The.Journal

SECOND EDITION: BOOZE, PENS AND CAMERAS

 The task was simple: to make this issue better than the last, while retaining the energy and spontaneity that was endemic of our fist effort. Ray Whitacher and Tim Jardin’s sharp and stylised graphics offered the momentum for a publication rendering bare the beauty of the artistic forms.

The team was overwhelmed with responses from contributors like Sydelle Willow Smith who had seen our Facebook group and had something fresh to offer, and those that had read the first, loved it and wanted to be part of the next. Kabomo Vilakazi’s intensely evocative and sensitive pieces kept the boldly rhythmic pace. 

The second edition grapples with the uneasy and tumultuous political environment expressed avidly through Afurakan Mohari’s satirical look at the presidential wrangling and Thapelo Tselapedi’s ‘Same Policies Diffrenet Mshini’.

‘My Old Man’s Heart’ (Ntsako Mkhabela) and LaSchandre Coetzee’s recounting of the essence of being encapsulated Miyela’s belief that art should vacate the remote depths of the mind and interact with the soul and the hearts of those with whom it interacts.

Kinky (Mbali Msweni) and spirited, the next edition of the journal gathered the tales of trouble and strife, and feisty adventures of young South Africa. 

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Poetry:
My Old Man’s Heart by Ntsako Mkhabela

 

My father’s heart is breaking.
He stands at the kitchen door unshaven.
Eyes hollowed.
Washed away by salty waters.

My father’s heart is breaking
he’s dissolving – his feet already gone.
I do nothing but watch.

I use to fit into my father’s shoes.
I would drag my blanket behind me and climb into his shoes,
My father’s shoes they smell like new leather. 

He’s dissolving in the doorway
watering down
floating in his watered down self
heart broken. 

There are gold fish,
in his shoes.
There is a pond
and the fish swim in the place that used to be my father’s feet!
It’s too cold to dive in
I sit as he dissolves,
a pond in his shirt.

 

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Illustration
The Pen is Mightier Than The Sword by Ray Whitecher

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LAUNCH ISSUE: HOUSE NIGGERS AND PORCH MONKEYS

We launched Miyela at the National Arts Festival in July 2008. “House Niggers and Porch Monkeys” hit the streets and recieved some really positive response.

Contributors: Hlawulani Mkhabela, La Schandre Coetzee, Thapelo Tshelapedi, Ishmael Mkhabela, Adwoa Ankoma, Mvuzo Ponono, Nicole Wilson, Luzuko Baku, Setumo-Thebe Mohlomi, Nkululeko Mthembu, Thabo Lesoro, Danelle Malan, Mbali Mtsweni, Qhakaza Mthembu and David Evans.

Starting up a literary and graphic journal was challenging but most rewarding when we saw just how much amazing work is out there. So here’s a taste of what was in the launch issue.

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Photography:
Freestyling at Underground Jazz Cyphers
pics and words by Setumo-Thebe Mohlomi

This could be a living room. I’m not sure though. If I were to go by the furniture it would be a bedroom come kitchen. The four chairs and crate in the room formed a circle in the middle of the room, and were occupied by people I had never met. Strangers, and strange too. Just as I’m about to make introductions and begin pleasantries a half somnambulant mop of blonde hair dressed in worn pyjamas walks in. It mumbles and gets a cigarette from someone who speaks its language.

Some days later I was in the same room and in a different daze. That same mop played along in frenzy to Herbie Hancock and cursed when the CD scratched on a straight note chaser. Trane replaces Herbie on the CD player and the conversation with the same strangers from my first visit turns to Jazz.

You see these nameless faces are artists. And boy will they tell you about the difficulties and tortures of their art. There is a jazz scene in Cape Town which brews just over boiling point and out of the range of mainstream media. I try to make a gesture of recognition to one of the faces. “My name isn’t Rob Bru, but here you go” he passes the lighter and continues with what he was saying. “There needs to be a new way of covering Jazz” he muses.

“Maybe something like”, this is the guy who has just come in from what I gather is his umpteenth job interview, “09:00 arrived at Tagore’s and had a drink, 09:45 had two grams of shrooms”. The room bursts into laughter. Once this subsides someone else says that maybe interview man has a point. Too many of these journalists don’t really catch what happens at Jazz gigs.

