Cutting Carrots the Wrong Way

Synopsis

The American poet C.D. Wright, in her collection Cooling Time – a fragmented mix of memoir, essay and poems – wrote the following: For decades the critical question has been, Can poetry survive? Is it mutable, profound, sentient, resplendent, intense, stalwart, brave, alluring, exploratory, piercing, skilful, percipient, risky, exacting, purposeful, nubile, mirth-provoking, affective, restive, trenchant, sybaritic, nuts enough? Can it still enkindle, prod, or enlarge us? And even if yes, yes to all of the above, is it enough? Among poets this inquiry is persistent. And if the answer is nay, all this and more is not enough, the question becomes, With what then will we hail the next ones, the ones who have to pick up around here after we’ve been chewing the roots of dandelions? This slim collection that you hold in your hand of poetry and prose about food has been written by “the next ones”. They are all postgraduate students from the Creative Writing programme in the Department of English Studies at the Univer¬sity of the Western Cape – a programme that covers the full range of postgraduate studies from Honours through to the Doctoral level. The collection is one of the outcomes of a partnership between the Centre for Excellence in Food Studies at UWC and the English Studies department. The part¬nership actively explores the social meanings of food and the ways in which these meanings are lived out through individuals, culture, the media and traditional sys¬tems. Such meanings, we argue, are better explored through a multi-disciplinary hu¬manities approach than through the strict biological and physical sciences. In this regard, the Department of English Studies and, in specific, the pro¬gramme of Creative Writing, has collaborated with the COE on a range of creative and practice-based research projects in order to better understand food systems as sites of cultural performance, social resistance and aesthetic expression. In this selection of work by some of the current creative writing students, I believe that “the next ones” are proving that writing can not just survive, but that it can in fact be relevant and resilient. Beginning in the seventies in South Africa, and extending into the eight¬ies, increasing emphasis was placed upon the need for artistic production to incorporate socio-political expression, that it reflects the historical context, and align itself with the progressive forces of resistance and change; in a word, that it be relevant. Collating material for this collection, I was struck by how the writers are ar¬ticulating an alternative notion of the term “relevant”. It is not that they eschew socio-political ideas (as part of a socially engaged institution of higher learning, students of UWC have an historical commitment to researching factors which inhibit socio-economic progress toward a more inclusive and equitable society). Rather, they are re-making the validity and consequence of the term by energis¬ing it with their own personal contexts and voices. This is, for me, as a teacher of creative writing, very significant. It shows that the students are connecting on an intimate level – the level of everyday lived experience – with not just writing as an imaginative, transformative act, but also with the idea that literature (that which they are ultimately participating in) be¬longs to them; that it can sound and look like them; that it can come from who and where they are. But the poems and short stories collected here are also acts of resistance. Wright, again in Cooling Time, argues that “If you do not use language you are used by it”. In a time where many lament the impoverishment of written expressive language (blamed on social media and the global shift away from text-based knowledge to the visual), “the next ones” are proving not just the resil¬ience of words – that words still matter and still mean – but also that words can be fashionable and even fun. That through their words – written in their own way to the best of their abilities – the next generation can dare to redeem their world; the b...

Copyright:

2021

Book Details

Book Quality:

Publisher Quality

Publisher:

uHlangaPress

Date of Addition:

09/10/21

Copyrighted By:

Kobus Moolman

Adult content:

No

Language:

English

Has Image Descriptions:

No

Categories:

Nonfiction, Poetry

Submitted By:

Bookshare Staff

Usage Restrictions:

This is a copyrighted book.