“It was the slave that actually pushed the sea back”

An experimental analysis of a previously-incarcerated group's walking history tour to the Castle of Good Hope through found poetry and sonic sampling

Abstract

The audio and accompanying “found poem” text provided come from a workshop series conducted with a group of previously-incarcerated men in which Cape Town’s history was critically engaged with to explore enduring legacies of captivity and racialization. Specifically, they derive from a recorded walking history tour that took place from Church Square through the Castle of Good Hope under the facilitation of Social History Educator at the Iziko Slave Lodge Museum, Najumoeniesa “Nadjwa” Damon. This experimental project begins by poetically rendering the two-hour recorded tour into a transcribed ‘found poetry,’ by which the researcher brings out the already-existing poems woven into transcripts as a way to “evocatively explore and convey some of the essences, experiences, and emotions of the… storied lives” (Wells 2004: 8). To conduct the found poetry technique, the project takes inspiration from Douglas Kearney’s ‘performative typography,’ an approach influenced by graffiti’s visual tactics as well as hip hop’s sonic aesthetics and production techniques to create visual layouts that forefront nuanced sonic experiences to written poetry (Kearney 2015). Kearney’s poetry not only takes on visually provocative approaches that are as musical as they are typographical but is often performed using particular techniques akin to sampling and remixing. Thus, the accompanying text, “No Comparison / Just So Small” approaches the found poem analysis through a kind of a sonic sampling that is then captured in the four-minute audio recording. The poem specifically takes shape as a two-pager, each page respectively reflecting discussions that take place by Church Square and within the Castle. Together, the audio and text amplify moments from discussions during the tour that highlight different ways the group grappled with the history and its resonances to their lived experiences.