And there it starts again. The keyboard playing mop strikes a key, sits gets comfortable, then begins to play. We all sit there with corpses of Black Labels littering the floor of what could be a living room. We listen to what could be a genius, if someone with a nine to five at a newspaper is impressed by her talent.

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Words:
The Post-Post Generation
words by Adwoa Ankoma pics by Thabo Lesoro

Nothing is ours. Jeff Chang in his analysis of the hip hop generation “Don’t Stop Won’t Stop” alludes to this generation as the post generation- post civil rights, post modern, post cultural, post feminist.

The generation that comes of age at the birth of the new millennium has no heroes, no revolution, no Rascals and no Holy Molies. It’s pretty bleak, much like a van all rusted up with only a Jimi Hendrix poster to testify to its days before the trailer park.
A generation with no heroes. No John Lennon, No John F Kennedy, No Bobby Dylan, No Nelson Mandela, No Ghandi , No Tsietsi Mashinini, No Diana and No Mother Theresa.

A generation of fallen heroes, of Tupac Shakurs. We don’t really believe the world is going to change for the better, so we’re not even trying.
As far as we’re concerned, signing up for a Facebook cause is doing our bit. No one to look up to, except for a few members trying to start a revolution. But we did have Chuck Norris…for a while.
A generation with no branding that it can call its own. We have no rascals, we have no holy mollies.

No James Dean, Dolly Rathebe, No Marilyn Monroe. A generation which finds its style icons in the form of the Paris Hilton’s of the world. We are not the first to do anything, everything we claim to be the innovators of, in terms of style, is just that, a claim to be refuted.
The All Star Takkies, the Afrocentric look, it’s all been done before. Walking around with your crew and a radio is so eighties. We didn’t come up with rap, or rock and roll or dance, or anything.
Even the foundations for all this new technology, like the transistor, was from another time. But we do dominate the sample to beat them all.

A generation without a language. Almost all of our slang is at best a derivative of what our parents used to say, and at worst, exactly what came out of the mouths of an older sister, like ten years ago, stuck in the subliminal to come out of the mouths of babes trying to act cool. But Dude, where’s my car.
A generation without a revolution. No concept of mass action. In the words of John Mayer, “we’re waiting for the world to change”, all on its own.

We’re definitely not comfortable with the way things are, but not quite dissatisfied to the point of mutiny. And revolution looks kinda rough, kind of violent. We’re not that committed to the cause. But there is this new Xenophobia creeping up, so maybe that will get us started.
A generation with all of the problems, and none of the hope of the sixties. AIDS, global warning, drugs, poverty and unemployment. Struggles we have inherited from previous generations, but on a scale that takes your breath away. There is no movement, because we are beyond delusions of changing the world.
“Imagine” is just a song. Our leaders keep us in place, assuring us that there will be no African Renaissance, no world peace, no end to world hunger or the exploitation of the masses, at least not in our life time.

Measuring our existence against a world which no longer exits, scrutinizing our generation, through the lenses of those who came before, makes us sound really pathetic, like there’s a generation gap created by our ‘lack of’.
Post the X and the Y generation, the Grunge and the Emo, and perhaps, even the hip hop generation. Is it just good enough to exist and keep keeping on, or are we really the weak link in the chain of human civilisation?

Perhaps it is the fate of every generation to feel a chronic sense of ‘in-betweeness’, waiting for the future in society which will characterizes it. We are more than just a post-post generation. We are The Adjusted generation. The Adapted. The chameleons.
A generation which can manipulate a PSP, but still remembers the green flashing that was MS-Dos. A generation adept with Blue Ray television, and yet remembers using video machines, radios and cassettes to keep up with all that defined a generation.

Before mp3’s but behind records. After the steppers but before the crumpers. We may not have broken the mould, but we did redefine it so that it could be identified by those who came before, and those who shall come after. Whatever. I’m over it.

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Illustration:
Culture Shock
illustration by Danelle Malan

Click HERE to check out more of Danelle’s work.

illustration by Mbali Mtsweni