Book Descriptions:

Xamissa sounds out Cape Town in a joyful elegy for the just city in the dream state, the city of alternate takes, which could have but has not come to be yet. A long poem, Xamissa adapts the mythical name for the springs and streams running from Table Mountain to the sea, under the city itself, since before the colonial Dutch ships came--the X of the title stands for the multiple ways in the languages of the Cape, past and present, the reader may pronounce the first consonant. A work of documentary poetics that investigates the cost of whiteness in South Africa, Xamissa code-switches at times into lontara, the subversive Indonesian script that undercuts the prevalence of Dutch in the colonial archive. Much of Xamissa depends upon a 1727 archival record, which suggests that a figure named Lena van de Caab, without precedent in her lifetime, marooned from the urban plantation of the Dutch East India Company to join a city of her making in the mountains beyond Cape Town and that 14 enslaved women and men, soon after, echoed her political action. Through serial questions around the ethics of its address, Xamissa probes the interrelation of language, sociality, and resistance, in its bid to interrogate the archive as a draft of the city's future.




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