The Electrician

Cape Town
Artist / director: Terry Westby-Nunn
Poet / voice / performer: Tanya van Schalkwyk
2'5''
2009

Cities are the dressing rooms of our dreams / fantasies. "The Electrician" romps through another side of Cape Town's blackouts and energy crises, as well as the mind of a city dweller. Is the electrician a figment of her imagination or is she part of an underground city - alternate to the one we read about in the papers and believe to be true? Reality or imaginary, the city plays dress up with our minds.

The Mountain Is

by Tania van Schalkwyk

The mountain is
smoking dope, puffing out smoke and starting fires. A troubled hooligan.
Or maybe a freedom fighting terrorist. Or just a crazy bored house wife circa 1954.

As the sun sets, the clouds turn to pomegranate juice trickling
down her sides. The city is hazed by a menarche game of pyromania
as dusk drips with veld fire. Arson toys with self immolation
like playing doctors and nurses at a new age self help conference for addicts:

Tell me where it hurts.

Well,
my eyes itch.

Is it the light or the smoke?

I want to wear binoculars and a microscope at the same time so I can get closer
to the mountain. See inside. Journey to the centre like Jules Verne
and maybe discover understanding of what lies beneath this unmoving rock.
Feels so fluid. Following me everywhere in the city
like a moon does on all hi-ways of this earth.
Making you feel special. Cared for. Chosen. Thy will be done.

And yet the mountain burns just like the moon eclipses sometimes. So solid
and yet tonight it could disappear
like villages in a tsunami.
And continents in an ice age
and a body in cancer.
I am reminded of my grandmother’s death bed
and how her blood feeds mine, just like juice.

Just like the sweet sticky air clings to my thighs and cakes me in red.
A strawberry tart prowling the streets, protected by her mother’s anger,
maybe wanting to be eaten by wolves- but killing them first.
And blanketing them up in the catacombs of matriarchal soil,
beneath the night fog that beds our city as the wind sirens a panic howl.
Not a cocoon preparing for birth, but a burial chamber mummifying.
The black widow has spun her tale of revenge. She has kissed and made it better.
The mountain is dark and grey now, tinged by cloud echoing electricity
like the silver of my succubus eyeballs.
Screams die as more lights are switched on and dinners cooked.
After sex there is always silence. And sleep.

Tomorrow, if the mountain has vanished before my waking sight
it will still be there in the morning’s dew.
Clouds will gather and suck up water from the earth and form precipitation.
Tears will fall. Lives are lived. And juice is drunk.
Like a Mayan blood ritual to appease the fire gods,
we build pyramids out of our lives
in an attempt to survive. Sacrifice ourselves to the altar
when all there is
is a playground.

The Mansion: An Anti-Poem

by Tania van Schalkwyk

The mansion is white.

It has no clutter, but under-floor heating
and a wraparound view of the city.

To enter the mansion you need to either live there
or know someone who knows someone who does
live there. You have to ring the belle bell —
an art-deco-repro door handle with TV com
and wait to be buzzed in —
walk through the plaster-of-Paris lions
flanking the entrance. And then you are given access

to a sushi-laden minimalist very long wooden table.
You will be seated under a bourgeois chandelier,
entertained with noise masquerading as conversation.
You will sit, toes caressing the slick warm tiles
mind blinded as you inhale
and watch many people come and go —
but never remember their names.

You will recognize these faces around town, in shops and bars —
but never speak to each other again.
You have all come for the wide white open space
this mansion provides. The thought of having to close the emptiness
with plenty of meaningful communication alarms.
So you’ll argue over which CD to play loudly
and silence each other’s talk with.

After exhaling,
you will take a tour of the mansion,
leave the kitchen, its built-in aquarium and ice-making frigidaire,
pass the bare lounge’s ubiquitous plasma screen,
walk and grope along large, serpentine walls —
look for a photo, used razor, scattered dirty washing,
opened library book, some sort of personal touch, anywhere.

On the walls? On mantelpieces? In the master bathroom? By the jacuzzi?
Maybe in the toilet bin? And you find nothing —

but a rolled-up note with which to powder your nose,
so that you too can accessorise

the mansion and its abundance of emptiness.

The Electrician

by Tania van Schalkwyk

I understood I could change things. That day, I walked along the main street of Cape Town, changing light bulbs from red to green just by looking at them. This simple trick caused much trouble and mayhem. I wondered how much damage I could do by expanding my new powers to a broader field.

This thought scared me, so I went to a doctor who sent me to a shrink. Neither believed me and now I’ve gone and closed down Koeberg Power Station with my mind.

Nuclear leak they’re calling it, but the birds know better. They see me walking the streets at early light when the first cars roar in the belly of the beast. Mostly at dawn pre-feeding time when all is quiet, hushed in sleep. Then, the early morning travellers sound loud as they begin their hunt. And I am compelled to change light bulbs and sometimes even switch them off all across town. It is my mission to stop the rush of human traffic. It is a dangerous job. But still, I enjoy the challenge of a good black-out. And I feed the birds to keep them quiet.