Streetlights - GoetheonMain The contributing writers were Libby Allen (editor), Lester Adams, Neil Coppen, Phillipa Yaa De Villiers, Joseph Gaylard, Liam Lynch, Lebohang Nova Masango , Zaki Mtshali, Scott Smith and Percy Zvomuya.
26°12'21. 0"S 28°3'46. 2"E
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Consider only that you are here alone. Everything that has come before has been made null. The landscape of your life a nadir with the upheaval of land ahead the absolute now of this moment. Here, alone on the sidewalk under a streetlamp at the corner of McIntyre and Park. The winter sun, oblique, sharp and golden on the wall behind you. The lamp above glowing yellow in the daylight against a chill blue, as if it has been storing the winter light. You might wonder, like me, if it will gutter out when night falls, leaving the memory of sunlight and its glow, feeble in contrast to the lack you will feel. You used to laugh at me when I told you that the city would die one day. That everyone would leave. That its streets would be left absurd by vacancy. I dreamt it, or thought it when we drove around the city on the M1 going east, (going where? I don’t remember now, and what does it matter?) the city humming to the north of us and quiet to the south. I think maybe that a low cloud had drifted into the city, below the tallest buildings and between them. The streetlamps lit the cloud up as if the city were burning. As if it were quietly aflame. I remember asking you to look but you wouldn’t, irritated by my romanticism, your thoughts with your mother or your idiotic friends. I didn’t bring it up again except once more, when we were in bed later that night. You lying next to me in that thick insensate and inconsiderate
way you sprawled. I said: the city is going to die, people will leave and there will be no one left to turn off the lights. The sun is setting now here on the corner of McIntyre and Park and the shadows grow deeper, the road greyer and the light above me more golden. You should be here, at the end. To feel what I am feeling now, the fear that the light will go out at nightfall. Or worse, that it was all for naught; what we wanted, what we did, who we were. The sun is almost gone and now I know. The light will not go out. I think it will keep burning here for no one and nothing.
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LESTER ADAMS
26°12'21. 0"S 28°3'27. 5"E
Johannesbur gICi t yandSubur ban|Mar shal lSt r eet ,Met al ,PHI LI PSAURORA,DAMAGED,NotLi t
A definition by lack. Where is the air here? In shadows; feeling out, feeling without. Still. Like dead things pressed in a book. A bird up metal tree by split pin: the wings, the up down silhouette.
Is it impotence, then? What does my mouth want me to say? I recall my inability to read maps. Think of three truths. Suck my stomach in. Try painting my lips. What is this, analysis of a nothing?
That isn’t the heart of this. Where is the air here? Look up: There are wires. Guts. The slow motion stroke, everything skyward is being drained slowly, with grudge, like gloop: what might be the frame for absence? freeway above, across the night, and the night itself pouring As if it is some altar, a thing made holy by neglect the light downward. The still street lamp, pushing against everything stands. If we make offerings to gods we know godlessness going down, there it goes, reaching up and across to the few by lack-of-light. Dirt, discarded things, things called Forget. lit windows across the way. That is what it is to be Two blocks up and the world is not the same. What stands desperate. across from a construct? What is the opposite of that? As if The achromatic colour of maximum lightness; the colour of ruin were more legitimate. What will I accept? What does objects that reflect nearly all light of all visible wavelengths; my mouth want to say? It twists, winds, is stretching upthe complement or antagonist of black. Lacking hue and brightness; absence of light; absorbing Is it white then, the resolution? What does my mouth want light without reflecting any of the rays composing it. me to say? I feel a force in my neck, aching in my shoulders, stirring, as if I do not know my own strength and The darkness enveloped her. That is already said too will chip the teacup when I drink and tear delicate things like much, and not truly at all when skin is this bright. Milky. lace or smother you when I am anything but still. Where is White. Think of the word, ‘bosom’. Think of cloud. Think of the air here? becoming monstrous, pressing myself onto darkness. Enveloping, crushing, and the politics that brings. These These clever thoughts disgust me. clever thoughts disgust me. As if the bone of my skull is dead, as if I am cells locked inside cells and I may not think LIBBY ALLEN how I want me to.
