In the “Fissures of Infrastructure”

This article offers an account of “toxic infrastructures” as mutually material and discursive arrangements operating in the postwar, postcrash, and settler colonial landscapes of the United States. It specifically responds to Jennifer Scappettone’s multimodal poetic work The Republic of Exit 43, developed after the author’s discovery that the industrial landfill site she grew up alongside in New York had been classified by the US Environmental Protection Agency as requiring federal intervention. Tracing Scappettone’s poetic geographies from the “corporate dump” of Syosset Landfill to the more (in)famous waste site Fresh Kills, the article argues that Scappettone exposes the ways that certain bodies and ecologies are rendered physically and conceptually toxic and implicates readers in the uneven social, embodied, and ecological conditions of composition and response. It suggests that Scappettone’s practices of collage, salvage, and collaborative performance destabilize lyric subjectivity to address a “garbage arcadia” compounding the material accumulations of US consumerism and neoliberal financialization with longer processes of dispossession and displacement. Reading this text with feminist materialisms and Julian Talamantez Brolaski’s queer Indigenous poetry, the article considers how poetics might reckon with the material conditions and residues of uneven wasting and generate situated, critical, and relational approaches to toxic infrastructures.

Grant Acknowledgement

The editors acknowledge the support of the National Research Foundation of South Africa, Grant no. 105159, for the following articles: “Towards Decolonising Poetry in Education” (Newfield and Byrne); “Mapping Pathways for Indigenous Poetry Pedagogy” (Mavhiza and Prozesky); “That’s Schoolified” (Cooper); “Dancing with Mountains” (Ndlovu); “South African Indian Indigeneity” (Govender); “Reflections on Decoloniality from a South African Indian Perspective” (Naicker); “Poetic Bodies” (Genis); “Research That Is Real and Utopian” (de Villiers, Botha and Maungedzo); “Moments That Glow” (Naidu and Newfield); “Transforming Data into Poems” (d’Abdon and van Rooyen).

Research That Is Real and Utopian: Indigenous Knowledge as a Resource to Revitalise High School Poetry

This article presents the reflections of a research team from the ZAPP-IKS project. ZAPP (the South African Poetry Project) undertook a three-year NRF-funded research project titled “Reconceptualising Poetry Education for South African Classrooms through Infusing Indigenous Poetry Texts and Practices”. The research on which we report here was undertaken as part of that project. The team consists of an English teacher, a poet and an academic. Together, they attempted a research intervention at a Johannesburg secondary school. The article presents their reflections on the challenges, successes and potentials of the attempted research intervention, which was intended to energise and inspire the teaching of English poetry by drawing from and developing indigenous knowledges and principles. Presented as a play, a praise poem and a conventional academic analysis by the school-based teacher, the university-based poet, and the university-based academic, respectively, the article offers diverse analyses as an illustration of how research relationships may be understood, experienced and represented in various ways. These analyses draw implicitly and explicitly on conceptualisations of indigeneity and indigenous knowledges, as well as decoloniality, with the conventional academic analysis making use of Erik Olin Wright’s concept of real utopias to frame its understanding of the project and the other two perspectives on it. Together they invite readers to challenge and transform the conventions that govern educational practices, research and representation, but caution against naïve idealism when doing so.

Mapping Pathways for an Indigenous Poetry Pedagogy: Performance, Emergence and Decolonisation

Poetry is notoriously unpopular in high school English classrooms all over the world, and English FAL (First Additional Language) classrooms in South Africa are no exception. We report on a pedagogical intervention with Grade 11 learners in a township school in Johannesburg, where the classroom was opened to indigenous poetry and identities by allowing learners to write and perform their own poetry in any language and on any topic. Rejecting essentialist notions of indigeneity as defined by bloodline or “race”, we work with a notion of indigenous identity as fluid and performative, and as inescapably entwined with coloniality. We argue that indigenous poetry, meanings and identities were emergent in the open space created by the intervention. To further explore this emergence, we discuss pedagogy itself as performative, an interaction between teacher and learners in which knowledge is built, stories told and identities sedimented. We focus on what can be learned about possible pedagogical pathways for an indigenous poetry pedagogy from the learners’ performances. We identify the constraints and potentialities for a decolonial pedagogy that arise when the classroom is opened to indigenous poetry, and ideas for what such a decolonial pedagogy would look like. The findings suggest that new ways of thinking about the ethics and politics of poetry in the classroom are required, some general to all indigenous pedagogies, and some specific to local South African traditions of praise poetry.

