Writers: Mkhululi Mabusela & Mbe Mbhele | Artwork: Slovo Mamphaga
We are not going to rush it, but that does not dismiss the fact that we are going to speak the truth. Instead of asking what the truth is, perhaps we should ask who speaks the truth? That might be much more important… Maybe it could lead us somewhere… To a place where we listen to Imvemnyama’s song, Sawa Street… What does it ask and what does it respond to?
This particular song seems to fall under what we would distinguish in Kantian terms, between conceptuality and non-conceptuality, it falls under the idea of conceptuality in so far as there are lyrics and a narrative that is being constructed.
What we get with Sawa Street is a witty analysis of black life, the precariousness of it all, the unthought that remains in the margins of all conceptions. We also get a detailed analysis of how black life unravels itself and how we suffer without relief. Lamenting what the people are given to eat, Imvemnyama exclaims “andiyithandi lent’ endiyityayo, ngob’ isour (sawa) lent’ endiyityayo,” explicating the unsavory ways of living that black people are subjected to.
Lent’ isour (sawa), lent’ isour (sawa), lent’ injani? This we would argue encapsulates the theme of the song.
This music falls under what we would call, following the French non-philosopher Francois Lauerelle, non-standard aesthetics in so far as what we experience when listening to the song, we have a peculiar reception of it.
Imvemnyama constructs a narrative of a real or better yet existing street called Sauer Street but he inverts this conception of the place and adds another element into it, it’s a play between sourness and the street, Sawa). He retells a story of boys/ young men being sent to fetch stolen cattle, but they return without them because they were seen playing along the road, and returned only with spoiled milk; and as such the song proceeds in that fashion.
Imvemnyama tries to attend to the inexplicable or better yet the unthought of black life, what he attends to is the subterranean life of blackness, it is not bound to any normative ways of conducting itself, what we would ordinarily call a queer way of living. In this, Imvemnyama’s register, Sawa Street encapsulates this black non-standard queer way of living. Eating sour food under precarious conditions encapsulates the entirety of black life.
The song is a culmination of all the revolutionary songs or better yet, all the black songs that attend to the wounds of black people, that we have been listening to. Many have done it, and so does Imvemnyama but he also gives us so much more than we expect. To say he is surprising would be an understatement. He is aware that he is a collage of all black sounds. He exists in the break, and as Fred Moten following Edouard Glissant would say, consents to not being a single being. The song dabbles with the conception of agency. But are black people agential beings that can attend to their needs? Can black people resist, and retain their stolen property (cattle)?
Sawa Street attends to all these sophisticated questions in a manner that is easily comprehensible but also weighty, Imvemnyama works through these questions easily but one can feel the heaviness of them. Sawa Street is a song of a decade, Imvemnyama has blessed us with something to reminisce with and over. Andiy’thandi lent’ endiyityayo.