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26°12'15. 6"S 28°3'43. 7"E
Johannesbur gICi t yandSubur ban|Mai nSt r eet ,Met al ,PHI LI PSAURORA,NotLi t
Too far from the ground to eavesdrop. You could say I’m not a very reliable narrator, but then who is these days. Words seldom reach me, the traffic too persistent. My stories gleaned from murmurs amongst the exhaust pipes. My pool of light a mise-en–scene of the mundane. A supporting cast which includes pedestrians, hawkers, pavement gamblers, shoppers and stragglers who seldom linger long enough for intrigue to play out. There are a few principals worth mentioning: my pavement once provided the stage for a man and his finger accordion. He would take his cue from the security door rattling shut over Tazim’s supermarket shop front and then play ‘till sunrise. There was also a girl who lived in the flat above this same supermarket with her siblings and father. As a child she used to dote on me. Come twilight she would stand in her pyjamas, staring upwards. My underwhelming act of illumination never failed to elicit a gasp. Why me? There’s not much setting us stooped poles apart from one another, not much going for us in the way of idiosyncrasy. What purpose she assigned to this ritual I will never know.
Her father, never far off, noticed one evening two silhouettes on the street below and stormed the tryst, leather belt in hand. The butcher’s son, clutching pants, went hop-scotching down the nearest alley, petrified. I followed the row from street to flat, watched as it played itself out, a dumb-show of shadows from behind tatty curtains. The girl corrupted by puberty, her father by unemployment and booze. He was a terrible insomniac, he began to curse me for his sleepless nights. I could hear him drunk and shuffling around the flat into the early hours. “It’s like it’s always fucking day in this place,” he yelled, before craning out the window and firing a single bullet into my bulb. No one came to repair me. The new place down the road gets all the cherry-picking attention these days. The accordion man, undeterred, sought his lime light a little way along, his song an eerie trace of its old self, and the girl quickly discovered how obliging my darkness was with her fledgling desire. I became redundant, shabby with wheat glue and photostats: an advertising board for muti men and their remedies. Bold assurances that enemies could be banished, penises enlarged and scorned lovers won back. Telephone numbers by the dozen announcing pain-free abortion with free cleaning- as if that were a discount of some sort.
Perhaps the moment my bulb flickered to life she would make a wish. Children are sentimental like that, granting purpose to random things. She might have imagined that, were it not consecrated by her, a moment might turn tragic. That either the world would end or she would drop down dead. There are no stars here, cities are short on whimsy. I think of myself as a substitute of The last time I recall seeing her she was staring up at me, not in sorts. awe or anticipation but with moist eyes and cell-phone in hand. In times less distant, I’ve played moonlight for this girl. Now a teenager, her vigil no longer a matter of life and death. My location more to do with the opposite sex. She would meet the butcher’s son after sunset, concealed (or so she thought) by the zinc roof extension erected around me.
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NEIL COPPEN
(A street light on the corner of Marshall and Maritzburg. Thus I am at least three things: wires, dent and light. It is sunset, and the light flickers on. A streetlight cannot Dent: Please don’t… Please … I’m asking please… speak – we hear its inner dialogue if we stop and watch.) Light: Don’t mess with immortality. I will stand as long as this city stands, yeah I am the beginning and the end of the Light: You could call me a friend but I’m not that corner of Maritzburg and Marshall. familiar: until you get to know me I’m just another face in Dent: And I’ve been collecting squeaks since school began the crowd. I don’t blame you for ignoring me, passing 40 years ago, I’ve got quite a nice collection if you’d care to me by, I would if I were you. It’s only when you see me in come and hear. my full glory that you can see my potential for… shall we Light: I am Marabi Dance, I watched isicathamiya tiptoeing say, or is it too obvious? Banal, even? Enlightenment. home at 5am all done up fine and swanking, but quietly (A group of children and youths runs through the beam through the silent streets. Dent: I am Bopha, thrown in a cell to rot and cry out loud; and exits) You see these kids, this handful of brats that there is no justice. could do with a walloping, they scatter along the street Light: Just when you think it’s safe to take that bribe, Mr like leaves blown by the wind and they’re noisy and Policeman, I come on and show your dirty hands to the light. hungry and I show them the way home; beyond me lies the shadow of un-knowing and the cold fear that waits to Dent: Don’t forget me, I’m part of you too. slit your throat if you’re not ready with fast legs or an Light: Part. Just a part. Just like untidy hair of wires coming Okapi. (A couple in ZCC regalia strides past the light, out of my neck. They haven’t even said a word! Talk about with purpose) And the couple heading north to the injustice. church meeting: I'm showing them the way home, the Wires: Bzzzrt. Bzzzt. Bzzzzrt. way home, the way home to heaven right here in Dent: No justice. Doornfontein this very day this very hour this moment! Light: I am the all-powerful force banishing darkness. You too can step into that show. Dent: But you’re damagedLight: Just a part of me may be a little damaged, but I work, Some even mark their territory on me; you can smell the bright stink of piss at my base and there’s a big dent guy! I still work! Wires: Bzzzr. Bzzzt. Bzzz… where some car bashed its bumper – which is another way of marking your territory - but I stayed standing.
