Living Poetry in Southern Africa 10

Bird or reptile?

I’d thought to continue the coastline theme of the foregoing episodes of Living Poetry, but the sight of a certain personage strutting about my back lawn has sent me winging in a different direction. The said personage is a kind of stiff-legged aristocrat, with a very aristocratic nose, metallic in attire, and perhaps the closest we still have to a pterodactyl. When disturbed from his primary task of digging up crickets and earthworms, he launches himself ponderously into the sky with what everyone agrees is the least musical birdcall in all of Christendom.

Here's a link to the real thing.

He's a Hadeda ibis.

My particular specimen (I dub him “Boss”, short for Bostrychia hagedash), feels a bit of a sad case, since there used to be a pair, but this year the mate seems to have disappeared. I feel for you, brother.

You might be astonished at how many of Southern Africa’s poets write about birds, from eagles to larks, robins to gulls. I read somewhere that, per capita, South Africans spend more money on bird books than any other nation on Earth. I know the syndrome: I personally own more, and more technically detailed, bird books than I have any reasonable need for. So perhaps it’s unsurprising that we do have a substantial anthology of bird poems, Birds in Words (edited by Gus Ferguson and Tony Morphet).

Possibly more surprising is that of all our poetical birds – and many are exquisitely beautiful and melodious – none appears more frequently than the hadeda. Ungainly, impenetrable, and indescribably noisy, it seems to have attracted a kind of enigmatic affection. Even professional ornithologist Warwick Tarboton describes the hadeda as both “striking and puzzling”. It is a puzzle, indeed, just how they locate their lunch beneath the surface of lawns. A recent study, having factored out sound and smell, surmises they must have a specialised nasal organ that detects the subtlest of vibrations. Still a bit speculative, I think, since the organ itself hasn’t been found.

Originally confined to the east of our region, but attracted westwards by more and more urban lawns, cultivated lands, and alien trees handy for nesting in, the hadeda is now found almost everywhere bar the deserts. “Inkankane” in isiZulu, it is not to be mocked, you’ll break out in abscesses; or it might bring good agricultural luck; or foretell rain. It is virtually a national icon. It often features, for example, in the wonderful local comic strip Madam & Eve. (My absolute favourite is one in which, referring to a recent cold snap, Gwen calls to Granny, “Oy, where are you going with my blow-dryer?” Granny’s reply: “Going to defrost the hadedas!”)

Often, the hadeda is mentioned just in passing, part of the scenery. In Jacques Coetzee’s “Always again”, the poet goes out into an autumn day, exhorting himself and others “to be empty enough to pay attention”. One of the first things to attract his notice is the paradoxically “beautiful, harsh” call of the hadeda. It can be comical, too, as in Moira Lovell’s sweet poem in which two hadedas, foregoing mere birdbaths, test out the swimming-pool with their “thermometer bills”, entering gingerly “feather by feather”. In other poems, it’s read as more forbidding. In Wendy Woodward’s poem “Bitterness” the hadedas “dig for creatures/ the child cannot bear to name” (eww), and the poem closes with the image of some “loping” predator, possibly going for the birds, implicitly confronting the child with the hard realities of blood and disappointment. In “Compassionate Leave”, Ingrid de Kock depicts a landscape emptied of people, all gone to funerals in a “deathwatch heat” and “infected space”. Possibly written with the AIDS epidemic in mind, (it was published in 2002) it feels eerily premonitory of lockdown during the Covid-19 pandemic. The poem is concluded with “trumpets in the sky // where ubiquitous hadedas/ unlike Auden’s mute impervious birds/ blast their high shofars …” Like religiously ceremonial adieux in a blighted world.

In most hadeda poems, it’s that voice that commands attention. Among the “Birds in Trinidad” that Helen Moffett observes is the Scarlet ibis. This distant cousin has “that familiar shape”, and is astonishingly vivid, but “something is missing …/ No clarion carks/ Cut through the dense air”. The poet will settle, in the end, for her “grey and gun-metal/ Country-bird, so beautifully ugly and loud.” (She was homesick, basically. And our own other ibis species, notably the Sacred ibis, are similarly reticent.)

Moffett’s poem, incidentally, was published in Carapace 100, the hundredth issue of a magazine edited by the late lamented Gus Ferguson, Cape Town pharmacist, editor, publisher, endlessly energetic promoter of poetry, and one of our few truly comic poets. Ferguson could be relied on to cast a deftly quirky eye on just about anything: so it is with his poem “Hadedahs”. (I don’t know where that final ‘h’ came from; it’s not official, but not uncommon. Maybe it’s an involuntary imitation of the long-drawn-out final note of the call itself.):

They’re not the Sacred Ibis.

They’re vulgar and profane.

We hear them in the suburbs.

They carp and they complain.

Their chronic disappointment

expressed without restraint

reminds by repetition

how blasphemous, complaint.

