<p>"Lesego Rampolokeng is well known in South Africa and internationally for his confrontational performance poetry. This is his first prose work, a stream of consciousness passage through a confused and violent Soweto 1970's childhood."</p>

Whiteheart: Prologue to Hysteria

Literature & Fiction

Rampolokeng, Lesego

History & Criticism

Univ of Natal Pr

Blackheart: Epilogue to Insanity

Pine Slopes Publications

"I've never celebrated nor embraced negativity in my life. Every single thing I have tried to do or written has come out of a need to actually eradicate or wipe out whatever it is that seeks to destroy the soul of other people. .I respect the WORD. People talk about wordplay, I don't play with it.it's one of the most powerful weapons in the world." --- Lesego Rampolokeng is well known in South Africa and internationally for his confrontational performance poetry. Whiteheart-his first prose work-is a nightmarish plunge into a 1970s Soweto childhood where violence waits everywhere to make its nest in the child-narrator's mind.

Literary

Deep South

<p>This is Lesego Rampolokeng's first book of poems to be published in South Africa since The Bavino Sermons (1999). Head on Fire includes the complete text of The Second Chapter, originally published by Pantolea Press in Berlin in 2003. One measure of a poet is the range of his concerns, and Lesego Rampolokeng takes on religion, war, street violence, global economics, obscenity, history, wordplay, sexual perversion, and, not least, his own contradictions. If he spatters the reader with blood and body fluids, it is not to shock or repel but to "engage with my world in all its manifestations...I want to see all the spluttered blood and gore. So I'm attempting to embrace its beauty. Hopefully." Few South African writers are as prepared as Rampolokeng to acknowledge that we all are the authors of our own chaos. "It is necessary for us to strip right down to the bone and see exactly how ugly we are as a people." Or, more aphoristically: Not the barbarian at the door - but the savage at the core.</p>

Head on Fire: Rants / Notes / Poems 2001-2011

Poetry

"This place is called SEDING, short for Leseding, place of light. Quite ironic given the darkness throbbing at its core and spilling out bubbling in the blackest rage when least expected. Surrounded by farmland in all directions, it is a settlement of about 700 households crammed in tiny structures. There are an average 7 souls per hovel. It used to be made up of ramshackle corrugated iron shacks that seemed tossed down regardless of aesthetics. Then the new administration's housing program kicked in. Man in the bush in quest of Bosman's ghost. Finding AWB rabidity. Tranquillity so deep it kills. Hate-hounds. Beneath the surface quiet, such racist rotten-heartedness. & children dying. Starvation abounds. Raw sewage in the water supply. Crap in the taps. Skin matters. Ancient white beards sexing black teens for tins, food exchange. The soul's impoverishment. The starved get their humanity halved. And weekends of sex-tourism. Alcoholic stares everywhere. Deep fear too." ***Lesego Rampolokeng is a poet and performance maestro, and the author of 12 books, including two plays and three novels. He has collaborated with visual artists, playwrights, film-makers, theatre and opera producers, poets and musicians. His no-holds-barred style, radical political-aesthetic perspective and instantly recognizable voice have brought him a unique place in South African literature. His third novel, Bird-Monk Seding, is a stark picture of life in a rural township two decades into South Africa's democracy. Listening and observing in the streets and taverns-narrator Bavino Sekete, often feeling desperate himself-is thrown back to his own violent childhood in Soweto. To get through, he turns to his pantheon of jazz innovators and radical writers. [Subject: Fiction, South African Literature, African Studies]

Bird-Monk Seding

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Books by Rampolokeng, Lesego

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Rampolokeng, Lesego. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Whiteheart: Prologue to Hysteria

Blackheart: Epilogue to Insanity

Whiteheart: Prologue to Hysteria

Head on Fire: Rants / Notes / Poems 2001-2011

Bird-Monk Seding