Xamissa by Henk Rossouw (review)

Henk Rossouw's debut poetry collection, Xamissa, published by Fordham University Press in 2018 as a part of their Poets Out Loud Series, represents a letter of complicated intimacy and affection to Rossouw's birth city, Cape Town, South Africa.

The title of the book stems from the word "Camissa," which Dutch colonists believed was the Khoe term for "place of sweet waters." The Dutch arrived in Cape Town in 1652 on behalf of the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC), or the Dutch East India Company, which was founded because of a government-directed merger of six small Dutch companies (voorcompagnieën). Rossouw stylizes the VOC as , the company's logo, which functions as a haunting visual vestige of colonialism throughout the book.

"Camissa," however, was a "linguistic error." Rossouw informs us in the introduction that "Colonists likely mistook the Khoe words for water, freshwater, to mean an actual place." Rossouw reassures us that Cape Town's "legendary springs and streams exist," and has himself waded and swam in them. The X in "Xamissa," according to Rossouw, "stands for … the intersecting languages of Cape Town past and present," and originates from the double album Dream State by jazz composer Kyle Shepherd, on which one of the tracks is named "Xamissa."

Following the "Proloog," which details the above information, Rossouw includes a copy of his South African birth certificate. Before the collection begins, we are witnesses to Rossouw's most bureaucratic form of identification, one that exposes his date of birth, gender, and race. It's a vulnerable gesture and might, under other circumstances, be read as sentimental, but Rossouw makes clear that his origins are intertwined in the socio-political histories of Cape Town.

Xamissa is divided into six more sections after the "Proloog," and this structure Rossouw has established befits the book. The beginning of the book introduces us to the author in the most exposed fashion and with each subsequent section, the poems become increasingly more entwined in archival research, concluding with the book's most profound statement on Cape Town's history and its future, "Helena | Lena |." This isn't to say that Xamissa becomes less personal as the book continues; on the contrary, even in the final section, Rossouw threads his own subjectivity into the narrative in such a way that he interrogates Cape Town's colonial past, its democratic present, and its future in conjunction with what it means to be an Afrikaner born in 1977, just before the election of Pieter Willem "P.W." Botha—an opponent of black majority rule and international communism—as Prime Minister.

As a result of these socio-political dimensions in Xamissa, the book doesn't serve so much as a counterpoint to the personal dimensions of Rossouw's life as they serve as a complement to these aspects of the book. For example, in the section "The Dream of the Road," Rossouw presents us with an intimate scene involving his father riding a "1300 c.c. six-cylinder" Kawasaki bike that Rossouw washed on Sundays and on which he rode pillion. Rossouw's father was a part of the "Kingdom Riders," a motorcycle gang rooted in the Christian faith. Rossouw and his father rode with Oom, or Uncle, Ibby, a "Coloured" who was forced to live segregated in a separate, residential development because of the Group Areas Act. Ibby's girlfriend, Jesse, from the rival motorcycle club Black Widows, would "dialect / [Henk's] father's name," turning "Eugene into Denie," which "sounds like genie," and Rossouw supplements this memory by asserting "In Afrikaans, anything / can happen." The moment is at once tender, nostalgic, and haunting, not in the least because we find out earlier in the poem that "Jesse died young" from a motorcycle accident. At the end of the poem, Rossouw describes a recurring scene from his childhood when he wrestled his father at home on the carpet. If he won, Rossouw would be hoisted up, reminding the poet of Jesse "in heaven, an upended bucket with a palace on top / ablaze like Caltex the refinery, my night light."

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