Xamissa [Paperback]

Xamissais a book-length poem that sounds out the city of Cape Town in a joyful elegy for the city of alternate takes.Xamissaadapts the mythical name for the springs and streams running from Table Mountain to the sea, under the city itself, since before the colonial Dutch ships camethe X of the title standing in for the multiple ways in the languages of the Cape, past and present, the reader may pronounce the first consonant.

A work of documentary poetics that investigates the cost of whiteness in South Africa,Xamissacode-switches at times into Lontara, the subversive Indonesian script that undercuts the prevalence of Dutch in the colonial archive. Through serial questions around the ethics of its address,Xamissaprobes the interrelation of language, sociality, and resistance, in its bid to interrogate the archive as a draft of the citys future.

Voices in the singular and plural compel Henk RossouwsXamissawith such ecstatic stride as to match the intensity of human spectacle advancing the procession of Cape Towns history. The collective effect of alternating scenes and incantations reflect an ethical imperative of uncertaintydestabilizing shifts of mood and matter; of the external and internal viewpoint. With formal ambition and acoustic scales of mind, Rossouw confronts a past haunted by racial brutality, even as it imagines an eventual social unity and the durational anyway that poetrys historical imagination is able to contain.InXamissa, Henk Rossouw writes the membranes that thrive between the hyper-real of the culturally residual and the liminally sensed real of the culturally emergent. His artistic vision isnt borne out of the tyranny of spontaneous epiphany, but rather is carefully fleshed out through a constructivist process of cultural excavation. Writ large are luminous alter-selves from South Africa's mist-covered past that get choreographed into what Aime Cesaire once called a rendezvous of ls*