PHILLIPA YAA DE VILLIERS
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26°12'13. 2"S 28°3'27. 0"E
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Shadow is a secondary, the outcome of a relation between light and a dense solid. Light is energy on the move, but so are heat and sound. Heat and sound also can be obstructed by dense matter causing areas of privation behind it; and these areas can be mobile, localised and bounded, sensible episodes of relative cool and quiet, and to that extent representational of the intervening matter they derive from. But there is not even a word for shadows of cool and quiet in fluxes of heat and sound – ‘shade’, after all, which is typically cool, being usually shadow signifying coolness, coolness made visible. […] The point is that even sensible holes in heat and sound can play little part in our perception of the world because they do not offer themselves in a composed array sensible from outside, from a distance, and so cannot much enlighten us about our larger ambience. Holes in light do so offer themselves and can so enlighten us, or (rather) they could.
cigarettes is concluded and arguments wrap themselves around corners. This is a gateway into the city, and the cars move past en route to missed appointments.
The emphatic sweep of the highway above emerging from the glowing blue of morning, the time when lights are still on, but no longer needed, no longer illumination, but now something else, a forlorn code we don’t understand. The beginnings of the day, the gathering distant rumble of traffic. People walk by dressed against the rising cold, hunched into themselves.
…and what we seem not to have is a clear idea of inattentive perception as a productive complement to attentive perception… For many purposes ‘attention’ effectively disables itself as a concept by reducing the ‘in-attentive’ to a negative or absence of something, rather than the active, determined and structured field in which consciousness plays. […] In this respect, at least, shadow is a quite provoking image of the makings of any actual experience at all.
The disinterested light of mid-morning, democratic in its affections and friendships. The buildings of the city face into it, implacable, dully glistening surfaces. The pavement stands firm. Three men are under the bridge, waiting.
And then afternoon into evening, the city in a state of crescendo. People going back to where they came from, the lights coming out, the engine that supports our rest stirring into motion. On the edge of things where we are, shouts and whispers, phone calls ending, the day’s final instructions delivered. Now it is night, and we are in business. The shadows have settled in, and a low murmur of light awards consideration to all that cross its path. The general quiet is punctuated by the occasional curve of headlights and the barely perceptible imprint of feet on pavements all around. Drink is taken, but not here. We finally go to sleep.
Italicised passages drawn from Michael Baxandall, Shadows and Enlightenment, Yale University Press, 1995.
Midday and questions are asked and answered. There is a whirring haze in which minute commerce in sweets and
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JOSEPH GAYLARD
26°12'11. 9"S 28°3'40. 1"E
Johannesbur gICi t yandSubur ban|Commi ssi onerSt r eet ,Met al ,BEKASTRADASUPRA,Mer cur yVapour
In this part of the city, there is the illusion of safety. Streets seem avenues, pavements broader, lower buildings an access to the sky. The city does not loom, though it defeats words like 'west' and 'horizon'. Here balconies sit like uneven collars, decorated with digital satellites pointing one way and analogue bitterly the other; huge, clumsy and already old. There is an uneven rhythm to everything, where two lanes of traffic shudder by like an escalator and its handrail, or a game of leapfrog other cars are forced to play with taxis. There are sight lines like a surveyor's memory, a beacon or causal landmark to be found in the view of the police station, the slow climb of the road over the railway. From here you can glance into a barber shop, strangely fit between two buildings, like a stored bucket or an altered box slash fort that the owner's face peers out of like the face of a child at play at work.
somewhere else, a hustle that will leave you feeling stranded if you're not flowing with it, if you're not just watching the weeds come and go and come and go with the weather. Sometimes people stop to talk here, and sometimes they don't, because as much as it is 'here', you're not there yet, and you never are in the city where a streetlight is always an excuse to lean or a need to sidestep off pavement, except for this one, at night, which oddly shines brighter than those nearby as if issued with a newer bulb that at night again grants this small part of the city the illusion of safety, as you walk in and out this brighter light and leave it behind.