The Role of Memory and Language in Transformation: Crucial Issues in American Indigenous Poetry

The integration of the personal and the political has been an engaging topic in analyses of literary texts by authors whose works are known for their political content and activism, as well as an emphasis on social justice. Literary audiences in the United States have been familiar with Joy Harjo and John Trudell, two well-known contemporary Indigenous poets, who have voiced out the concerns of Indigenous people in the face of colonization and injustice happening in their homeland. Within the fusion of the personal and the political, as well as the mythical, the idea of transformation is paramount for Indigenous authors since to move from the state of being colonized to one of being decolonized, transformation is undoubtedly crucial. This paper focuses on the role of memory and the power of language in the process of transformation in the three poems by Joy Harjo and John Trudell. The analysis uses a qualitative methodology in the form of a close reading of literary texts to uncover the interconnectedness of memory and language in transformation. I argue that Native poets experience personal transformation that is critically influenced by the role of ancestral memory and social and historical consciousness in the broader context of Indigenous people’s struggle and resistance, as well as the power of language to see reality differently and affect its change. The analysis is intended to show to what extent the concepts of memory and language are critical in the process of decolonization and the manners in which these texts can be empowering for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous audiences in response to forms of injustice through the integration of the personal, the political, and the mythical.

Dialogical Relationships and the Bear in Indigenous Poetry

The essay provides a review of a small but remarkable book on the work of two important Native American and Siberian poets, Meditations after the Bear Feast by Navarre Scott Momaday and Yuri Vella, published in 2016 by Shanti Arts in Brunswick, Maine. Their poetic dialogue revolves around the well-known role of the bear as a sociocultural keystone species in the boreal forest zone of Eurasia and North America. The essay analyzes the understanding of dialogicity as shaping the intersubjectivity of the poets emerging from human relationships with the environment. It tries to unpack the complex and prophetic bear dream in one of Vella’s poems in which he links indigenous ontologies with urgent sociopolitical problems.

Using Features of Indigenous Poetry and Music in the Oral Performance of Some Praise Psalms in Isizulu

Translation needs to be accessible and acceptable to the receptor community. In the case of the Zulu people, the medium of communication most accessible to the majority is oral performance. Thus biblical text needs to be translated in a way that is prepared for the ear and not the eye. To be acceptable, the translation should sound like “my language,” using indigenous forms and contemporary vocabulary. When translating biblical psalms into isiZulu, they should sound like Zulu songs or poems, with all the richness of performance texture that is part of the long history of Zulu oral art. With this goal in mind, and given the tradition of Zulu praise poetry and the passion Zulu youth today have for poetry, a study was conducted in which young Zulu people, taking cognizance of their Zulu traditions in poetry and music, applied these to the translation and performance of some biblical praise psalms. The results show the value of focusing on orality, indigenous poetics, and performance in communicating effectively the message of some praise psalms.

God's Word Became Our Poetry and Sang within Us: Facilitating Contextualisation through Indigenous Poetry

Many cultures around the world esteem poetry as a medium for communicating truth and preserving traditions, and which can impact peoples’ cognitive, affective and volitional dimensions of life. This exploratory project discusses the necessity of effectively contextualising theology for indigenous churches, and the inherently beneficial nature of poetry to help achieve this process. Research includes the study of relevant missiological literature and material acquired by questionnaire. This questionnaire was completed by linguistic field workers involved in Bible translation and by their professional colleagues. The findings of this research indicate that indigenous poetry is inherently valued in a variety of cultures and can be appropriately applied by both indigenous poets and cross-cultural workers to facilitate the contextualisation of Bible translation.