This reader impression was written and sent to LitNet on the writer's own initiative.
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In this hauntingly beautiful volume of poetry, Makhanya chronicles the all too familiar, universal experience of the dysfunctional family. He starts with the experiences of a young boy who shoulders the burden of divorce and lack of acceptance from his father figure. However, My father’s blazer quickly transitions to a wider family, that of the South African people, Africa – and mankind.
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Title: My father’s blazer
Author: Phelelani Makhanya
Distributed by: Minimal Press (https://minimalpress.co.za/shop/my-fathers-blazer/)
“you will grow up and be a loser like your father”
my mother told me
she points at me with her left hand
the flesh and bone revolver …
I, a twelve-year-old, stand helplessly
in front of her drab bedroom door
I am a door nail where she hangs
my father’s grey blazer
the only souvenir of her failed marriage
I never knew that a thing made of fabric
can be this heavy …
(“my father’s blazer”, 9)
In this hauntingly beautiful volume of poetry, Makhanya chronicles the all too familiar, universal experience of the dysfunctional family. He starts with the experiences of a young boy who shoulders the burden of divorce and lack of acceptance from his father figure. However, My father’s blazer quickly transitions to a wider family, that of the South African people, Africa – and mankind. It is a lament for the fatherlessness of our country (“don’t mandela me”, 16), for the orphanhood of Africa (“the digging season”, 20), for the homelessness of man, who knows and believes that he is destined for another world (“we believe”, 23). We are also, as Makhanya points out in a series of ecopoems, turning ourselves into orphans by our treatment of the earth:
leaves
now I know why leaves
wilt and fall from trees
it has nothing to do with
seasons and time
the issue is with the birds
birds of all kinds and sizes
…
they tweet about horrible things to come …
soon
when the skies will vomit acid rains …
birds tweet about many things
terrible and horrifying
which make leaves
see no worth
in committing to their branches
(33)
The tone of much of this volume is melancholic – “winter … anchor[s] with a full load of poetry” (“winter blues”, 45). When you read a volume that is mostly a lament, a longing, a search for home, it can become quite depressing. But Makhanya always leaves us with a ring of hope. Beauty lurks everywhere in his poetry; the beautiful mystery rises and breathes slowly like the moving branches in “wind mirrors” (one of my favourite poems in this work).
hope
even in the darkest night
under the cloudiest skies
trust me when I say …
between the tiny openings
of drifting clouds
there will always
be a peeping star
trying to smuggle
a twinkle of hope to you
marry your eyes to it
(46)
It is said of great poets that they have a childlike gaze at things – that children are really the true poets. Makhanya frequently surprises with his simple, childlike gaze at things, as in the poems “hope” and “we believe”:
…
where skies become oceans
and oceans become skies
where small boys and girls fish birds
and fly fish like kites
(23)
He skilfully aligns metaphors and imagery (“the flesh and bone revolver” of “her left hand”, 9; “your tears stand … like ultra-vigilant patriotic guards”, 56) and employs synaesthesia, incidentally another sign of a good poet (“when the city lights/ look like they are made of jazz”, 54; “don’t say a word/ just smile/ I will listen”, 63).
My father’s blazer comes without section breaks, but this seems deliberate. It is a circular journey that starts with the child living in a dysfunctional family and ends with the adult’s longing for romantic love, a love that will not “hang me in a closet where you shove everything that no longer fits your waist”.
Although there are some spelling mistakes in the book – notably suits misspelled as suites in more than one instance – and some poems that may have needed some editing, this did not majorly detract from the experience of reading My father’s blazer. This is poetry you can lose yourself in.
