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Tania van Schalkwyk

Tania van Schalkwyk
South Africa

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Tania van Schalkwyk Dive under waves with this German-French-Mauritian-South African poet whose voice and metaphors are deliciously haunting.

BIOGRAPHY

Tania van Schalkwyk is the hybrid of a Hamburg sailor and a Mauritian artist, born in Africa, raised... More >

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Abyss

There is an abyss
from my childhood.

I remember 
‘Trou Dangereux’
where we would 
challenge each other
to jump. 

Close to the shore,
only twenty or more steps 
past a ridge of volcanic rock,
there it lay,

swimming in tales of dead people and animals
and a monster sucking you into a bottomless pit.
The sea was murky there — a sick grey-green colour. 
We stood on black rock, salt-encrusted, sun-hot sacrifices,
hearts beating like captured birds’ wings,
and with shaking legs
we jumped.

No one ever reached the bottom. No one died.

But I remember
pissing warmth into the cool current
curling between my toes,
imagining fingers pulling,
swimming as fast as I could 
back to the edge —

and when scrambling up the precipice’s wall
the worst was feeling slick seaweed cloy my limbs, 
and the rocks’ broken barnacles clawed my skin
in a vicious attempt to make me cry
in front of my friends.

Once back on dry land,
the pulse of the ocean continued to drum in my ears
like a huge shell swallowing me alive,
but I laughed and smiled along with the others
knowing I had faced something deep down there,
an inexplicable dangerous hole 
that would keep gaping at me 

on and on, like the tides
and the cycles of the moon,
always there
below every path I walk, waiting.
-Tania van Schalkwyk:Hyphen, UCT Writers Series 2009

Notes

Abyss

Poem inspired by an article in the Argus, particularly this extract:

Deepest seabed unveils its secrets
A team of Japanese and British marine biologists found that delicate, soft-walled creatures dominate the microbial life forms that inhabit the sediment at the bottom of a deepwater trench in the Pacific Ocean. The trench, called Challenger Deep, lies 643 km off the Marianas Island in the South Pacific. The trench is 11.2 km below the sea surface at its deepest point and would comfortably submerge Mount Everest in a 1.6 km-deep layer of water.  
? Steve Connor: Weekend Argus 5th February, 2005

Trou Dangereux: Dangerous Hole

Sound mixing and Music: Pete O'Donoghue

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