Xamissa

Henk Rossouw (Author)

9780823281107

Paperback / softback, published 4 September 2018

136 pages, 6
22.9 x 20.3 x 1 cm, 0.29 kg

Xamissa is a book-length poem that sounds out the city of Cape Town in a joyful elegy for the city of alternate takes. Xamissa adapts 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 came—the 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, Xamissa code-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, Xamissa probes the interrelation of language, sociality, and resistance, in its bid to interrogate the archive as a draft of the city's future.

Proloog 1
Rearrival 7
The Dream of the Road 17
Doppler Shift 21
Folding Screen 29
Twin Soldiers 31
The Prisoner 32
Elegy for the Gesture 33
The Water Archives 35
helena Lena 43
Lontara Translation 111
Sources 113
Notes 115
Acknowledgments 119