Imagine walking alone at night during the lockdown and a ghostly figure with wild hair and a grizzly bear beard jumps in front of you. Well, that’s what a small Malaysian community is experiencing. It’s their government’s attempt to ensure superstitious residents stay home during the country's coronavirus lockdown. With the ongoing disregard for the lockdown regulations in South Africa, this might be an option.
I want to share something equally ghostly and ghastly about Arthur Nortje, a poet from Port Elizabeth, doomed to isolation in a foreign country, unable to return home. He went to school in South End, studied at the University of the Western Cape, and taught at Paterson High School before leaving to graduate at Jesus College in the United Kingdom.
Arthur Nortje died in Oxford in December 1970. He didn’t die from the coronavirus, but he was sent into exile by the apartheid virus. A racist virus that had Nortje questioning his self-worth and his identity. He kept a diary (exercise books) in which he wrote about life in South Africa, Canada and in the United Kingdom. Robert Pearce, a librarian and author, digitised all Nortje’s diaries. It is archived at the University of South Africa. From his diary entries, one could deduce that Nortje questioned the meaning of life, his identity and his on-off love relationship with his country, then run by a racist government.
Everything went bad when he had to leave his beloved country in 1966 on a one-way exit visa. His writing dealt with the isolation of being classified as a ‘baster’ coloured in apartheid, South Africa. He felt alienated, discarded, isolated. His poems reflect the feelings of separation and loss. Arthur Nortje died a lonely man, but he lives on in the hearts of those he touches with his bold yet introspective writing. Nortje's life has made me realise again that one’s destination is not a place but looking at things through a new lens. Unfortunately, all that Nortje could see was dead roots.
Here is an excerpt from his poem “Waiting”:
“The isolation of exile is a gutted
warehouse at the back of pleasure street:
the waterfront of limbo stretches panoramically
- night the beautifier lets the lights
dance across the wharf,
I peer through the skull's black windows
wondering what can credibly save me.”
The Arthur Nortje Collection was sold to the Unisa Library by Hedy Davis, who obtained the notepads, exercise diaries, and personal documents in the course of her researching the life and works of Nortje, on behalf of Mrs Cecelia Potgieter, the mother of Arthur Nortje. A few people I know still have questions around royalties because he has a surviving half-sister living in Port Elizabeth. There are efforts underway to have Nortje’s remains repatriated to South Africa.
During the lockdown, many women, men and children are stuck at home with their abusers. There is no excuse for abuse during or after lockdown. The bravest thing you and I can do is to help someone who needs help or is asking for help. Call the Stop Gender-Based Violence Helpline on 0800 150 150.
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