Table of Contents

Proloog 1
Rearrival 7
The Dream of the Road 17
Doppler Shift 21
Folding Screen 29
Twin Soldiers 31
The Prisoner 32
Elegy for the Gesture 33
The Water Archives 35
helena | Lena 43
Lontara Translation 111
Sources 113
Notes 115
Acknowledgments 119

About the Author

Henk Rossouw teaches at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. His poems have appeared in The Paris Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Boston Review, and other publications.

Reviews

In Xamissa, Henk Rossouw writes the membranes that thrive between the hyper-real of the culturally residual and the liminally sensed real of the culturally emergent. His artistic vision isn't borne out of the tyranny of spontaneous epiphany, but rather is carefully fleshed out through a constructivist process of cultural excavation. Writ large are luminous alter-selves from South Africa's mist-covered past that get choreographed into what Aime Cesaire once called 'a rendezvous of victory.' Nimbly threading History's objects ('nation', 'city', 'self', 'peoples'), Rossouw guides us into and out of Imperium's capture zones. The result is a lived-life global poetics where the harmonic modulation from nationalist myth making to a newly invigorated drive for liberationist re-definition of 'citizenship', makes for a dazzling music of our time.---Rodrigo Toscano

Voices in the singular and plural compel Henk Rossouw's Xamissa with such 'ecstatic stride' as to match the intensity of human spectacle advancing the procession of Cape Town's history. The collective effect of alternating scenes and incantations reflect an ethical imperative of uncertainty--destabilizing shifts of mood and matter; of the external and internal viewpoint. With formal ambition and acoustic scales of mind, Rossouw confronts a past haunted by racial brutality, even as it imagines an eventual social unity and the durational 'anyway' that poetry's historical imagination is able to contain.---Roberto Tejada

In the 1990s, the poet Sandile Dikeni led Monday night poetry readings at a place in the center of Cape Town called Café Camissa. Both poetry and the capacity to recover history's untold cruelties found a home in Xamissa, the name "crossed-out" beneath the one we know, 'Cape Town.' In Henk Rossouw's stunning collection of this name, Xamissa, crossed-out histories refuse their erasure, spill their liquid meaning, and reclaim the name that means 'place of sweet waters.' Eddying, disorienting, unforgotten, ceaselessly coursing, the history that the city wants to lose returns liquidly, wearing away, accreting, unburying. But because what you see when you look at this place is too easy at first, you might miss that its bright surfaces are like 'a beautiful wet bag over the mouth of.' Xamissa misses nothing.---Gabeba Baderoon, The Dream in the Next Body, A Hundred Silences, and The History of Intimacy