The River At Full Flood
Tue, 19/08/2008 - 12:09 — Pete Kalu
I grew up by this river, and my feelings for it are so shifting and fathomless that I feel I will write poems about it some day. The thought first struck me when I came across Langston Hughes 'river' poem. I thought it was one of the most moving poems of all time. How could I ever describe a river after having read Langston's poem? And yet, and yet.
To take the photo I had to return to it after some 20 years. Again so many memories and feelings, I began to wonder what Marcel Proust's 'Remembering Lost Time' novel reads like. I can well see how you could get an entire novel out of remembering things lost, things past, things that have since flowed and flown...
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Comments
Blood River
Rivers have long been a rich source of inspiration for writers. I read this non-fiction book called Blood River, by..... a brit Telegraph journalist who went to dark Africa, the Congo & charted its river in the manner of Stanley the explorer who also coincidentally worked for The Telegraph.
After all the wars that the Congo has gone through the writer spoke to locals who recalled the river, the river I repeat, going from muddy brown to bloody red from all the dead & wounded who were thrown into it. A river of blood. Limbs, rotting bodies, cannibalistic fish which know the taste of human flesh & often wash it down with the urine of locals & desert the whole meal with the defecate the locals deposit into it. Sorry to do this to ur blog Pete....
Stanley, so it seems, had been after finding Livingstone, the so-called great explorer. He found him & also discovered the congo river, which he decided to chart. In doing so, he founded the Belgian Congo, & the Congolese people lost so much in the following Colonial period. The whites from that era probably have fond memories of a life they probably believe the liberation fighters stole from them; ferry rides, amazing scenery, amazing savages.
In Zimbabwe, the greatest river is Lake Kariba. Livingstone, coincidentally, 'discovered' the river & named it after his Queen, hence the Victoria Falls, one of the natural wonders of the world. The Rhodesians built a dam, the kariba dam in order to harness some of its great power for hydro electric purposes. Many locals died building it. Fell into the concrete. Couldn't be or just wernt retrieved. They're still there as u read this, preserved between granite boulders & concrete, iron girders sticking through their chests.
Nowadays, reports have surfaced that anti-government activists are being put inside concrete and thrown into the Kariba dam alive. Imagine that.
When I look at a green riverside I think of the many books that were forced down me in school of little white boys in grey shorts fishing by the river, fly catching, teenage boys kissing rosy cheeked girls with ponytails....
None of these things happened for me.
Perhaps Pete there's a love poem or story of yours tied to this river?
Blood River Barbarism
Its a dramatic story you tell that rings so true - the barbarism of the colonial era as reflected in the waters of the river; and the ongoing injustices in the region. And your disengagement from green riverbanks is echoed in the unease many UK black people feel about the 'british countryside' - since it is so often described as a retreat into whiteness/ 'purity', a means of excluding/denying the long standing black presence in Britain. Perhaps thats why I post that green banked river on the blog - to muddy the waters of that 'rural purity' and move beyond black = urban simplicities. There's a decent note on it in After Empire, the book by the academic, Paul Gilroy - a hard read but worth the journey.
As for my feelings on the river (mersey) of the photo, umm there are many cross currents, swirls and eddies, though sadly a love story does not feature among them!
It's interesting your point
It's interesting your point about the countryside being a retreat for whiteness, directly linked to questions I've had in my environmental work about why the green movement in this country is so white... I've put Paul Gilroy to the top of my reading list!
In relation to thinking about rivers, PLATFORM, a campaigning arts organisation I did a course with in 2006, have done some work on London's rivers, forced underground to create the world's first sewerage system. From rivers of blood to rivers of shit!
Sorry, these comments are becoming a bit insalubrious...
Buried rivers
Thats an amazing project that you've let me know about - the unburying of london's rivers. Manchester has many underground systems (or is it all rumour?) tunnels etc. I've always had a desire to write about the Manchester Underground stuff - theres a metaphor there for... something! -pete