Other places have other nuances, as all writers romance corners, or short-cuts, or secrets and anecdotes concerning bargains or loose-cigarette supplies of tiny shopkeepers. This place, is here. You can grow to know the summer shade here, a respite along a scorching walk, that otherwise is little more than the sight of your own breathing in winter. No one speaks of step after step after step en route to www.vaughnsadie.net/streetlights/
LIAM LYNCH
26°12'22. 2"S 28°3'36. 6"E
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This sky keeps secrets of clouds, witness to how mere dust can rise to meet God in the air. There, at the pivot of the rhythmic, industrial dance of a million men. These fathers, husbands and sons offered gifts to masters and spirits alike. Them - the colour of creation they know intimately how blood, tears and lifeless bodies poured to the tune of a new kind of labour (that Pickaxe and Spade Swing) at the core of earth’s belly will give birth to gold. And so they above the ground: named you, claimed you, Johannesburg, as the new dawn. Trusted you to keep the promise first spoken by your soil, they whispered prayers of prosperity into each brick as it was laid. And the gospel grew into a congregation of skyscrapers, factories and sweet suburbia. Sermon as kept by streetlights.
dusted off of Rand notes at the restaurants, apartments and markets of the Twelve Decades. This is the sermon as kept by streetlights. There’s nothing to tell when the truth is felt. I keep counsel with darkness and bathe the street in glow. And without fail the ghosts gather here with their pleading eyes and open palms. I tell them that I’ve seen a graffiti writer, lovers and a car-crash at my knees but let it go; no one really lives here anyway. I have no real answers. No real comfort. No real place for them to be. “Good fences make for good neighbours.” There, is another country. Here, is a rumour. This is the sermon as kept by streetlights.
I wear this pavement at my feet; a badge of honour as I keep vigil over the once-forgotten Jeppestown. I can tell how, once dirty and dangerous – words like ‘downtown’ and ‘CBD’ were swapped for where the privileged play and find ease in the city’s grime. When the years wear on and middle-class dreams fade into crinkled, sepia memory kept in a pendant on history’s chest – we ask – what became of the glory days? Time twists herself into teacher and repeats herself. Here. There, where the descendants of ghost mining men waste themselves away at Tiger, Don’t Cry while scripting their own eulogies at the bottom of bottomless brown bottles or how some still chase scraps of gold www.vaughnsadie.net/streetlights/
LEBOHANG NOVA MASANGO
26°12'14. 9"S 28°3'28. 7"E
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The Mbawulas are always there… pierced drums blazing in street corners, a beacon that signals to the shadow people, “Come here, we have heat and stories to sustain you. But that is it.” We night visitors, with streetlight guides to an oasis in amongst the rough and peeling surfaces of creaking buildings and the stray people we (do not) see. This shabby place. We claim it! We give it its chic veneer but I can still smell the must-decay, the desolation. Doornfontein was a slum in the thirties… the photo in the exhibition at JAG shows 3 prostitutes glaring unashamedly, shoeless and smoking… we resurrect the dead here; we’re jolting it back to life. I want to nestle, like I belong, like my tears and blood are the by-products of something precious I too am digging for. Like I understand that. The vinyl-red lipped girl keeps taking photos. “It’s for my blog,” she keeps saying, to no one, to everyone. We’re smoking too much and speaking about our work. In our heads we’re glad we have a Woolies to swing by and ADT where we live…
We real cool. We Left school. We Lurk late. We Strike straight. We Sing sin. We Thin gin. We Jazz June. We Die soon. Sadness turns to rage when I am in this place with you. There is no rebuilding. No second chance at being new. Nothing reimagined. In us only emptiness and a history that dies. We are embers of burnt paper, become nothing. When we walk back to the car and I take your hand, you ask me, “Why are you so afraid of the dark?” I look ahead and say, “Because we’re honest in the night time.”
