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Xamissa

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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 Tabl...
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  • 04 September 2018
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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.

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Price: $26.00
Pages: 136
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Imprint: Fordham University Press
Series: Poets Out Loud
Publication Date: 04 September 2018
Trim Size: 9.00 X 8.00 in
ISBN: 9780823281107
Format: Paperback
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In Xamissa, Henk Rossouw writes the membranes that thrive between the hyper-real of the culturally residual and the liminally sensed real of the culturally emergent. His artistic vision isn’t borne out of the tyranny of spontaneous epiphany, but rather is carefully fleshed out through a constructivist process of cultural excavation. Writ large are luminous alter-selves from South Africa's mist-covered past that get choreographed into what Aime Cesaire once called ‘a rendezvous of victory.’ Nimbly threading History’s objects ('nation', 'city', 'self', 'peoples'), Rossouw guides us into and out of Imperium's capture zones. The result is a lived-life global poetics where the harmonic modulation from nationalist myth making to a newly invigorated drive for liberationist re-definition of ‘citizenship’, makes for a dazzling music of our time.---Rodrigo Toscano
Henk Rossouw teaches at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. His poems have appeared in The Paris Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Boston Review, and other publications.

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