Keorapetse Kgositsile: Collected Poems, 1969-2018

by Keorapetse Kgositsile, Phillippa Yaa de Villiers (Editor), Uhuru Portia Phalafala (Editor)

Overview

Keorapetse Kgositsile, South Africa’s second poet laureate, was a political activist, teacher, and poet. He lived, wrote, and taught in the United States for a significant part of his life and collaborated with many influential and highly regarded writers, including Gwendolyn Brooks, Sterling Plumpp, Dudley Randall, and George Kent. This comprehensive collection of Kgositsile’s new and collected works spans almost fifty years.

During his lifetime, Kgositsile dedicated the majority of his poems to people or movements, documenting the struggle against racism, Western imperialism, and racial capitalism, and celebrating human creativity, particularly music, as an inherent and essential aspect of the global liberation struggle. This collection demonstrates the commitment to equality, justice, and egalitarianism fostered by cultural workers within the mass liberation movement. As the introduction notes, Kgositsile had an “undisputed ability to honor the truth in all its complexity, with a musicality that draws on the repository of memory and history, rebuilt through the rhythms and cadences of jazz.” Addressing themes of Black solidarity, displacement, and anticolonialism, Kgositsile’s prose is fiery, witty, and filled with conviction. This collection showcases a voice that wanted to change the world—and did.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781496222091
Publisher:	Nebraska
Publication date:	01/01/2023
Series:	African Poetry Book
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	360
File size:	776 KB

About the Author

Keorapetse Kgositsile (1938–2018) was chosen as South Africa’s national poet laureate in 2006. He taught at the University of Dar es Salaam, Nairobi University, and Sarah Lawrence College. His publications include The Present Is a Dangerous Place to Live, If I Could Sing: Selected Poems, and This Way I Salute You. Phillippa Yaa de Villiers is an award-winning South African writer, performance artist, and lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand. Uhuru Portia Phalafala is a lecturer at Stellenbosch University.

Table of Contents

Introduction in Two Movements
 
Spirits Unchained (1969)
To Gloria
For LeRoi Jones, April, 1965
When Brown Is Black
Brother Malcolm’s Echo
Mandela’s Sermon
Elegy for David Diop
Ivory Masks in Orbit
Lumumba Section
Spirits Unchained
To Fanon
Song for Aimé Césaire
My Name is Afrika
For Spellman at Spelman
I Am Music People
Origins
 
For Melba (1970)
And the Long Story
Song for Melba
MMABATHO: Dakar, 1966
The Creator
Indeed In Deed
For Those Who Love & Care
True Blue
Of Death and Lives
Death Doses
Death Doses No. 2
Death Doses No. 3
My People When Nothing Moves
Come Duze
3000 Miles Apart
Of Us for Us
In Time
By A. B. Inspired
Tropics
For Melba
 
My Name is Afrika (1971)
The air I hear
Impulse
Shotgun
Mayibuye iAfrika
Could Be
Random Notes to My Son
To Mother
My People No Longer Sing
To a Black Woman, Insane
To My Daughter
Sift and Shift
Vector or Legacy
Bleached Callouses, Africa, 1966
The Lip Trick
The Nitty-Gritty
Time
New Dawn
Inherent and Inherited Mistrusts
Symptoms
Flirtation
Conditioned
Innuendo
Axiomatic
Bandung Dance
For Afroamerica
No Celebration
In the Nude
Of Yesterday’s Tomorrows
Epitaph
Like the Tide: Cloudward
No Tears In the Tide
Towards a Walk In the Sun
The Spearhead Wind Strides
The Gods Wrote
The Long Reach
The New Breed
For Eusi, Ayi Kwei and Gwen Brooks
Recreation
Point of departure: Fire Dance Fire Song
            I. The elegance of memory
            II. Lumumba section
            III. Fire dance
            IV. Spirits unchained
For Sons of Sonless Fathers
Notes from no sanctuary
 
The Present is a DANGEROUS Place To Live (1974)
For Ipeleng
The present is a DANGEROUS place to live. . . one
I. In the mourning
II. Beware of Dreams
III. Without Shadow
IV. Mirrors, Without Song
Mystique
There Are No Sanctuaries Except in Purposeful Action … two
            1. Wounded Word, Insane Song
2. When things fall apart
            3. Exile
            4. Perception
            5. Logistics
. . . three
Blues For Some Literary Friends & Myself
Home is where the music is . . . four
            For Billie Holiday
            For Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers
            For B.B. King and Lucille
            Acknowledgement
            Pro/Creation
            For Hughie Masekela
 
