3. South African government act prohibiting sex-4. Tropical trees with blue flowers. ual relations between whites and other races.
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accepts for herself but regrets that it has prevented him from being nominated, as he should be, to stand as the Party's parliamentary candidate for the district. He does not let her clothing, or that of anyone else gathered closely, make contact with him. He, too, stares at the grave. The dead man's mother and he stare at the grave in communication like that between the black man outside and the white man inside the cab the moment before the gun went off.
The moment before the gun went off was a moment of high excitement shared through the roof of the cab, as the bullet was to pass, between the young black man outside and the white farmer inside the vehicle. There were such moments, without explanation, between them, although often around the farm the farmer would pass the young man without returning a greeting, as if he did not recognize him. When the bullet went off what Van der Vyver saw was the kudu stumble in fright at the report and gallop away. Then he heard the thud behind him, and past the window saw the young man fall out of the vehicle. He was sure he had leapt up and toppled?in fright, like the buck. The farmer was almost laughing with relief, ready to tease, as he opened his door, it did not seem possible that a bullet passing through the roof could have done harm.
The young man did not laugh with him at his own fright. The farmer carried him in his arms, to the truck. He was sure, sure he could not be dead. But the young black man's blood was all over the farmer's clothes, soaking against his flesh as he drove.
How will they ever know, when they file newspaper clippings, evidence, proof, when they look at the photographs and see his face?guilty! guilty! they are right!?how will they know, when the police stations burn with all the evidence of what has happened now, and what the law made a crime in the past. How could they know that they do not know. Anything. The young black callously shot through the negligence of the white man was not the farmer's boy; he was his son.
1991
A. K. RAMANUJAN 1929-1993 Born in Mysore, India, Attipat Krishnaswami Bamanujan grew up amid the different languages that later informed his life's work as poet, translator, and linguist: he spoke Kannada in the streets, Tamil with his mother, and English with his father, a mathematics professor at Mysore University. Educated there and at Deccan College, he traveled for graduate studies to Indiana University, staying on in the U.S. to teach at the University of Chicago from 1961. He was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, and in 1976 the Indian government honored him with the Padma Shri for distinguished service to the nation.
Ramanujan affirmed that 'cultural traditions in India are indissolubly plural and often conflicting,' and his poetry?in its texture and subject matter?embodies this complex intercultural mingling within India and across much of the contemporary world. His poems reflect the influence of modern English-language poets, such as
W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Wallace Stevens, while also
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ELEMENTS OF COMPOSITION / 257 9
drawing on the vivid and structural use of metaphor, the flowing imagery and syntax, the spare diction and paradoxes of ancient and medieval poetry of south India. A poem such as the wittily entitled 'Elements of Composition' recalls a traditional Indian vision of identity as embedded in endlessly fluid, concentrically arranged contexts at the same time that it suggests a postmodern vision of the self as decentered, composite, and provisional. 'India does not have one past,' Ramanujan emphasized, 'but many pasts,' and the same is true of the self whose multiple pasts he composes and decomposes in his poetry.
Self-Portrait
I resemble everyone but myself, and sometimes see in shop-windows,
despite the well-known laws
5 of optics, the portrait of a stranger, date unknown, often signed in a corner by my father.
1966
Elements of Composition
Composed as I am, like others, of elements on certain well-known lists, father's seed and mother's egg
gathering earth, air, fire, mostly 5 water, into a mulberry mass, moulding calcium,
carbon, even gold, magnesium and such, into a chattering self tangled in love and work,
io scary dreams, capable of eyes that can see, only by moving constantly, the constancy of things
like Stonehenge or cherry trees;
add uncle's eleven fingers 15 making shadow-plays of rajas' Indian kings or princes and cats, hissing,
becoming fingers again, the look of panic on sister's face an hour before
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258 0 / A. K. RAMANUJAN
20 her wedding, a dated newspaper map of a place one has never seen, maybe no longer there 25after the riots, downtown Nairobi,0that a friend carried in his passport as others would capital of Kenya
a woman's picture in their wallets;
add the lepers of Madurai,0 city in south India male, female, married, with children,
30 lion faces, crabs for claws, clotted on their shadows under the stone-eyed
goddesses of dance, mere pillars, moving as nothing on earth 35 can move?
