Slave Trades
Ari 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.
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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
Date of publication: 2000
ISBN 0620250526
190 pages
210 x 145mm
R180.00
Ari Sitas 2022 © Rhoda Isaacs
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Ari Sitas is a sociologist, a poet, a multi-genre artist and a civil society activist. He has been a university social science teacher and thinker, and his contribution to humanistic scholarship in this field has received widespread recognition. Books published |
Additional information
| Weight | 0.5 kg |
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Interviews & Articles
Interview with Ari Sitas by Robert Berold New Coin, 1995 text PDF
Interview with Ari Sitas by Jan Trude, Marcia Trude and Jonathan Mandel New Coin, 2015 text PDF
Article on Ari Sitas’s Notes for an Oratorio on Small Things that Fall (like a screw in the night) by Nicos Trimikliniotis The Trim, 2024 text PDF
Other Links
Introduction to Ari Sitas and his work South African History Online (SAHO), 2013
Full list of Ari Sitas's books text PDF
Interview with Ari Sitas
Discussion with Ari Sitas by Zoe Boshoff and Sabitha Satchi: “Love, War and Insurrection - A discussion about poetry with Ari Sitas” Herri #09
Poetry by Ari Sitas
"Hooding" by Ari Sitas Almost Island, 2018
"Marikana" by Ari Sitas translated into the Greek by Elli Peonidou Dialogos (includes English version), 2013
Music and Performance by Ari Sitas
"Cold was the Ground - A Requiem for Elephants Too" (Parts I & 2) by Ari Sitas (voice) and George & Debbie Mari (piano) Herri #5
"Ari Sitas’s Music Notebook: collective cultural work across oceans": by Gwen Ansell sisgwenjazz, 2023
"Notes on the Music" by Ari Sitas Insurrections Ensemble website, 2023
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