Interview by Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike
Peter Midgley’s latest collection, let us not think of them as barbarians (NeWest Press, 2019), is a “sensual and intimate” exploration and reconfiguration of Namibia’s history, philosophy, and relationship to the present. It was a finalist for the 2020 Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry, and won third place in the Poetry Category at the 2019 Alcuin Society Awards for Excellence in Book Design in Canada.
Uchechukwu Umezurike: Congratulations again, Peter, on the publication of let us not think of them as barbarians. You portray genocide through the trope of memory. Why this subject?
Peter Midgley: Thank you, Uche. This little book has been good to me, as have my publishers, NeWest Press. It had a difficult birth, and I am thrilled to see how well it has been received.
Music and orality are key elements in this collection and have been overlooked in favour of the more topical story of genocide. Why memory? We––and by that I mean, those of us not immediately affected by genocide or war––rarely deal with these topics in the present tense. Think of Rwanda or the Holocaust. Think about Canada or Palestine. I want to use memory less to dissect what happened or why it did, than to use it to prevent future madness. It makes sense to process historical violence through memory. Let’s not forget, though, that I am not only talking about that one decisive moment; I am talking about belonging, about the intergenerational consequences of colonialism. We tend to remember traumatic events selectively, drawing attention primarily to events that affect Caucasians: here in Canada, we commemorate the Holodomor; we remember the World Wars and the Holocaust. In doing so, we forget how integral African and African-American troops were to the Allies’ eventual victory. Namibia’s genocide is forgotten, but it is significant: it was the first genocide of the twentieth century. Its methodologies bred the Holocaust; the fathers of Nazi commanders fought and governed in Namibia.
UU: How did you approach the process of writing this book?
PM: This was a hard book to write. It started as fragments during a trip to Namibia in 2010. It came to me in Afrikaans and in English and I built two texts, cross-translating and finding and expanding metaphors as I crossed linguistic borders. I did a lot of research into Namibian and personal history. I explored various oral traditions and listened to music—particularly musical forms that use overtone singing. I learned to listen. I grew enormously in writing this book, working through identity, coming to terms with diaspora. In the process, I found a second home in Canada after two decades of living here. In that sense, it was a very rewarding experience. But it was hard.
Much of the book was being written just as the report on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women was being finalized; as debates around appropriation grew; as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Canada was happening. So, as I dealt with history on another continent, I was also confronting similar issues in real time here. This book took a lot out of me, emotionally.
UU: The motif of stone recurs in your poetry. What drew you to this imagery?
PM: I grew up among stones. A landscape without stone is almost unimaginable. Here, stones became part of the metaphor of movement.
Stone has deep significance in parts of southern Africa: travellers can place stones on cairns dedicated to the ancestors; the civilizations of Great Zimbabwe, Mapungubwe, and Bakoni were built from stone; San artists used stone as their canvas. Stone lies at the heart of everything. Stone was inevitable, and I am so pleased that the designer, Natalie Olsen from Kisscut Design, managed to pull that metaphor through to the cover.
UU: Repetition, refrain, and parallelism characterize your poetry. You draw upon the griot tradition, I assume. Could you maybe just talk a little bit about this?
PM: I certainly do call on oral traditions, but not the griot. That is a tradition I know only from reading. I have a better grasp of izibongo, the tradition of oral praise poetry from southern Africa, and drew from my understanding of that tradition. Izibongo are not generally long narrative poems in the tradition of the griot.
One of the things I wanted to achieve was to present the inner conflicts of my main narrators, dragfoot and woman, on the page. I wanted to give a sense of a multiplicity of voices as they worked through their own fears and doubts. For that, I turned to the amaThembu tradition of umngqokolo, or overtone singing. The pattern of umngqokolo helped me find a way to do that in poetry.
UU: In the title poem, the speaker recounts the killing of the Herero or Nama. The triumphant tone is understated and clinical, almost bereft of feeling: “then we slit his throat.” Is that the point of the poem––to convey how the logic of brutality works?
PM: Those are in fact words spoken by a Damara soldier about the Nama-Damara wars. They reflect the cold brutality with which we relate acts of horror. The calmness, the matter-of-factness with which we often hear soldiers speak, is clinical; killing numbs us, takes away our humanity. I wanted to convey the progressive nature of violence—from cutting off an ear to slitting a throat in a few short phrases.
UU: The poem “shark island” reminds us of Europe’s history of eugenics, its human zoos, and its fetish for the Other. Why was it necessary to use German in the poem?
PM: Namibia was a German colony. David Olusoga has written a devastating book, The Kaiser’s Holocaust, in which he draws a through line from the German colonial exploits in Namibia to Nazi Germany. In this poem, I wanted to make that line explicit. After independence, Peter Katjavivi, then ambassador to Germany, heard about skulls being kept in Berlin. This started a journey of repatriation.
For so many years we have looked to Germany as a country that has come to terms with its past, much like my own people, the Afrikaners, have had to come to terms with their past. As I was finishing up the collection, I could see signs of neo-Nazi revival around the world. Those impulses are in our midst, and we need to fight them. It is only in the past few weeks before this interview that the Germans succumbed to sustained pressure from BLM activists and changed the name of “Mohrenstraße” to Anton Wilhelm Amo Straße, in honour of the philosopher. Just recently, a doctor here in Canada hung a noose on a colleague’s door. Bringing German into this poem brings such legacies into the present.
UU: In the final poem, “after the dust settles,” you write: “at the shebeen, a woman stands / at the shebeen, a woman falls / freedom writes herself in blood / flint as blood.” The stanza evokes, for me, the role women play in cultural memory and nationalism. Why close the collection with this particular imagery?
PM: In so many ways, that is true. In South Africa, there was a protest song in which we sang, “Wathint’ abafazi, whatint’ imbokodo” (you strike the women, you strike the rock). You’d asked earlier about stones—well, here’s another stone. Women as rocks, women as anchors. So often, it is women who stay behind to face the violence while men fight. Think of Winnie Mandela. However conflicted people might be about her legacy, no one can deny that she was a rock of the struggle. In Namibia, there are women who never gained the public status that she did, women like Priskilla Tuhadeleni. Then there are the strong women in my own life: my mother and my aunts; my sister; my wife; my daughters; my nieces. It seemed fitting that a story that starts with a woman being abandoned on the shores of the country should end with a woman standing on the doorstep of a shebeen, preparing to fight.
Peter Midgley is a Namibian Canadian author of eight books and three plays, already performed though unpublished. A writer, editor, and translator living in Edmonton, Midgley is festival director, STARFest, a St. Albert Readers Festival. His latest poetry book, let us not think of them as barbarians, was published by NeWest Press, and was a finalist for the 2020 Stephen G. Stephansson Award for Poetry.
Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike is a PhD Candidate and Vanier Scholar in the department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. An alumnus of the International Writers’ Program (USA), he has been a resident writer in India, Switzerland, and Italy. Uche has won national and international awards for his poetry and prose and he is a co-editor of Wreaths for Wayfarers, an anthology of poems. His children’s book Wish Maker is forthcoming from Masobe Books, Nigeria in fall 2021.