Places and Bloodstains (1975)
Requiem for My Mother
Epitaph for Can Temba
For Gwigwi
For TW
For Otis Redding
Here We Are Like the Present
Letter to Skunder
For Zeke and Dennis
For Cecil Abrahams
After Mongane
Son of Mokae
Song for Ilva Mackay and Mogane
For Montshiwa and Phetoe
Open Letter
Places and Bloodstains
 
Heartprints (1980)
Letter to Ipeleng On Her Birthday 1976
 
When the Clouds Clear (1990)
The Long Arm of the Blues
The Same Strip of Land
Rites of Passage
Dance
Morning in Tunis
Sharper Than Any Blade You Know
Bleeding Red
Luthuli Detachment
When The Clouds Clear
Red Song
From Now On….
Mpilo’nhle
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All
Every Patriot A Combatant
Quest
Kate
My Sister
June 16 Year of the Spear
Chimid: A Memorial
Seaparankoe
Here You Almost Started
A Luta Continua
New Age
Manifesto (1981)
South Africa Salutes Uzbekistan
 
To The Bitter End (1995)
I. Coil of Time
What time is it?
In the Wheeling and Dealing Time
Rites of Passage: (1991)
Dumalisile
I Am
Manboy
When the Deal Goes Down
Years Without Tears
Strange Rituals
Grand Papa Dhlomo
For David Rubadiri
For Bra Ntemi
Fidelity
Montage: Bouctou Lives
Heart to Heart
We Are All Involved
Even Skin Disappears
 
If I Could Sing (2002)
Recollections
Venceremos
Affirmation
Memorial
If I Could Sing
Renaissance
Rejoice
 
This Way I Salute You (2004)
For Johnny Dyani
Santamaria
Cassandra Wilson Will Sing
Where Her Eye Sits
eThekwini
For Gloria Bosman
For Our Mother of the Heavy Names
 
Homesoil in my Blood (2018)
No Boundaries
No Serenity Here
Letter from Havana
In the Naming
Anguish Longer Than Sorrow
Wounded Dreams
I Am No Stranger
We Are All Involved (2012)
Of Shadows and Chameleons
Festive Heart
I Know a Few Things
New Day
For Fernando, Gloria, Eduardo and the 2012 Team
For Sterling Plumpp
For Hu Xiancheng
 
Uncollected (1971)
Soulbook 1(1), 1964
The Awakening
Manifesto
‘Yes, Mandela, We Shall Be Moved’
Fruitful seed
Freedom train, 1965
Introduction to a future history book
Whistle for Pennies

Editorial Reviews

[Kgositsile’s] poems transcend the superficial definitions which some might attempt to make on the basis of quick-draw ideologies, tactics and postures from yesterday’s conferences, and keep their fingers on the pulsations of the Black soul history. That emotional history, with its consequent cry for steadiness and action, for undeviating clear-sightedness, for rejection of death, in its range of reference and feeling, jumps forth in these pages as truly deep Pan-Africanism—the truly joining thing.”—George Kent, introduction to The Present is a Dangerous Place to Live
 


“When trying to find texts to compare Kgositsile with one thinks of Pablo Neruda of Chile, García Lorca of Spain, Agostinho Neto of Angola, Okot p’Bitek of Uganda, and Thomas McGrath of the United States. . . . There is something magical in the way the personae of these poems seemingly start in one direction, reverse, or deviate to side paths, and then deftly start in an entirely different one to begin anew on another plane of reality. This is the work of a poet hearing his own muse and inventing an original expression as medium for the oracle.”—Sterling Plumpp, foreword to If I Could Sing
 


“The young want to move and they want everything else to move—including poetry. Willie Kgositsile’s poetry lunges, strains its muscles—and barks or howls or richly murmurs or screams.”—Gwendolyn Brooks, introduction to My Name Is Afrika
 


“What Kgositsile has to say is too urgent for the conceit and fanciful ambiguity of literary artifice.”—Chinua Achebe

 

From the Publisher