16 Jul 2007
Danie Marais at Poetry International in Rotterdam, June 2007 (photo Kamiel Verschuren)
Read on though. This isn’t a mournful tale. It’s about endurance and recognition, and ultimately about the fantasist’s victory. But dad was right, the poems from Danie Marais’s multi prize-debut In die buitenste ruimte do shiver from sadness, loss and longing. Danie himself calls it his “break-up album”, as it largely deals with the separation from his wife, a German exchange student whom he followed to Europe in 1992 when he was 22, only to return to South Africa nine years later after suffering from a severe bout of depression and homesickness.
In true romantic fashion, it was this feeling of utter loneliness that made him a poet. “I only started writing poetry around 1996. When I was at university I always used to laugh at these guys with their silly little poems in little books and magazines. But then my life really crash-landed when I was in Germany. I felt very alone and didn’t know what to do about it. I began reading a lot of poetry, starting with Philip Larkin, then Anne Sexton and Ted Hughes. It was a way of trying to make myself feel better. It was a really intense thing.”
He orders a beer, a strong Dutch Palm. “I’d been writing letters to people home and realised that I could tell some of the little stories a bit differently. I started off being all philosophical, but that didn’t work. It sounded showoffy and pretentious, and I didn’t want that. It’s bad enough that you write poetry… But when I discovered Raymond Carver everything changed. I realized that by writing down a little story as a poem you can change the rhythm with the line breaks and put emphasis on different words. I’ve read his poetry a thousand times. He’s even more deadpan and prosaic than I am.”
We’re sitting under an umbrella on the patio of a Rotterdam restaurant on the final day of the festival. A small drizzle forms the perfect prelude to the melancholic verses that we’ll be hearing later this evening. But not a trace of wistfulness with Marais. He’s in a buoyant mood; the dark years in Germany are finally paying off. In 2005 he was nominated for the DaimlerChrysler Award for Poetry; last year Tafelberg published his debut for which he subsequently won the Eugène Marais Prize; and now he’s in Holland taking part in Europe’s biggest poetry festival, rubbing shoulders with colleagues from Armenia, China, United States, Angola, Egypt, Belgium and Holland. Revenge of the dejected?
“A bit,” he says, grinning proudly. “The Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska said ‘poetry is the revenge of the mortal hand, the only space where nobody shoots a dear, no leaf moves and no breeze blows until I allow it do it.’ So you take control of something over which you normally don’t have control. I wrote most of the poems when I felt overpowered or powerless or didn’t really know how to deal with the situation.”
He leans back. “In my case it was a bit like a little poem Carver did.”
When I raise my eyebrows he recites: “And your dog dies/ you feel bad/ you feel bad personally/ but you also feel bad for your daughter/ because it was her dog/ so you go and bury the dog in the woods/ and you bury it deep/ then you sit down and write a poem about your daughter’s dead dog/ and you like that poem so much you’re almost glad that little dog died/ and while you’re writing this poem a woman screams your name, both syllables.”
He finishes his beer, slaps his belly and adds: “That was the process for me.”
That night he’ll read his poem Barcelona, tweeënhalf jaar later, a wordy narrative in which he mixes bitterness with sentimentality, sadness with relief and nostalgia with poignancy. It’s the ultimate break-up poem in which the worn out author describes himself as an “insomniac soft-toy”. It contains lines like “then you close your mouth finally in a thin, bitter line” and “frustrated, you twist the neck of a sugar sachet/ so that the white sugar falls slowly/ onto the raving orange table cloth/ while you begin to cry behind your dark glasses”.
I want to know if it isn’t scary to expose yourself so much. He shakes his head. “For the kind of thing I want to do it’s necessary. It’s something that came quite naturally from an early age. I always think that if you’re open about something you get some power about it, it doesn’t scare you anymore, it’s out in the open. It’s a coping mechanism. When the book was about to be published, I did have a panic attack for a whole weekend. It was all so personal, and if people would hate it and if critics would tear it apart there was no way I wouldn’t have bled. If something like that bombs, it hurts.”
He pauses for a few seconds, something quite unusual for him. “But there’s a positive side to all this as well. A part of my life I think I wasted now has some meaning, some recognition. I got a prize for feeling blue in Germany. That’s quite weird.”
His poetry traverses a tricky landscape where too much leads to sentimentality and too little makes it shallow - not unlike a good country song or the territory that British novelist Nick Hornby explored in Hi-Fidelity and About A Boy.
He’s well aware of the pitfalls. “People like it if there’s a certain intimacy, but if you overstep the line it suddenly becomes creepy, like someone flashing in a park or masturbating in public. It’s also a fine line with sentimentality. I wanted to write about nostalgia. And like Hornby says, we’re not supposed to write about things like sentimentality and self-pity. But that’s all emotional correctness.”
Danie Marais grew up in Pretoria, in a safe middle-class Afrikaans home. Dad was an engineer who liked classical music and wine but didn’t think much of literature. A Nabokov novel he once took on a holiday ended up on a floor in the corner. “He was extremely annoyed by this Nabokov guy.”
It was his mother, a librarian and Afrikaans language teacher, who taught him the marvels of the written word. She even insisted that Danie and his brother went to see Johannes Kerkorrel. “She knew something important was happening.”
Being a good son, Marais followed his father’s advice and studied law, the obvious road to the bourgeois dream of a good job, a good income and a loving wife. But then he rebelled and decided to follow his German love to her home country, where a career as a lawyer was negated by stints as an au pair and a teacher. After four years depression set in. “I never knew if it was because I was in Germany or because of my relationship or maybe I was a very melancholic depressive person or simply missing home,” he says.
