The fall by Hans Pienaar (Dye Hard Press, 2022)
Title: The fall
Author: Hans Pienaar
ISBN: 9780994723116 (print)
ISBN: 9780994723123 (e-book)
Hans Pienaar is best known as an Afrikaans poet, novelist and essayist. He has also been active as a magazine journalist who has toured Africa on behalf of some South African English newspapers.
As an Afrikaans author, Pienaar has produced noteworthy works. Most recently, his splendid novel Die generaal (Tafelberg, 2018) deals with the dissent of some Afrikaner youth under apartheid. It very realistically depicts the love stories of a number of these youth during the seventies and early eighties, describing how they found comfort in one another while channelling their dissent towards influential family members of probably the world’s most unwanted regime at the time. Their discomfort occurred not so much from having real groundbreaking contact with those most oppressed, namely black people, but from the knowledge that they had ejected themselves irrevocably from the spoils of privilege that any oppressive system holds out to some.
As a writer of historical nonfiction, Pienaar depicted a largely unknown piece of South African history in his award-winning book Die derde oorlog van Mapog (published by Idasa, 1991). The chieftain, Mapoch of the title, was also known as Niabela, a tribal chief of the vanquished Ndzundza-Ndebele tribe in what would in later times become the province of Mpumalanga. This was a sponsored undertaking in which Pienaar was hired to write down a particular history in a novelistic way. It is the history of a particular ethnic disenfranchisement and their experience of cruelty. It is a cruelty which was visited upon some African tribes by the surge of white settler farming into the interior. The story becomes a terrible cameo of unwelcome historical memories – unwelcome it would have been, to some members for Pienaar’s target audience at the time, namely Afrikaans readers. However, it is a book that should be translated into English and read widely, because it is the type of “unwelcome story” that invites moral imagination to conceive afresh from a bleak local history. It is a book on local history and historiography that I rate. I read it years ago.
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Like all his work, it is written in a tone of political melancholia mixed in with satire. However, Pienaar’s strong point as a prose writer, namely the creation of character within situation, is notably absent from this book by virtue of the chosen genre, namely poetry.
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My account so far gives the English reader some background on Hans Pienaar, the author of this publication, his first book of English poems. It is called The fall and is published by Dye Hard Press. Like all his work, it is written in a tone of political melancholia mixed in with satire. However, Pienaar’s strong point as a prose writer, namely the creation of character within situation, is notably absent from this book by virtue of the chosen genre, namely poetry. This is despite the fact that these are narrative poems, often long and winding. The emphasis here is on ideas, the nature of perception, and the thematic. This emphasis sometimes comes between the reader and the tangibility of the unfolding theme.
The narrative theme is not firstly bound to pure imagery (as one would normally expect from poetry – and imagery is normally a strong point of Pienaar’s writing), neither is it built on the lyrical experience of the individual. This facet is the adventure of the anthology as well as its partial downfall, if the reader would excuse my pun. For the result is somewhat synthetic, despite the strengths of the phrasing, the dexterity of the registers employed, and the general “intelligence” of the book.
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It is the wilfully imperfect note that Pienaar strikes with great care and planning, which charms when it doesn’t become too convoluted.
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However, downfall should not alienate potential readers from this work by Hans Pienaar. He is a creative writer very much attracted to the beauty of the mangled achievement; it is, in a sense, part of his ethos. It is the wilfully imperfect note that Pienaar strikes with great care and planning, which charms when it doesn’t become too convoluted.
Pienaar is a very appreciable poet – don’t get me wrong. He is not as good, in my opinion, as he is as a prose writer of fiction or nonfiction, for some of my reasons mentioned. But certainly he is very appreciable, in Afrikaans as well as in English.
The fall is a series of poems all bound by a single narrative link. This link is based on Pienaar’s own experiences as a travelling and reporting journalist into African countries. He was, after all, an emmisary from South Africa, a country which is inclined to see itself as an emblem of modernity on the African continent, despite the linkages between traditional cultures and the modern in South Africa being rather tentative and often questionable.
Pienaar (or the poetic voice behind poems in The fall) is a Dedalus. Several titles in the anthology feature the name of Dedalus. Dedalus was the father of Icarus in Greek mythology, the youngster who arrogantly stole his dad’s chariot and flew it too close to the sun, which he tried to circumnavigate until his wings, attached by wax to his body, melted, and he fell to earth again and crashed to his fate.
I have always thought that there is something of a privileged Pretoria white youth in the figure of Icarus. (They might very well be black these days.) Right down to the smashed car that had got snatched out of a parental garage while both parents were gallivanting overseas. And Pretoria is a city that Pienaar knows well.
