Ari Sitas
-
Rough Music
R180.00Ari Sitas
Rough Music: Selected Poems 1989-2013 is a selection of poems from the nine books and manuscripts written by Ari Sitas between 1989 and 2013, in poetic forms that range from exuberant jazz-like improvisations to astringent political observation, humorous dialogues and diary-like narratives.
*
[Sitas’s] close involvement in the workers’ movement is evident in [his] own poetry: it teems with references to the lives and spaces of the marginalised, but not as artifice, a nod to political correctness. Rather, there is a fulsomeness to the world represented in his poetry that teems in contrast to the almost misanthropic silences and blind spots of much South African poetry caught in narrow, unseeing class perspectives. And it carries the ring of truth of someone who moves through these spaces, who knows the people.
The poetry is alive with much else as well – the grotesque and the carnivalesque, the smells and sights of the world as it obtains in South Africa, especially Durban (most of his poetry), Ethiopia in Slave Trades (2000), or Cyprus and Greece in Rhythmskewed (1991); Sitas was born in Cyprus.– Rustum Kozain, New Coin
-
Slave Trades
R180.00Ari Sitas
In 1874, aged 20, the visionary poet Arthur Rimbaud abandoned poetry and left France for Africa. He spent some years in Cyprus and Aden, then settled in Ethiopia, during the reign of King Menelek. He became a trader in coffee, guns and hides, and considered trading in slaves.
Ari Sitas’s 100-page poem Slave Trades, the first part of this book, is an attempt to speak in the voices of Rimbaud, of his Ethiopian ‘wives’ and of priests, poets, kings and the marketplace, in a chorus of vivid images. It describes colonial brutality and African resistance, both political and spiritual: “I hope, therefore I am.”
The second part of the book, “An Artist’s Notebook”, is a long fictional prose-poem set in war-ravaged Ethiopia in the 1990s, in which a diverse group of disaffected people, some of them descendants of the characters in Slave Trades, struggle to understand their roots and identities.*
Despite scant review attention when it came out, Slave Trades is a book often lauded in informal conversation among historically sussed poets and literati in South Africa. […] Sitas conceptualised Slave Trades – an epic in large fragments – as some form of literary corrective to the blank spaces figured in colonial representations of Africa, specifically Abyssinia (Ethiopia). Rimbaud is central and Sitas imagines “the voice of a cynical Rimbaud” and those of his Ethiopian lovers, of kings and queens in a world in flux, but a full world. It is an astonishing piece of work, maintaining a feverish tension between, but short of, the exotic and the real.
– Rustum Kozain, New Coin