Rustum Kozain (South Africa)

RUSTUM KOZAIN was born, raised and schooled in Paarl. He attended the University of Cape Town, majoring in English Literature. Following his M.A., he spent ten months (1994-1995) in the USA on a Fulbright scholarship. He returned to UCT and eventually took a full-time position as lecturer in the Department of English in 1998, where he taught literary and film studies. In 2004, he left UCT and now works as a freelance writer and editor.

Rustum’s poetry has appeared widely in journals and magazines both locally and abroad, and has been awarded with the Philip Stein Poetry Award (New Contrast, 1997) and a Thomas Pringle Award (2004).

His debut collection, This Carting Life, was published in 2005 (Kwela/Snailpress) and received the Ingrid Jonker Poetry Prize. “The collection…,” Pumla Dineo Gquola writes in Chimurenga: “…explores the textures and ruptures of connections: forced, chosen, and sometimes elusive. It delves into the haunting movements of exile, slavery, wine-streams, language and beauty – all the time the difficult business of beauty. These concerns reverberate across the sections, times and geographies of Kozain’s poetry. Here, Rustum Kozain is able to turn his eye and voice to entire lifetimes in textured precision that never veers towards the glibly palatable sound byte. This Carting Life is the kind of profoundly political and exquisite poetry you want to read again and again.”

Rustum also publishes the occasional review, essay and short fiction. During the late 1990s, he published some food journalism, for which he received a runner-up Mondi Award.He has recently compiled two high school anthologies (short fiction and poetry) forthcoming from Oxford University Press Southern Africa. Other projects include English translations of selected poetry of N.P. Van Wyk Louw and a book of autobiographical essays.

“He has a distinct and distinctive voice that I would characterise as elegiac and world-weary, injured but wanting to bless. It is the voice of someone who finds that in poetry he has half a chance of recovering what is loved and lost, and of recovering what it feels like to love, when that, itself, seems what is lost.” PR Anderson, Litnet

Stars of Stone

Today the stones I know will nick
our skulls, then knock our souls
from us. It is so. For under stars
that are but burning stone,
we held each other. Named for light,
Nurbibi clung to me, her back
against the flat roof of my house
warding off earth, hanging
under heaven. Face-down,
I gripped her shoulders, smelled
the stone-roof through the rug.
Nurbibi may have stared
over my shoulder at the stars,
those burning bits of far-off stone.

And she may have seen four men's eyes
hanging above us in their own,
unmoving flame. Eyes of stone,
heads shrouded in swathes
of scripture. So I, Turyalai,
am bound. And on my knees.
And Nurbibi, in whose loins I sought
some God, is now almost at one
with earth, buried to her waist
next to me. We wait
for the seekers of God
and their ceremony of the stone.
Men we do not know will come
and let stone speak, first in whispers

then in what they must believe
a chattering of angels
when the crowd erupts and rocks arc
but in parabolas far short
of reaching God, that must return
to earth. Men who do not know us.
Men who cannot know
that even as we wronged my wife,
in union we created God. In come-cries
caught in the throat, we made Him.
And made Him ours, gave Him some voice
even as He was in the still of night
as He is now, inchoate
before the hard and burning stars.

Turyalai and Nurbibi were accused of adultery and stoned to death by the Taliban in November 1996.

from This Carting Life (Kwela/Snailpress, 2005)