Tell us about yourself
I am a Trauma Surgeon at Cecilia Makiwane Heritage Hospital in the township of Mdantsane, East London, South Africa
Tell us about the poetry scene in your country, as a fellow poet.
Well, I balance myself between two countries India and South Africa. During the seventies while still at Delhi, Protest Poetry was synonymous to South African poetry. I believe we may divide South African poetry into pre and post 1994. Prominent among them would be Tatamkulu Africa, Shabbir Banoobhai, Denis Brutus, Ingrid de Kok and many others. The post 1994 poets who signed their words in revolution against the present regime would be Rustum Kozain, Lindiwe Mabuza, Kobus Moolman and others. Politics and Poetry, they go together and fusing them in culture is sheer silk, erratically torn at many a time.
What influences your creativity? When and how did you get to be a poet?
I believe, I am a love poet because most of the time I am madly in love with some or other person, strangerlove at strangertimes. I have seen the worst of trauma and taken up arms in civil wars and complex humanitarian emergencies in Niger, Congo and Rwanda, Treating and facing trauma is my profession and continues to be a mercenary for hire for such African countries. Love Poetry for me is a catharsis because I have nobody to reveal what I have seen and what I have done. I worked with General Nkunda in Masisi. He wrote poetry too. His whereabouts now are not known.
Tell us about your work as a publisher in South Africa
Poets Printery is small time publishing house dedicated to publishing exclusively poetry and art in a non profit basis. We have been publishing poetry since 2002.
Tell us something embarrassing that happened to you, or anything secretive that you have kept to yourself?
The Interpol had put a red corner notice which was removed after proper explaination
What other arts are you involved in
Visual Arts – Acrylic on Canvas, Charcoal on Paper, Poetry Art and Poetry Film
Tells us about your other poems in BNAP
I think I have this habit of repeating myself, like my father. He wished I could go to UK and do my Fellowship in Orthopaedic Surgery. Instead I repeated myself inadvertently so many times in so many distances. This could never have been you obviously. I took to the lonely streets in shadows of many evenings in lives we lived and tried forgetting. In inanimate proportions, living was never reaching and I believe you too never reached.
It has been a long time since then. I would love to know, did you ever think of repeating time, remembrances in many other dewdustdawns. And as I pass many such indigo
blue days, I seem to believe in repeating again. Each stranger sun tends to replicate itself and each of our lives still stays together. You are not there because you believed
in belief and I who never believed in anything other than you, still look down at many
shades of new evenings where the answer seems to be a stretch to many more lives. I do sometimes slip into a life that you are used to living when I treat an assault trauma in
an African country but then old lives don’t leave me so easily.
I am a Trauma Surgeon at Cecilia Makiwane Heritage Hospital in the township of Mdantsane, East London, South Africa
Tell us about the poetry scene in your country, as a fellow poet.
Well, I balance myself between two countries India and South Africa. During the seventies while still at Delhi, Protest Poetry was synonymous to South African poetry. I believe we may divide South African poetry into pre and post 1994. Prominent among them would be Tatamkulu Africa, Shabbir Banoobhai, Denis Brutus, Ingrid de Kok and many others. The post 1994 poets who signed their words in revolution against the present regime would be Rustum Kozain, Lindiwe Mabuza, Kobus Moolman and others. Politics and Poetry, they go together and fusing them in culture is sheer silk, erratically torn at many a time.
What influences your creativity? When and how did you get to be a poet?
I believe, I am a love poet because most of the time I am madly in love with some or other person, strangerlove at strangertimes. I have seen the worst of trauma and taken up arms in civil wars and complex humanitarian emergencies in Niger, Congo and Rwanda, Treating and facing trauma is my profession and continues to be a mercenary for hire for such African countries. Love Poetry for me is a catharsis because I have nobody to reveal what I have seen and what I have done. I worked with General Nkunda in Masisi. He wrote poetry too. His whereabouts now are not known.
Tell us about your work as a publisher in South Africa
Poets Printery is small time publishing house dedicated to publishing exclusively poetry and art in a non profit basis. We have been publishing poetry since 2002.
Tell us something embarrassing that happened to you, or anything secretive that you have kept to yourself?
The Interpol had put a red corner notice which was removed after proper explaination
What other arts are you involved in
Visual Arts – Acrylic on Canvas, Charcoal on Paper, Poetry Art and Poetry Film
Tells us about your other poems in BNAP
I think I have this habit of repeating myself, like my father. He wished I could go to UK and do my Fellowship in Orthopaedic Surgery. Instead I repeated myself inadvertently so many times in so many distances. This could never have been you obviously. I took to the lonely streets in shadows of many evenings in lives we lived and tried forgetting. In inanimate proportions, living was never reaching and I believe you too never reached.
It has been a long time since then. I would love to know, did you ever think of repeating time, remembrances in many other dewdustdawns. And as I pass many such indigo
blue days, I seem to believe in repeating again. Each stranger sun tends to replicate itself and each of our lives still stays together. You are not there because you believed
in belief and I who never believed in anything other than you, still look down at many
shades of new evenings where the answer seems to be a stretch to many more lives. I do sometimes slip into a life that you are used to living when I treat an assault trauma in
an African country but then old lives don’t leave me so easily.
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