Chères oubliées

Antje Krog (1952 – ) est une poétesse et journaliste sud-africaine qui écrit en afrikaans et en anglais. Elle publie à l’âge de 17 ans son premier recueil de poèmes, « La Fille de Jephté ». Son oeuvre la plus connue est « La douleur des mots », chronique de la Commission vérité et réconciliation sur l’Apartheid présidée par Desmond Tutu.

En 1970, en plein Apartheid, elle scandalise la communauté afrikaner et attire l’attention de tout le pays avec son poème « Mon beau pays »

Voyez, je me fais un pays (…) Où Noirs et Blancs, main dans la main
apporteront amour et paix, dans mon beau pays

Voici trois de ses poèmes en anglais, « What the stars say », African love song » et « Since we »

What the stars say (extrait)

the stars take your heart
because the stars aren’t the least bit hungry for you!
the stars exchange your heart for the heart of a star
the stars take your heart and feed you the heart of a star
then you’ll never be hungry again

because the stars say: ‘Tsau! Tsau!’
and the bushmen say the stars curse the springbok’s eyes
the stars say: ‘Tsau!’ they say: ‘Tsau! Tsau!’
they curse the springbok’s eyes
I grew up listening to the stars
the stars say: ‘Tsau! Tsau!’

it’s always summer when you hear the stars saying Tsau

African love song

neither the moist intimacy of your eyelids fair as fennel
nor the violence of your body withholding behind sheets
nor what comes to me as your life
will have so much slender mercy for me
as to see you sleeping

perhaps I see you sometimes
for the first time

you with your chest of guava and grape
your hands cool as spoons
your haughty griefs stain every corner blue

we will endure with each other

even if the sun culls the rooftops
even if the state cooks clichés
we will fill our hearts with colour
and the fireworks of finches
even if my eyes ride a rag to the horizon
even if the moon comes bareback
even if the mountain forms a conspiracy against the night

we will persist with each other
sometimes I see you for the first time

Since we

since we started walking
this road the irises
finished blooming the still
abandoned eyeballs of
the light blue ones the plush
folded bats of the purple row since

we started this road the
grass now gasps away seed
the buttercups have dropped
their leaves like nail clippings
the camelia’s bathrobe
among the cedars withered from the

branches since we started
the road the tough pony-
tails of the wisteria
fell in disrepute the
banksia waterfall
finished her fatal plunge since we have

started walking this road
the swallows came back we
can smell the jasmine from
its jugular the snow
melted from the mountains
since we started a man tumbled back-

wards into all this air
what we breathe is the air
of whole this world the sky
overwhelmed in writings
of grief at dusk we do
become dark of tongue as we translate

disintegration our
ankles reek mortal but
god how strong our thighs have
become since we walked this
road how fierce how savage
our filigree as the heart bangs in terror