. These are the places where indigenous-home-language- home-culture-rituals feel most right. Or to wander, accompanied by collies picking up impossible ranges of scent, taking my teenage daughters on quiet journeys. Where I could wake up, surrounded by wooden beams, and boil a gas-stove kettle and find songs and poetry tumbling through my dreams.
This movement in the Karoo is helping me to find the home of my own circle, therefore. No Title Deeds needed. The Custodians of the way may pass such wisdom on down the generations, and we need more of this, from more communities. More re-membering that the land is truly our Home, though only if we respect Her ways; otherwise we co-create our own alienation. Then The Land – represented so aptly by The Karoo - becomes indeed a place of Isolation and Desolation where no self-respecting traveller would stop; a place where restlessness becomes a curse rather than a flowing, humble joy; a place where artists chew glass. Better to play with it and ourselves, like another Eastern Cape artist who found instead a restful restlessness: Walter Batiss of Somerset East, whose colourful life-infused art reflects his totally different kind of rebellion, perhaps more available to a man than a woman in the traditional conservatism of the Karoo. Like Fela Kuti in Lagos, except not, Batiss declared himself a citizen of his own state. He passed through borders on his self-made passport, gained international renown, and returned to the Karoo for refuge from the madness of men. Somewhere near the tortoises and legavaans that amble across the flats. It’s not just Nogwaja the hare that’s a Trickster, of course; Tortoise is one too, in many an African tale. Both sides of the race. Batiss thumbed his nose at the nonsense, and recorded the paintings of the Ancient Ones on the rocks, which have so much still to remind us of.
Mostly, I think, it is the freshness of the elements that captures me there. I breathe, sharp, fresh, cold air; drink sweet clear water. See earth as dust, as rock, defined. Feel pure dry heat, or raw fires. Markers of the journey, of the spiral, of the cycle, of the ever-moving circle of life around my little dot.
* the urban sprawl that links Tshwane (Pretoria) to Johannesburg