There’s something about that call that invites poets to read a whole gamut of emotions and moods into it. It used to be said that the hadeda was saying “Farmer takes a wife, Farmer takes a wife”. It’s not what I hear, but this ‘translation’ was included in earlier guide-books, before more scientific editors banished all traces of poetry and fancy, reducing call-descriptions to sonograms and unhelpful blandness. This particular reading is evoked in Elizabeth Trew’s poem “Good Morning, Hadedas”. The poet, walking out of doors, observes a pair of “courting hadedas … with clacking beaks and courtship purrs”, and greets them, “Good morning, hadedas,/ Good morning, hadedas,/ Are you well?” (Possibly an echo of Sydney Clouts’s less comfortable “Good morning, gentle cobra/ Are you well?” I’m not sure. It’s gently respectful on Trew’s part, anyway.)

Trew’s poem mentions that she’s carrying papers bearing “the news of the world”, destined to be dumped and recycled: the familiar, loving hadeda pair acts as something of a counterweight to all that dreadful, apparently inescapable human clutter. This also seems to be the case in Joan Metelerkamp’s poem, “Truth Commission”. The hadedas appear early on: one is “lame-footed”, limping across the lawn, while her mate is “freighting sticks to their nest”. Metelerkamp applies a very different ‘translation’ to their call: “viva-a-a/ a-a-a-mandla …” – the revolutionary rallying-cry of anti-apartheid movements. The poet is “looking for some sign [she] can hold onto”, and the hadedas seem momentarily to provide this; it’s almost as if love and caring is today the truly revolutionary response. The hadedas’ air of both vulnerability and parental care is echoed immediately by the image of “a woman feeling her way forward – arms/ firm enough for limbs/ of warm children”. But the hadedas vanish thereafter, and the long poem spirals away into a litany of the atrocities exposed by South Africa’s post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It seems that the poet does become overwhelmed by the “brazen, searing” truths: the “killers in their ill-fitting// suits and shitty ties”, murders repeating those depicted by Goya, the “slump of the bodies/ against the weak wall of the will” (the closing line). How, the poem laments, is the woman, the nurturing mother particularly, supposed to face up to all this? As (25 years after Metelerkamp’s poem was published in Into the day breaking) we watch the horrors unfolding in Gaza, Myanmar, Sudan, Ukraine, many of us will empathise with that feeling of helplessness, wonder how we can get back to the homely and comforting familiarity of the hadeda.

Brian Walter, the Eastern Cape poet we’ve met before, also juxtaposes the birds with human messiness in his poem “Hadedah” (from the volume appropriately titled, Mousebirds). The poem is in four parts. The first part treats crumbling architectural remnants of apartheid; the second focuses on revolutionary poets, like Dennis Brutus and William Blake; the third on a mother’s bemused grief at her AIDS-wasted son, and our leaders’ indifference; the fourth on the assassination of a gay Afrikaner. A thoroughly political poem, in short – but in between each part, a two-line interpolation gives voice to the hadeda, “discordant in the twilight sky”, “Somewhat wry”, “The Sarafina of the sky” (referring to that popular musical). The first three interpolations are, perhaps, the refracted voice of the observing poet: defiantly individual, wry, even musical. But the last couplet is more dismissive, or defeated, depending on what tone you read into it:

And when it quietly flaps on by

The hadedah has had its day.

A similar trajectory, or ‘line of flight’, is traced by Adam Schwartzman’s poem, “Hadedah” (from The Good Life. The Dirty Life). It opens with a colourful description:

The flower-bed predator sinks its picked beak like a piston,

spreads its legs like a suburban cowboy, places its weight

and levers out of the ground.

Though now sharing its environs with us, the hadeda remains somehow “exotic”:

The most we have said

is that they were omens and make a very loud, uncivilized noise,

but they climb with imagination.

That is to say, in the poet’s imagination the hadedas climb over the jacaranda streets of East Rand gold towns, over mine heads, dumps, streams, “over neon paradises, shebeen kingdoms /and corrugated churches on earth … private Edens that were not always good … unmarked graves// of sleeping cultures”. The poem traces a literal bird’s-eye view of a broad swathe of South African (or at least Jo’burg) life. Until, transcending all that,

when no one can see,

they catch a warm thermal to ride on and upwards

and out of the world.

We would love to gain such an ineffable freedom, wouldn’t we!

Or maybe not all of us. My favourite hadeda poem of all does quite the opposite: it does not see the bird as some sort of quasi-occult omen, or as a symbol of what entangled violent human society fails to attain. Harry Owen (English-born but now resident in South Africa for some years) rather sees the bird, precisely because of its challenge to our aesthetic preconceptions, as an integral part of our country, as actually a glorious and authentic presence. Here, with Harry’s blessing, is the complete poem.

Hadeda

Certainly not posh. No Knightsbridge or Bath,

no golden regency Crescent, no plum –

not la-di-dah but the bleaker raw screech,

primordial as swamp one step up

from reptile. Real.

Less pretty by far than rosellas

and fairy wrens ripe for picturing,

but heavy, squat and chucked together

with blocks of rusty parts, a spare

Concorde snout. Propped.

Like so much of here, shacks and townships,

tyres, tin and cardboard, half a forest

balanced on each woman’s head

held proud, still, elegant as models.

Hadeda. This

beautiful bird. Ugly? Rough? Unfinished?

True.