A Chapter in South African Verse: Interview with Jeremy Cronin

Abstract

Jeremy Cronin, a South African poet and politician who spent years in prison and exile, is presently a member of parliament and the deputy general secretary of the South African Communist Party. The interview probes into his poetics and political orientation. Cronin views his prison poems as self-survival strategy, testament to the realities of incarceration, and an attempt to forge a voice of resistance and solidarity in opposition to apartheid and his own white South African upbringing. Cronin sees capitalism as barbaric progress, the need to wean the communist tradition from its own totalitarian habits, and globalization as turning the world into a market. Poetry for him offers the possibility of challenging leftist dogmatism through irony and its ability to evoke the local and the rooted against the standardization of globalization controlled by a few corporations. The interview ends with three exemplary poems of Cronin. Introduction Amnesia classifies Third World countries as 'developing' (structurally adjusted amnesia) ... Jeremy Cronin. "Even the Dead." Even the Dead: Poems, Parables and a Jeremiad. 1997 The report-backs were straightforward: we were all behind schedule and over budget. I might add that we were almost past caring. It seemed impossible that we'd be finished in time for the official opening. The builders were still knocking down walls left, right and centre, and establishing piles of rubble in every room. Ivan Vladislavic. "The WHITES ONLY Bench." Propaganda by Monuments. 1996 Jeremy Cronin was born in South Africa in 1949 and grew up in that country. He spent a year studying in Paris in 1972-73, and lectured in philosophy at the University of Cape Town on his return to South Africa, only to serve 7 years imprisoned--from 1976 to 1983--in Pretoria's Maximum Security prison, for "seventeen acts of terrorism." In other words, "seventeen underground SACP/ANC pamphlets and newsletters, distributed between 1973 and 1976" warranted the incarceration. But the pamphlets in prison became poems. And the prisoner has gone on, after continued activism on his release from prison in the United Democratic Front (UDF) and another three years in exile in London, to spend now still another kind of time---as the Deputy General Secretary of the South African Communist Party (SACP), and serves currently as an ANC MP, with a portfolio in Transport. Cronin's writing persists in embracing not just poems, however, but polemic as well, for he also writes regularly--as circumstances and conditions enjoin--for, inter alia, the SACP publications The African Communist and Umsebenzi, which he edits, as well as political editorials for such South African newspapers as the Mail and Guardian and Business Day and literary reviews for The Sunday Independent. Pamphlets and poems, that is to say, continue to animate Cronin's contributions to the verse-making and critical writing of the South African story. But, as the museum worker describes the situation in Ivan Vladislavic's short story, "The WHITES ONLY Bench," "The builders were still knocking down walls left, right and centre, and establishing piles of rubble in every room" (Vladislavic, 57). The story's project was to construct a museum to the past, to apartheid, so that, once housed, it would not be reconstructed--another kind of "structurally adjusted amnesia," perhaps, but as the committee learned when they convened to assess their progress, the institutional outcome was still pending: "The report-backs were straightforward: we were all behind schedule and over budget. I might add that we were almost past caring. It seemed impossible that we'd be finished in time for the official opening" (57). "Left, right and center": the walls were coming down, to be sure, and the prepositions scattered throughout the preceding sentence suggest the still indeterminate outlines of the new directions and compelling directives that would have yet to ground the eventual construction, and, along with their attachments to nominal substantives, are reminders of the commitments and omissions that render the construction a pending, indeed transitional, one: report-backs . …