Writing Poetry, Writing the Oceans

Robert Frost, famously wrote, ‘To be a poet is a condition, not a profession’. For the last few years I have composed poetry and it is now apparent that the number, form and quality of the poems composed, evolve as the world around me becomes more complex, less just, less hospitable, less charitable. I started writing poems because of the lack of time to write ethnography. For five years, I served as a senior manager in higher education and my main task was to resolve the many complex problems and challenges that arose in the diverse community of scholars that I led. I was then and still am, a person who likes to think in different directions. I am a person who enjoys deep creativity. In my previous role I enjoyed working with and helping many people. Unfortunately I also worked with those who did not understand that being creative and writing beyond the management space was absolutely critical to the full expression and evolution of my leadership skills. During this time, Robert Frost’s first quote was entirely applicable, writing poetry reflected my ‘condition’, a condition then of constraint, pressure and distance from creative writing. But long before I joined the One Ocean Hub, (a consortia of researchers seeking to understand and conserve the oceans and coasts), I was part of and enamoured of the sea. The poetry I wrote during the period before I joined the One Ocean Hub reflects this bond. The poems also traverse experiences of being in a ‘post’ apartheid society. A society where many are desirous of change but are constrained by the politics of history and barbarity of economy.

But, long before I became a manager, I was an anthropologist. My craft is writing. I write long essays and monographs. Anthropologists spend years, if not decades, or entire lifetimes trying to understand and to convey the complexity and diversity of the people they encounter. For them (and I), being in the ‘field’ is a sort of heaven. A real kind of heaven, where we don’t really belong but really want to be. As the days and weeks and months go by, our hands and bodies come alive, as if we are steadily relinquishing the carapace of zombie capitalism to emerge where lives are lived differently and where priorities are differently organized. For many anthropologists, part of the carapace remains. We write for those ‘at home’. We go back, back to our universities, communities and families. I cannot speak for others but my experience has been that wherever I have been in the last 20 or so years, those places and people have remained with me. It is as if that unremitting shell is cracked and I am forever connected to those I encountered. This brings me back to the issue of poetry and other reasons why I came to and stayed with it.

In 1984, James Clifford and George Marcus published a series of influential essays on what they called, ‘The Poetics and the Politics of Ethnography’. In it, selected essayists discussed the challenges of anthropology in a ‘post’ colonial world, the problem of authorial voices, of male ethnographers and of the political disparities between the researcher and the researched. The essayists also focused on the literary turn in ethnography, including the rhetoric and discourse of ethnographers, how they chose to and made their subjects come alive in their writing. The book unleashed serious questions about and responses to the position, purpose and politics of anthropology and of the place of local or native ethnographers in narratives of a ‘colonized’ humanity. Could these local anthropologists authentically represent the realities of their research participants, or, would they (as a result of being trained in neoliberal and ‘white’ establishments), ventriloquize their scholarly masters? Of course, it turned out that local and native ethnographers produced a diversity of works. While some dutifully followed established tenure tracks and replicated hegemonic knowledge forms, others, gently and decidedly drifted away on an ocean of possibilities to consider different forms of expression, writing styles, topics and spaces for research.

Thus I started writing poetry a few years ago. I wrote because I could not write ethnography. Every time I tried to set aside time to write, I would be interrupted. But the flow, form and fury of creativity could not be stemmed. Instead, it intensified and I eventually realised that I was not just articulating a ‘condition’ but that I had found a genre of writing, to abstractly and otherwise express what I had been circling in ‘pure’ ethnography. I had become interested in sensory aspects of existence and began to see, taste and hear the world differently. Around the same time, I also began with oceanic poetry, because besides being an anthropologist I am an islander. My memories of the sea, sand, the tides, the waves, the colour of the sea and its moods are always in my mind. For me then, poetry is a mnemonic device, it allows me to remember exactly how different kinds of sand look and feel, it reminds me of how the sea tastes, where the ocean is cold and where it is cloyingly warm. Poetry allows me to express what it is like to feel buoyed on the gracious deck of a dhow or what it was really like to cross a lake in a dugout canoe full of holes. I kept going back to the islands of the southwest Indian Ocean region and the east African coast for field research. I needed to be with the sea, to see how others were beholden to it, how they lived with it and why they could not be separated from it. I visited many artists and sculptors. I spoke with poets and singers. For many of these people, the oceans and coasts are not mere economic resources. We should therefore not only perceive it is as such. The oceans, sea and its creatures seem to provide many with poetry for their souls. The oceans and coasts soothe, reassure, feed and allow some to weep, others to rejoice. It was and still is, a place of bounty, landing, adaptation, boundlessness and profound beauty.

The anthropologist Divine Fuh, has called the current times, Corona Times. In it, humanity appears to be rapidly running out of time. Time to write deeply, in multiple layers and in copious texts, time to be with each other, quietly, listening to and tasting each other’s knowledge. Time to restore and sustain the oceans. The relentless mill of capitalism and the evaporation of the analogue way of life urges us on, to produce demonstrable, consumable albeit virtual outputs. Not even a virus that is killing many seems able to stop it. But, like a virus, poetry I find, slips through the nooks and crannies that capitalists and virtual virtuosos forget. Poetry is also quick and often imperceptible. Those who wish to stop it have to be very fit indeed to catch up with it. The difference is that for now, poetry is deemed so unimportant, so unprofitable that no self-respecting earner should take notice of it. Rather than despair and unfamiliar pain, poetry tends to bring hope, healing, fantasy, possibility, memory, taste and a range of sensory experiences to delight both mind and body – especially in a time of social distancing and no physical contact. And, since there is no vaccine yet, no antidote to what currently plagues humanity I use poetry. I write poetry. I write it to remember and reconnect with the sea. I write to connect with my past. I write to remember what it is like to be with people, in places and in the social worlds I knew before. Poetry also seems to be a potent balm and catharsis while I wait for time to write whatever else I must. Since much time has passed since I began, I now realize that poetry is what it is supposed to be, a brief, powerful expression of human sentiment in a place where time is scarce. I am not yet a poet, since the poet Robert Frost also famously said, ‘The word “poet” is a gift word: someone else has to call you a poet; you can’t call yourself one’. So for the time being, I’ll accept being called a writer and anthropologist. Poetry does not seem to have any expectations and that’s the secret to its longevity and power.