End Of The Century - Which Is Why Wipers

 

by Jeremy Cronin

 

‘Let’s leave pessimism for better times’ – spray-painted on a wall in Bogota

 

1.

With windscreen wipers

(Unlike drive-belts

Or footwear, or chameleons’ tongues)

Low adhesion is advised.

 

But for this end of century

Wipers should be given

Some additional stickiness

Some adhesive stubbornness to turn

Grand vision into rhythm

Light into rubber

Narrative into epigram

 

These being more useful inclinations, I think,

At this end of a bad millennium

 

2.

Some time after the revolution, Soviet libraries adopted

the Dewey Decimal System

With one rectification – the two hundreds: Religion

All the way from 201, 202, 214 (Theodicy), 216 (Good & Evil), 229

(Apocrypha & pseudo-epigraphs), down to 299 (Other religion) –

this great textual body of human wisdom, confusion,

folly and aspiration was reduced by the Soviets to a bald:

 

Dewey Decimal 200: Atheism

 

This was not (not by far) the worst sin of Stalinism

 

But it was its most typical

 

This should be remembered of the 20th century

 

3.

I decline to name my windscreen wipers

‘Easy Come’ and ‘Easy Go’,

I think of them, rather, as

‘Quote’ and ‘Unquote’

 

Between them

Reality

Lies in parenthesis

 

4.

Clandestine communist cells were organised

Right inside the Nazi death camps

(Each one a parenthesis)

 

Cell members used cigarettes to bribe camp officials, to get messages

out, obtain medicine in,

or to win space to perform this or that other small task of

solidarity and survival

 

A condition for secret Party membership was the payment of a weekly sub

- one cigarette

 

Somehow to be stolen from the guards

 

How many militants were summarily executed?

 

How many were caught trying to meet the brave challenge of stealing the

week's levy?

 

This, too, should not be forgotten of our century

 

5.

I name my wipers:

‘On the One Hand’ and

‘On the Other Hand’

 

6.

Those who lost the Cold War

Did not deserve to win in the end

 

Those who won the Cold War

Were (and are) entirely

Unworthy of their triumph

 

7.

I am very much worried, ma-comrades, I mean if we get

retrenched, or contracted out, or sent to i-casualised ward, is because why?

 

Soren-so says for economic growth we have to via global

competitiveness, by so saying

 

i-Management says, workers, the ball’s in your court

 

We have given you, they say

 

A good package

 

(Which is almost the same phrase Kgalema had just used with irony, thirty

minutes before, as we waited for this very meeting with FAWU shop-stewards)

 

(Which meeting eventually started two hours late)

 

(Which is why we’d been watching soccer on TV in a breakaway room, and I was distractedly trying also to write a poem about the end of the century, while Steve Lekoelea looped in a weak cross that was easily cut out by

Chief’s defence)

 

And Kgalema said - ‘No,

 

It was a good pass

 

Just to the wrong team’

 

And I thought: That’s it!

 

That could be the poem about the end of the 20th century

 

8.

In the shadow of the big banks a stokvel

Home brew in the backyard

 

In a thump of rubber with the foot

To wake up your ancestors in a mine-compound

With a gumboot dance

 

For most of this century

People’s cultures have retreated to the secret

Thaba Bosius of the soul

 

Forced to stratagems of non-hegemony -

Rhythm, syncretism, exhibition for the tourist, slant-wise to reality

 

But what went up to the high plateaux as wedding song, or hunting chant

Came down, sooner or later, transformed

 

In a factory choir, or toyi-toyi on the street

And is even now an incalculable resource to go, bravely

Slant-wise, into this next imperial century

 

9.

With all the ambivalence of a car in the city

 

Being of the street and

 

Not of it, just passing through

 

Down Tudhope, wipers at work, rubber-thump, rubber-thump, taking the bend

in the shadow of the tower blocks, then, where the next bend sweeps left

 

Just there

 

One day it’s an inner city father walking his four-year-old kid to creche

 

One day a kerb-side telephone hawker (‘Howzit?’, ‘No, grand’) with her

extension cord looping up to a jack in a third floor flat

 

One day it’s a bucket with ‘For Sale’ (cooked sheep’s trotters) ‘Johnny

Walkers’, they’re called

 

One day it’s the crash-in-transit Toyota that I see first

 

Then the polaroid photographer, then the taxi-driver himself

 

Posing, door open, left elbow on bonnet, tossing away a cigarette butt (one

week’s sub?), for a snap-shot to be sent to someone, somewhere (rural?), no doubt, else

 

This tenderness, make-do, wit, role-reversal, job-pride, all in the midst of a

crumbling, an urban, end of century something else

 

10.

The wisdom of windscreen wipers

Is velocity’s blink

Hesitation in onward rush

An ironic side-swipe on the hypothetical freeway N1 North

 

In this end of millennium downpour

Where we’ve become habitual, edgy, typical, turned to a split-second hi

One of the genus: desperate whisk, squeegee, scull-oar, either/or

Wavering with intent

In this global, totalitarian, homogenised deluge, where parents, patients,

dependants, lovers, learners, supporters, congregants, citizens (if we

still exist) are zombified into one thing all - clients

 

And public (if they still exist) institutions are made, the leaner the meaner the

better, contractual service providers

 

Where managerialism is the ism to make all isms wasms, the new 200 Dewey

Decimal, the delirium of our age

 

Which is why wipers

 

With their cantilevered, elegant, frenetic, rubber-thump, rubber-thump

 

Activism want to insist

 

Clarity of vision

Forward progress

Proceeding wisely to the point

Involve

A certain

On the one hand

On the other hand

Prevarication

As into

Another millennium

With its own impending

Miscellany, theodicy, good & evil, apocrypha

You/We

Either way, now

Slant-wise

Ironically

Plunge

 

 

This poem is from his collection entitled 'More Than a Casual Contact',

Umuzi, Cape Town, 2006. Reprinted with kind permission.