The Dream in the Next Body

By Gabeba Baderoon

Gabeba Baderoon’s debut poetry collection attempts to probe the realm of the unsaid and the ripples that move between words, between people, between bodies. Sometimes the verses trace and explore details that have brought the poet to, in her own words, "arrested instants of loss or witness that break open the surface of the world". It is a collection of poems that brings one to be silent, to be still. By writing the author attempts to "see again". Like "when we are about to fall asleep ... and the mind suddenly finds itself encountering a memory - a connection ... a small meditation." Sean O’ Brien says of her work:  Baderoon’s work involves the steady, scrupulous contemplation of questions of identity and meaning. It is lucid, surprising and graceful. It balances the melancholy of departure and solitude with the utopian suggestion that there will, in time, be grounds for general celebration.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kwela
• Release date: May 29, 2012
• ISBN: 9780795704420

Gabeba Baderoon

Gabeba Baderoon is Associate Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and African Studies at Pennsylvania State University.

Book preview

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GABEBA BADEROON

The

Dream

in the

Next Body

KWELA BOOKS/SNAILPRESS

To my mother and father,

who gave me my love of reading

True

To judge if a line is true,

banish the error of parallax.

Bring your eye as close as you can

to the line itself and follow it.

A master tiler taught me this.

People wish to walk where he has kneeled

and smoothed the surface.

They follow a line to its end

and smile at its sweet geometry,

how he has sutured the angles of the room.

He transports his tools by bicycle –

a bucket, a long plastic tube he fills with water

to find a level mark, a cushion on which to kneel,

a fine cotton cloth to wipe from the tiles the dust

that colours his lashes at the end of the day.

He knows how porcelain, terracotta and marble hold

the eye. He knows the effect of the weight

of a foot on ceramic. Terracotta’s warm dust cups

your foot like leather. Porcelain will appear

untouched all its life and for this reason

is also used in the mouth.

To draw a true line on which to lay a tile,

hold a chalked string fixed

at one end of a room and whip

it hard against the cement floor.

With a blue grid, he shakes out

the sheets of unordered space, folds

them into squares and lays them end on end.

Under his knees, a room will become whole and clear.

At night, he rides home over ground that rises

and falls as it never does under his hands.

Witness

Mr Dunn arrives early in the white morning

to clear the driveway of snow.

He heaves and snarls with the machine

biting into the mounds, pushing,