In my ears is John Coltrane and in my head I imagine us all a lot poorer and more brazen like Gwendolyn Brooks’ pool players, Seven at the Golden Shovel: www.vaughnsadie.net/streetlights/
ZAKI MTSHALI
26°12'22. 2"S 28°3'37. 1"E
Johannesbur gICi t yandSubur ban|Par kSt r eet ,Met al ,BEKALANE,NotLi t
A police van stops next to me, whoop, the officers ask if I Street corners are ubiquitous things, hardly worth thinking about. The cement carries no memory and each one looks am alright. I move closer so they can see me properly, expecting nothing but harassment. They nod and move on. like the last. They serve the same purpose, whether night or day, but are a stable identity for our urban existence, It’s not yet late, still before 20:00. forever being trotted upon by those who meet, talk, walk and often stumble. A man is running with a loose packet in his left hand. Two Pick just one. One street and one corner under one light. ladies holding hands divert slightly to accommodate him as he turns the corner, under the light. A lone woman from the Choose a suitable shadow from which to perch and watch other side seems to change her course to rather walk past the little world of your view be illuminated before you. me and crosses the road. She is looking at me and I check whether I am covered in shadow and shuffle slightly so she A fire truck, sirens on, rushes past. Three men, standing on the opposite corner watch it go by. One holds takeaway is not startled, but she simply continues walking. Curiosity was simply the precursor. food containers for all of them while they stand, talk and plan. The lights on Park Avenue are off, the yellow-orange The gatherings are always in the light, never shadow. tinge of others illuminates the street and the men stand People talk loudly, exchange handshakes, perhaps a drink under the domed glow. They soon leave. or two. Others sit on the pavement on the other side of the road, just next to the shebeen further down Martizburg A drunk, pockets filled with packets, stumbles closer. Street, a locked and cold meeting place. They don’t talk so Facing me he stands, swaying, wags his finger without a loudly there. word and carries on. I am left wondering if he even knew I was there, beyond the working light on the other side of the A taxi behind me stops. No one gets out or in, the driver street. clicks into gear and drives on. I move into the light after that, only to retreat into shadow, uncomfortable with the attention For a moment, I think I hear the soothing voice of a it brings; a still figure on a busy corner chatting to no one muezzin gliding through the air before it is drowned by the and with no seeming purpose to be there while all along sound of traffic and my attention is stolen by others under wanting to be no more than a shadow. the light. They stand in its pool and chat at the junction. I am starting to consider it the crossroads. It’s a meeting place, a gathering place. Groups change, ebb and flow.
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SCOTT SMITH
26°12'22. 7"S 28°3'32. 4"E
Johannesbur gICi t yandSubur ban|Damaged,Par kSt r eet ,Met al ,UNKNOWN,NotLi t
“Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.”- Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man I was scared of the dark when I was little. During school holidays, I often went to our rural home, which had no electricity. Days were an idyll, nights a nightmare. The day’s routine normally involved playing football in the plain, interspersed with looking for wild fruits or herding cattle or swimming in the river- once I foolishly tried to look for its source. While pylons obscured our skyline (to supply the neighbouring commercial farmers with electricity), the village didn’t boast a single streetlamp: the pylon’s dwarfish child. So the moon was our source of light; but the moon is full of caprice, big and white today, thin and sickly tomorrow.
exasperated mother or grandmother or aunt would often shriek as I held onto the door, timidly peering into the darkness, trying to locate a kitchen utensil I had to bring into the house. The idea was to dash like a commando, rescue a pot, pan or plate from the darkness and quickly retreat into the light and intimacy and safety of home. When I drove to ‘my’ streetlamp next to the Mai Mai market, it seemed the fear of my adolescence had gone before me. When I got to the lamp post, the fears of my childhood stood waiting for me, gyrating the seven heads that jut out of its slippery, elongated body (you don’t mention the snake by name at night). “It’s dangerous here. Is it?” My companion stared at me without reply. I got out of the car and contemplated the street. It was dark. The streetlamp wasn’t flickering. It was dead. The streets wore a menacing grin. And a hoodie. And sunglasses.
I stood looking at the streetlamp, head swivelling, one On moonless nights, I sat by the fire, legs folded and minute facing this way, the next that way. And then hands stretched, scared to step into the night. The toilet, the bedroom, the granary seemed to be a world away. You suddenly, emerging from the menace, two broom vendors trudged past, making small talk... couldn’t go anywhere without avoiding the darkness: the darkness was the medium, the darkness was also the destination. And it was the fire and lamp light that I was PERCY ZVOMUYA being forced to step from. All the shards of terrifying thought from the day came together at night, so a piece of wood morphed into a python and a man lighting a cigarette became a ghost. “What did you put out there that you are scared of?” My
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