Tania van Schalkwyk
South Africa
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 >
Abyss
There is an abyssfrom my childhood.I remember ‘Trou Dangereux’where we would challenge each otherto 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 animalsand 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 legswe jumped.No one ever reached the bottom. No one died.But I rememberpissing warmth into the cool currentcurling between my toes,imagining fingers pulling,swimming as fast as I could back to the edge —and when scrambling up the precipice’s wallthe worst was feeling slick seaweed cloy my limbs, and the rocks’ broken barnacles clawed my skinin a vicious attempt to make me cryin front of my friends.Once back on dry land,the pulse of the ocean continued to drum in my earslike a huge shell swallowing me alive,but I laughed and smiled along with the othersknowing I had faced something deep down there,an inexplicable dangerous hole that would keep gaping at me on and on, like the tidesand the cycles of the moon,always therebelow every path I walk, waiting.-Tania van Schalkwyk:Hyphen, UCT Writers Series 2009NotesAbyssPoem inspired by an article in the Argus, particularly this extract:Deepest seabed unveils its secretsA 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, 2005Trou Dangereux: Dangerous HoleSound mixing and Music: Pete O'Donoghue