Though it is the Icarus figure Pienaar knows best historically, I imagine, he opts for Dedalus this time as he writes in his mature years. The Dedalus of the anthology ventures into the continent on a journalistic brief, and his plane crashes. He survives, but the Icarus emblem, something like a son to him and who is suggested by the pilot figure in the book, dies on impact.
This loss has something in it of the rebel author’s younger self, Icarus, who is now replaced by an older self, Dedalus. Dedalus is the voice of these poems and one whom the author seemingly only very reluctantly makes friends with. He is more or less the same age as the older generation who created an ignoble society in their children’s name, too often without the latter’s consent.
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The book works with many ironies, such as the proto-Westerner – from Pretoria, say – being used to pontificate about the values of modernity to a continent which at least still has its own mythology intact, while said proto-Westerner has all but lost touch with their own premodern mythology.
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The thematic line of the book is most interesting: the presence of a tortured modernity in Africa – imported and superimposed, in the main – and this modernity’s self-styled “mechanic”, Dedalus, only tolerated on a mainly black continent for certain skills (such as keeping “Western things” in a working condition).
The axis that Pienaar works with is something like this: African animism / Western mythology / modernity. All the narrative poems treat various crossings of the traveller in Africa as encountering local aspects against the backdrop that I have just mentioned: the chief, the political leader, the diplomat, the shaman, the political victim, the African metropolis built on a colonial grid.
So, it is a book about who is the bigger loser in this non-game of politics and power inherited by everybody but created only by a few.
I want to say something about the technique of the poems: they are written in a rolling, storytelling style, but contain too many details. Pienaar should cut more and let the best moments shine better. There is sometimes a bothersome obliqueness in the created tableaus, something which is also sometimes found in Pienaar’s work as a journalist. It is as if a fuzzy lens is at work here – not without the charm I spoke of earlier, for the reader is inevitably invited to search for the lost focus behind the enigmatic words.
The points of narrative tension in the book are manifold and mostly effective, despite being buried under too many words, as I have said. Such a tension is the tension of “Western heritage in Africa / African ancestors”. One might call it the battle of the two ancestors. All is written (mostly) in deeply flowing, evocative and resonant lines – except for the over-presentation of detail, and also except for unnecessary forays into the margins of the narrative. A leaner offering would have been more effective.
The poems have a significant aura of “the symbolic” that surrounds them. This keeps the reader paging on. Also rather enigmatic is a recalcitrant tone that time and again jerks at the reader’s ear. This is something like an anger of the author towards his white self, and it punches through the pages time and again.
I have here mentioned only a few of the characteristics that give this book of poetry its charming, uncomfortable feel. Am I a fan? Yes and no. But more yes. Pienaar, in this anthology, is somewhat of a “Tess Gallagher version” of a buried, unacknowledged “Raymond Carver” Pienaar, waiting to be found by a better editing hand than his own. The publisher, Dye Hard Press, should nevertheless be commended for this product, which straddles an important linguistic divide between English and Afrikaans, a straddling to which Pienaar has given his writing life in order to overcome.
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In the case of the title, the fall is the fall of Western imperialism, as well as the fall of indigenous cultures to that imperialism.
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The title, The fall, shows Pienaar’s ability to place his utterances at a crossroad, so to speak, so that their meaning often points in two directions. In the case of the title, the fall is the fall of Western imperialism, as well as the fall of indigenous cultures to that imperialism. In metaphoric terms, it activates the Icarus metaphor of the plane crash deep in the heart of Africa.
From the following end passage of a longer poem, the reader could glean much of this poet’s suggestive powers:
The sea showed us nothing and shucked
The enigma from its shoulders as it sucked
Itself back into the deepest of its depth
And just slightly hunched as it let
The children take over the beach again.
The metaphor concerns the aftermath of a tidal wave or a tsunami, a destructive wave, that seemingly has now passed. But on closer inspection, what is suggested is that the destructive “wave” could be repeated again, and that “the children on the beach” are not safe, after all. On the technical level, the passage shows Pienaar’s knack for very effective half-rhymes (depth/let), which fits in with the anthology’s characteristic of searching for the imperfect note which might be more effective than a “pure perfection”.
The poems chart the human need for, fear of and anger at “gods”. These gods are the modern as well as the primeval ones. The need to have them, as well as the need to get rid of them, is a pendulum theme in the book.
The fall will appeal to readers looking for an intelligent read, written by a poet of deliberately contrary bent.
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Kommentaar
Thank you, Charl-Pierre, for an insightful review.
It needs to be pointed out that The Fall is a co-publication by Dye Hard Press and altoviolet. The latter was responsible for the editing so any shortcoming in that department is to the account of altoviolet.
A PDF-version of The Fall is available for free from Dye Hard Press or from me at mwhanspi@gmail.com. Hard copies are free too, except for shipping costs.