Rumblin’- Sihle Ntuli (Uhlanga Press: 2020)
Review by Sarah Frost
Sihle Ntuli dedicates Rumblin’ to ‘Africa’s first UNESCO City of Literature, Durban,’ and rightly so. This chapbook resonates with the lushness and vitality of eThekwini. It is fitting that uHlanga, a KwaZulu-Natal printing press, brings out a collection of poetry that so clearly situates itself in a dynamic of place. I found it interesting that Ntuli links his poem named simply, ‘Durban’, to a longing for black emancipation. He summons the image of the eThekwini ocean that has witnessed ‘Bambatha’s bones’ and heard ‘Gandhi’s voice’, reminding those who have been oppressed: ‘may stillness not be confused/with silence/may new life form in the closure/and may the sound of still, calm and tranquil/be received with/the heart warm/ as the ocean.’ In this way the poet links two important themes in his book: the identity of place, and the identity of race.
Ironically, in one of his few poems definitely not about Durban, but named ‘Free State’, the poet also probes the vicissitudes of being black in a still-racist South Africa where ‘I am, lone academic battling, syndromes reserved for imposters.’ Similarly, in a wonderfully compassionate and strong poem dedicated to UCT Dean of Medicine Bongani Mayosi who committed suicide due to the pressures of dealing with a race war on campus, Ntuli writes the ‘clenching violence’ of an institution choosing not to understand, ‘not to see, the intricacies of his/black/pain.’
His poems are marked by a subtle and at times ironic humour, as is evinced by ‘No Exit’, where he describes a bus full of travellers forced to become a congregation as a preacher begins testifying on the long trip from Musgrave to KwaMashu. ‘and as we turned towards the window/to measure how far we had come/how much more of this to take … it would be a whole two stops/before we even reached/KwaMashu.’
Ntuli’s poems lightly grapple with a troubling witnessed interpersonal violence. The strongest of these is ‘Cassette’, where he sets up the oxymoron of sound (the cassette tape his uncle was killed for) and the streets where the ‘murderer still walks/his footsteps block out/our moments of silence’. I was shocked by ‘Brush’, which describes a man punching a woman in the face, because it was not evident in the way Ntuli described this whether he condemned the brutality. Did he approve of the woman’s ‘humiliation’?
The sea is an over-riding image in ‘Rumblin’ ’. In another poem of place, ‘Amanzimtoti’, Ntuli speaks of the ‘versatility of water/ the stillness of tensions/ of the waves that will not be held down.’ But it is more than the movement of water he is describing here, he lets it become a metaphor for self, a self he identifies with, whose fluidity and ability to transform is empowering.
So too, in the title poem of the chapbook ‘Rumblin’, which comes right at the end, Ntuli describes a people personified as one individual, Azania, who are in flux, strong because they are moving and dynamic, ‘blood boiling running flowing veins her chest gradually inhales exhales/ knees the ground people of the south bow heads down palms together clasping clenching.’ The movement gives the poet hope that Azania might speak, might tell him ‘at the end of all this/will you live again.’ Despite the bleak vignettes of township life and the hardships of ongoing racism exposed in this book, the poet harbours a mythical hope that a Utopia is possible, that her footsteps can be heard ‘rumblin’.
In conclusion, I found this an authentic, interesting, at times oblique collection to read, which like visits to Durban, shifts experientially each time you arrive within its locale. Worth re-reading, in other words.
