Firstly, let me welcome Amazon literary searchers to my home warehouse site. My assumption is that you are here because you are part of the small slice of readers who enjoy poetry, or, that you represent the slightly larger slice of readers who are intrigued at the idea of a ‘blood and guts’ tale of murder, intrigue, lust and looting; being presented in a poetic, allegoric: and deeply dekonstrukted format.
Secondly, a point I have made before. I do not “choose” to write poetry… Poetry chooses me and has done for more than fifty years… I don’t know why. It simply arrives randomly and demands to be noted down… At first during a childhood in which I hid from reality through performance poetry; and champion competitive storytelling: before I ever read any of the books I list below… Well, excluding James Joyce and Jack Kerouac: both read when i was 14.
I have for the moment, chosen four collections for your consideration….
Upfront then, let me say that I am writing mainly for your entertainment… and hopefully to tease your imagination.
Three parts of my ‘Azanian Quartet’ are available for you to access with ease. The first two parts are what I have described above: simple old style crime, blood n guts tales of murder, intrigue, looting, lust and retribution, delivered from, and about a place, where these activities are [and always have been] a normal way of life.
The Buffalo Hunters is a single issue story.
The longer, ‘Ashanti Raider’ has been presented as seven episodes in a serialised form.
They are also presented in an allegorical format that strips away many cherished features of narrative prose… while still retaining all the ingredients of a gripping tale.
Part Three [online on this site for 12 years now, as a podcast cyber serial], and Part Four [an upcoming attraction] peep into a possible background and future.
The settings are [in part each] after the climate changes that are now operating in full force: have had their unpredictable: but nonetheless inevitable way. And while they involve all the above features: I add to them the dimensions one expects, in what I call “Survival Sci-Fi”.
Because at heart I am a poet; who was formally, in professional, pre-retirement life, a semi reluctant educator in the varied fields of applied economics, that I blended with history; all names and places are wrapped in metaphor.
This is mainly because when disaster strikes, our reflexive human instinct is to apportion blame … And one can hardly blame the Planet on which we live; when it doesn’t enjoy the dumber aspects of what we do: to enjoy the pleasures of life… and jealously guard our advantages.
And then of course my use of metaphor is due to habit….
The first half century of my life was lived in a vicious, incompetent and thoroughly nasty, fascist police State… that eventually imploded.
The experience of speaking out clearly in such an environment, was one that brought routine misery in its wake. This blog would be almost endless were I to elucidate on that.
So one developed the habit of hiding one’s thoughts and messages, as much as possible: and old habits die hard, as they say.
So this is the only place where you will meet me. I eschew social media. I do this, firstly, because I have come to realise that it is; in its currently monetised form, a more sophisticated version of 19th and 20th century ‘junk mail’: mediums, with which I had considerable professional familiarity.
Secondly I feel that, when [social media] platforms can simply, at a flick of a switch, “cancel” and de-platform , for instance, the President of the world’s biggest current Empire, someone with 75 million followers… then there is no point in building readership in somebody else’s turf, over which I have pretty zero control. At 75 years, I have no time to be, nor interest in: being ‘cancelled’.
So welcome to my world. Take a chance on what a poet who has justifiable reasons for describing himself as a Prekarian poet writes; and feel free to express your view in the manner Amazon gives you….
It is enough for me that I have written. I have no control over the outcome
To date no one has ever told me they dislike what I write, even though some have threatened me with death for saying things they didn’t want to hear… Presumably because the words echoed truths they preferred to keep hidden.
Buy, read, enjoy.
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PS: I note from my perusing of other’s works, that it is fashionable to list those writers whose work has had an influence on them.
Since I am 75 and wake up each day amazed that I am still here. I am putting as much of my life’s work up on Amazon as I can, while I am still around to do it. To rephrase what John Lennon famously said: “Life was what happened while one was fooling around with other plans”. I have collected some 10,000 plus books in my personal library over a lifetime: and all have had something that I took from them. I shall not, however, list them all….
I will simply name the most significant authors, for this purpose here, in the order in which I thought about them. There are many, many others who are not perhaps relevant here; but have been important.
Some [below] impacted on my philosophy; while others impacted on how I chose to write stories… which I discovered to be more difficult, than simply telling them for competitions, or to sell things.
Friedrich Nietzsche… Who taught us to take control of our own lives. [My collection ‘Rehearsing Nietzsche’ was based on a year playing the role of that great philosopher for the International Nietzsche Convention in 2000 CE.]. Others:
Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Kurt Vonnegut, Alfred Bester, Frank Herbert, Camille Paglia. Hannah Arendt.
Thomas Stearns Eliot, Robert Frost, John Keats, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. William Shakespeare… [My role as Mark Anthony, for instance, was recorded for a Canadian Television program in 1978… And my performance as Tybalt,[1976] caused a stir; mostly when my epee flew from my hand, on ‘dying’, and stuck into the floor between the feet of a Rebel Prime Minister of a Rebel country, seated in the front row of the theatre… So beginning an unpopularity that contributed to my Shona name: Jakari.
Later my Sundown Theatre Company’s production of a politically ‘correct’ version of Othello; with “first time in Afrika” appropriately colour coded principal players: won best production and best actor for 1978, and further affirmed my unpopularity with the Prime Minister.].
Continuing….
Jack Kerouac [Hanif Kureishi advised that Kerouac should never be read by anyone over 30… I read The Dharma Bums at 14… and later understood Kureishi’s admonition. Too late though. The damage had been done.].
James Joyce, Gunter Grass, Stieg Larson [and his various successors] Henry Miller, Elmore Leonard, Peter Hoeg, Umberto Eco, Carl Hiaasen, Jean Paul Sartre, Albert Camus.
Tom Stoppard [Best actor award, me: playing Aston in “The Caretaker”] Andrea Dworkin, Richard Dawkins.
Among many writers from Afrika: JM Coetzee, Herman Charles Bosman, Charles Van Onselen, Breyten Breytenbach, N.P. Van Wyk Louw, Ingrid Jonker [in whose honour I named ‘The Jonker Memorandum’a Podcast cyber serial on this NicholasJakari website since 2010], Athol Fugard, Credo Mutwa, Wole Soyinka
[I also produced and directed Soyinka’s ‘Kongi’s Harvest’ in a theatrical performance in 1979. The production contributed to my unpopularity with an incoming and upcoming “Kongi”… type Diktator: Robert [Bob the Roz] Mugabe. And Jakari was born.
Kongi was the last overtly political play to be produced in Zimbabwe for more than 35 years.
As I said I have more than 10,000 books in my library and have read many more than that.
Enjoy my work, as I have enjoyed and learned from others.
Cheers.