This dark mood was exacerbated by an existential crisis that turned a jovial beer drinker into an insecure brooder. “I suddenly became scared of the fact that I wasn’t going to do anything special in my life. There was this fear that I was going to disappear. When you’re isolated and homesick you get that: you dissolve and no one knows about you anymore. Your language is this weird private language. You do have memories but it feels like someone planted them there. And you become afraid of disappearing.”
So what do you do? You try to justify your exile by magnifying everything unpleasant about South Africa. “I soaked up all the bad news to convince myself to stay there. I became convinced that if I’d go back they’d murder me in my bathtub.”
Eventually he had a nervous breakdown and saw a therapist. “She had to laugh a few times, for which she apologised and said: ‘I’m sorry but you are a very funny man.’ Then she gave me pills. We didn’t have a very good relationship, but she did tell me: ‘You don’t have to stay in Germany, you seem to be very unhappy here.’ This, strange enough, was a very novel idea. I had reached the point where I felt so depressed that I thought I deserved the bad stuff happening to me. I felt completely useless and had a lot of self loathing. When I got out of this and the medication worked I was really angry at my wife. Then I just wanted to make war. Soon after it ended.”
His ex-wife never appreciated his writing anyway. She even threatened to break-up if he dared to publish any of the poems that dealt with their wrought relationship. With sardonic delight he describes their final meeting in September 2001. “I always wanted her to buy leather pants. But she thought I was this silly fetishist person. And then of course the last time I saw her she arrived in red leather pants and a read leather long coat and she drove a red Polo. She came to pick up something. Her last words were: ‘Ich wünsche dir alle Schlechte (I wish you everything bad)’. And then she took her red leather coat and stepped into her red leather Polo and drove off. That’s the last I saw of her.”
Now this would have been a perfect way to end this story. But two days after his return to Cape Town Danie sends me an email: “Just heard I also won the UJ (Universiteit van Johannesburg)-debuutprys. Fok, broer, it never rains but it pours. In 36 years I've never won anything and now suddenly. I just can't believe it. I'll prepare myself for another 36 years without prizes now.”
Three days later another one arrives. “George Weidemann het my nou net gebel om te sê ek het die Ingrid Jonker-prys ook gewen!! 'n Driekuns, goeie fok! Ek kan dit nie glo nie, man. Ek gaan nou maar terugtrek Duitsland toe, want hoe moet ek nou die klein blou boekie opvolg? Eish, maar eers gaan ek partytjie hou - dae lank! Tequila, ek sê!”
1971 Born in Kimberley
1993 Law Degree from University of Stellenbosch
1992 Falls in love with a German exchange student and follows her to Germany
1994 Au-pair work in Oldenburg, Germany
1995 Studies German, mathematics and philosophy at the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg, Germany
Since 1997 my poems appeared in various magazines and some of my poetry has been included in anthologies: Nuwe Stemme 3 (2005), Honderd Jaar Later /(2006), My ousie is 'n blom (2006) en Versindaba (2006). Poems were also included in the Dutch literary magazine Bunker Hill (37/38 March 2007).
1998 Teaches at primary school near Bremen, Germany
2002 Returns to South Africa
2002 Teaches at German School in Pretoria
2003 Freelances for Rapport and later for Beeld, Rapport, Insig and Litnet
2005 Poems appear in Nuwe Stemme 3
2005 Nominated for DaimlerChrysler Award for Poetry
2006 Publishes In die buitenste ruimte (Tafelberg)
2007 Poems appear in Bunker Hill, Netherlands
2007 Hosts The Unhappy Hour on Bush Radio with Clive Smith
2007 Wins Eugène Marais Prize
2007 Wins the UJ (Universiteit van Johannesburg)-debuutprys
2007 Wins Ingrid Jonker Prize
Heroes/influences: Singer-songwriters: Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Waits, PJ Harvey, Johnny Cash and Nick Cave (“They have always made me want to write songs or poetry. I’ve loved rock and pop music as far back as I can remember and as a teenager I scribbled my diary full of song lyrics.”); poets: Philip Larkin (“I discovered him when I was 25 and shortly after that I started to try and write my own stuff. Larkin made me realise that poetry good be very stripped, anti-lyrical and about small things and little people, but very powerful at the same time.”), Ted Hughes, Anne Sexton, Wallace Stevens, Czeslaw Milosz, Fernande Pessoa, Yehuda Amichai, Rolf Dieter Brinkmann (“He was an enfant terrible in the German scene who was very into the sixties rock revolution and the American beats. He championed concrete poetry stripped of rhetoric. Unfortunately he died very young.”), Derek Walcott (“Although his poetry has not influenced me stylistically, his views on the post-colonial Carribean and creole identities have made a great impression on me.”), Raymond Carver (“I loved his fiction but his narrative poetry really gave me a whole new perspective on what poetry could be. He took Larkin’s poetic realism a whole lot further.”), Anne Carson (“She combines the prose poetry of Carver with something intensely lyrical. The way she changes register and pace is awesome. She plays the language like an accordeon.”); Afrikaans poets: Breyten Breytenbach and Gert Vlok Nel (“I especially loved the early Breytenbach of Koue Vuur. I’ve always aspired to write poems in the same narrative vein as Die hand vol vere, with the same disarming effect.”); filmmakers: Jim Jarmusch and Aki Kaurismaki (“They showed me how lyrical tragic realism can be if you do it in slow motion. I’ve always wanted my longer poems to feel like a scene from a Jarmusch movie.)