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Tongues Untied (Marlon Riggs, 1989)

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darryldorzelma

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Xzavier Zulu, August 2021.

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cape town, south africa | part eleven via yoliswa mqoco

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https://instagram.com/quarterback.kennedy

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smile through the pain🙃

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Stephen Hickman’s cover for H. Rider Haggard’s “Nada the Lily.” H. Rider Haggard spoke the Zulu language fluently and wrote a history of the Zulu in their own language. 

Though he is better known today for his fantasy romances, Haggard got public attention initially because of late 19th Century classicist scholar Stephen Lang, who argued that Ancient Greek poems were utterly incomprehensible to the rational modern mind, and could best be related to the poetry of warlike “primitive” peoples of today, like the Zulu, which often contain unreal, dreamlike, or fantastical things like encounters with ghosts who give warnings before key battles, dreams that give omens, one eyed sorcerers who can change shape, skins that command wolves, and miraculous births attended by animals and rainbows.

Since Haggard wrote the first true fantasy romance novels as we would understand them, She and Saga of Eric Brighteyes in the 1880s, it can be argued that we owe the existence of the fantasy genre as we know it to his Zulu books and their championing by Stephen Lang. 

Haggard never ceases to astonish me. At first glance, he looked like the ultimate imperialist, a commonplace, orthodox, jam-and-toast Englishman. Hell, there are author pictures he literally wears (good gosh!) a pith helmet and monocle. But deep down, like so many of us, he had a hidden being or true self: though he’d probably deny it as a good Englishman of his era would, he had the heart of a wildman or savage, mixed with an obsession with Eastern Mysticism. His stories involved people taking hallucinogenic drugs to experience their past lives in the stone age or Ancient Egypt. 

There were dozens of men in the generation after Robert Louis Stephenson and Treasure Island who were inspired to write “adventure books for boys,” but Haggard’s sense of the unreal and fantastic, the dreamlike and psychological (he was, after all, both Tolkien and Sigmund Freud’s favorite novelist) shows him as the point that the fantasy novel broke off from the adventure novel. 

All of us have a Hidden Self, deep down, that transcends time and place. What’s yours?

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source

Haverst on Instagram

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Black drag magic – portrait of drag artist and activist Belinda Qaqamba Ka-Fassie, Cape Flats, South Africa, Lee-Ann Olwage, 2019