Walking in Plastic

Cape Town
Choreographer / performer: Mduduzi Nyembe
Poet / voice: Bandile Gumbi
Artist / director: Kai Lossgott
2009

Performance artist Mduduzi Nyembe presents a memory of a wounded woman, a dream for an absent father, and a dance in a street market for survival. They are ritual stories of the heartache of the slums – substance abuse, violence, gender inequalities, chronic unemployment, families’ incapacity to provide for and protect their children. Each of Nyembe’s characters, taken from his daily interactions in the township, is left, in the words of poet Bandile Gumbi, "a constant wanderer / always at the beginning of complete circles", trapped in the existential cycle of poverty.

Things that make the skin itch - a two part monologue

by Bandile Gumbi

Giving up

They announced
Change took a detour
To council with an old friend
It was around teatime
He is detained

We know once old friends get-to-gather
The moss grows under feet
He might be rooted for millennia

The progressive movement can wait
Change has been around for ages
Its agile youthful feet
Use to act just in time
For a bygone revolutionary moment

These days
The heart might be in the right place
But change is delimited by age
Just, maybe its time for a new age


Giving In

I will not look you in the eye
The blank space next to your left ear
Holds much fascination
I t does not affect my nervous system
Nor aim to initiate involuntary communication

Yes, I will look at the cityscape
Pass by on the right side of your ear
It rushes past like I do
It asks no questions
And I am not giving any answers

I will not take up any particular struggle
I was not born of my mother’s struggle dreams
But conceived in between idle chatter and shopping sprees
On Longmarket street

Indifferently numb I will not comment
Answer only when spoken too
There is nothing more than this

Insanity

by Bandile Gumbi

While your body
Stands at the shore of your past
Your yearnings take a flightful dive
To the depths and contours
Of the land of your mother’s mother
As the perpetual identity puts to rest
The juxtaposed questions
At the right angle of your confusion

You have always seemed
To be swimming up-stream
With the diligence of a mad woman
Catching flies in midair

Your fears are buried in the still waters
Only to resurface
With the floods

A constant wanderer
Always at the beginning
Of complete circles

You smell the winds
Before they have blown the house of cards
Where you have taken refugee
Reminding you of the oath
Your poetic heart pledges your destiny too

You have kept us all
Gasping for air
As you ride the tornado
To your metamorphosised self

You have knocked yourself
Against the shadows of doubt
As you search

Chop-Change

by Bandile Gumbi

Fast Forward
To pressure cooker
Cockiness

Born free
In a microwave
A figure on a leash
Of another micro-economics scheme
Domesticated
By the silverscreen
A dog
With a god complex

Swallowed a placebo
Drank half emptiness
Shooted-up
Powdered wet dreams

They raised their asses to the camera and farted in the west
The stench still lingers
In our southern palates

As we drink black naked beauty
With our café laite
While stroking our weave
In the name of independence

We're definitely stuck
Between the s's
Of assimilation

A banana is an exotic fruit in Africa
When chasing
Coconut dreams

I've learned to make do with plenty
Worshippers of the scarce rarities
Might as well
Take the backseat burner

They say on this one-day
A camouflaged chameleon
Crowned in plastic thorns
Claimed the thrown of a lion

They play games with hyenas
On their playstations
Bombed-out
Bombarded
In blasphemy

My girl-child fear and I
Have since had a one on one
On issues of faith and power
Joined the procession
To our god mother courageous

These days
I pen this revolution with an anxiety
Of a timid bastard child
Of political correctness
With my tail on fire
Before the hunters
Of the funky and hip
Fit my soul into a hipster
Auction the Word
For plastic smiles and
Chop –Change