Rustum Kozain's Blog

(Review of the Miscast exhibition/installation by Pippa Skotnes; originally published in Southern African Review of Books, Issue 44, July/August 1996, alongside reviews of same by Carmel Schrire and Yvette Abrahams. Reproduced here unedited.) I catch a train into Cape Town and walk to the South African National Gallery to view the Miscast exhibition. Ungraced by […]

From the archive, a short piece of fiction written for a Sunday Times special, set in South Africa, 2030. “Fifty dollar!” the tuk-tuk driver yelled over the noise of helicopters chopping air over heavy loads at the docks nearby and revellers in the streets banging drums and setting off fireworks. The Atlantic was black as […]

Dear comrades, we see you now everywhere on Facebook we see you clown and sermonise in tweets of desperate guise while fattening off our purse rolling around on fairways and on greens posing next to your fancy cars or some American superstar patting each other on the back lips and cheeks glistening at tables of […]

The wind in the morning The man wakes from dream to nightmare, his night-aged knees buckling over rubble outside when he emerges from the black mouth of his house its burnt shell a meagre shelter from the wind now tugging at a loose something and the blight it brings like a scythe through the valleys. […]

For W. 1. Ohio, 1994 When the shutter clicked, you jumped back and hated me for that one moment you had glanced into my camera, as if my shutter had fallen like a guillotine through parts of you. I should have known. Weeks before, smoking outside after class, we both mauled Gary Snyder for playing […]

Christmas Eve Almost all is ruin – the Mozart fugue that fails its promise of deliberate consolation, the unending ticker and swish of a sprinkler outside, and the roads angry with traffic in last-minute errands as the year breaks again, breaks again into its manifold terrors – Christmas Eve and its solitudes for the holy […]

Father Crow Tick I have been a tock bird a tick crow black tock crow clawed tick to your tock shoulders tick talons tock rung round tick collar bones tock hung tick sit ridden tock along tick as you tock walk the earth tick trying tock to be one thing tick with it tock master […]

This carting life I met History once, but he ain’t recognize me. – Derek Walcott, ‘The Schooner Flight’ On pilgrimage down damp steps, deep inside the British Museum, among boxes stocked roof-high, I rummage. And sniff like a dog and pause, snout snuffling for my nearest quarry, for the tacks to my own, final shit. […]

Safari Every now and then foreigners come across the plain stop for shade speak through an interpreter to the assenting chief. They go look at the school speak to the principal see the children. A boy, older, shows them the scar like a long lunar crater below his knee the girl the large mangled star […]

Morning, under its wind-still, sun-gold halo. Occasional only the frisson of a breeze through a palm tree across the road, the green oak, the break of red hibiscus and the slow start of Saturday humming in a car passing leisurely by. Down the road gently rock at their moorings the tugs at harbour. Ships like […]