Lesego Rampolokeng
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The Bavino Sermons
R160.00Lesego Rampolokeng
Originally published by Gecko Poetry in 1999 and republished 20 years later by Deep South, The Bavino Sermons includes such memorable poems as “Lines for Vincent”, “Riding the victim train”, “To Gil Scott-Heron”, “Crab attack”, “Rap Ranting” and “The Fela Sermon”, as well as some longer poems and prose fragments.
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Passion drives this book. When the matrix of issues is the world we are in now/ yesterday/ the future, and the forecast is strewn with images of gore and madness, we laugh as well. If for some of us the idea of love’s physical gestures might be reduced to twinkling eroticism, Rampolokeng comes in and insists on the bland and blatant […] The Bavino Sermons are sermons of moral outrage. In their satellite eye-view and perspective of witness, the themes crisscross and happen all over…
– Khulile and Sibusiso Nxumalo, reviewing the original 1999 edition
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Bird-Monk Seding
R220.00Lesego Rampolokeng
Bird-Monk Seding, Rampolokeng’s third novel, is a stark picture of life in a rural township in the North West province, two decades into South Africa’s democracy. Listening and observing in the streets and taverns, narrator Bavino Sekete, often feeling desperate himself, is thrown back to his own violent childhood in Soweto. To get through, he turns to his pantheon of jazz innovators and radical writers.
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There are new things in this book. The personal voice is not so relentlessly a voice of disgust as it has sometimes been. Though the shifts between affectionate memory and visceral horror still happen fast enough to feel like a punch in the guts, there are more of the former than there used to be. There’s nobility, fortitude and love in the lives of people such as Seding’s Pogisho and Mmaphefo, risking everything to protect their son. […] It declares it’s a novel. Believe it.
– Gwen Ansell
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Head on Fire
R180.00Lesego Rampolokeng
Head on Fire is Lesego Rampolokeng’s first book of poems to be published in South Africa since The Bavino Sermons in 1999. It includes the complete text of The Second Chapter, published in Berlin in 2003.
One measure of a poet is the range of his concerns, and Rampolokeng takes on religion, war, street violence, global economics, obscenity, history, wordplay, sexual perversion and, not least, his own contradictions. If he spatters the reader with blood and body fluids, it is to ‘engage with my world in all its manifestations… I want to see all the spluttered blood and gore. So I’m attempting to embrace its beauty. Hopefully.’*
No contemporary South African poet – indeed, no writer – has occasioned more approval or disapproval, partly no doubt due to the confrontational nature of Rampolokeng’s poetic persona and style, and the scatological, irreverent content of much of his work. Eclectic and wide-ranging in his influences (these stretch all the way from the figure of the traditional praise poet to Sotho song forms, from rap to the Beats, from Lautreamont and Artaud to Cesaire and Mutabaruka), provocative – some would say apocalyptic – in his performance style and public pronouncements, unique in his varied usage of acoustic regimes and breath-phrasing, unusual in his line structures and his blurring of conventional syntax, his brand of rapped verse has got him, on occasion, into trouble…
– Kelwyn Sole, Cross-Cultural Poetics
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whiteheart
R180.00Lesego Rampolokeng
Written between 1992 and 1997, whiteheart: prologue to hysteria is a nightmarish plunge into a 1970s Soweto childhood where violence waits everywhere to make its nest in the child-narrator’s mind.
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The rap & rhyme intertwined with the vivid images cause your whole internal system to shiver. […] The words come at you like grotesque radical images straight into your imagination, making you very afraid excited educated & emancipated all at once.
– Sonwabo Meyi, Wordstock