December 21st, 2012
— Jacques Coetzee
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TODAY THERE IS NO WIND
Today there is no wind
The sky is full of blue
And I am breathing you
Today there is no wind
The light breaks open like a prayer
The hills are floating in the sky
Desert water everywhere
Today there is no wind
A gemsbok walks across the sky
This insubstantial landscape
A mirage in my eye
I have an image of this silence
Printed in my brain
All the bone and beauty of it
To take me home again
Take me home again
Home again
Today there is no wind
The sky is full of blue
And I am breathing you
I am breathing you
I am breathing you
TODAY THERE IS NO WIND
I wrote this lyric for someone I love.
Standing alone in clean desert air, no wind, space reaching out all around me, the sky an impossible blue, the hills floating in the sky and mirage water all around: and no sound: no sound at all – feels like I am standing in a place of almost biblical revelation. It is no wonder the desert has been a place of vision.
December 13th, 2012
— Jacques Coetzee
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GENOCIDE
Naked Herero men
Hanged from a tree
Walking skeletons
In the desert sand
Women cleaning skulls
Erasing faces with shards of glass
Skulls in little boxes shipped
To a foreign land
Poisoned wells in the desert
Men in chains
Holy fires extinguished
Cattle seized for settler’s land
Images of evil
Printed in my brain
And somewhere my complicity
Blood upon my hands
GENOCIDE
My daughter Jo Ractliffe had just returned from her third visit to Angola to photograph that landscape devastated by a lengthy war. I told her a little about the feeling of ‘absence’ in so much of the land, and she advised me to read up on the Herero Genocide.
Our lament is for the Herero nation; for the almost total extermination of their people in the massacre at Waterberg, August 1904, by the German army under the instruction of General Lothar von Trotha, and for those remaining men, women and children, for their suffering and subsequent death from exhaustion in the work camps: and for all the atrocities that were visited upon them during that time.
This is for the descendants of those few ancestors who managed to survive, some, unbelievable as it sounds, by crossing on foot, the arid desert of Omaheke (the Kalahari Desert) and into what was then the British Territory of Bechuanaland. It is reported that the Missionaries couldn’t believe their eyes when they saw these ‘skeletons’ walking out of the desert.
With an extraordinary synchronicity, we finished mixing the song the day before the first twenty of three hundred Herero skulls taken to Germany, were returned; a day when all over the land the Holy Fires were lit for the ‘returning Ancestors’.
- Barbara Fairhead
December 7th, 2012
— Jacques Coetzee
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DEAD MEN WALKING
Dead men walking
Diamonds in their eyes
A crouching skeleton
An unmarked grave
Long forgotten men
A rattle of bones
Dying in the desert
For a pocket of stones
Dead men walking
Diamonds in their eyes
Dredging the backwash
Of an empty dream
Brave men and fools
A rattle of bones
A heavy price to pay
For a pocket of stones
Grinning skulls of dead men
Diamonds in their eyes
White skulls staring
At the sky
Dead men walking
Between the desert and the sea
A human stutter
In an unforgiving land
Empty footprints
Taken by the wind
A rattle of bones
On the sand
Grinning skulls of dead men
Diamonds in their eyes
White skulls staring
At the sky
DEAD MEN WALKING
The belief that untold wealth in the form of diamonds lies in the Skeleton Coast, and there for the taking, has drawn many a legal and illegal diamond prospector to a slow and thirsty death. The many unmarked graves and skeletons of men testify to this. Those who obtained permission soon found that the logistics of operating a mining venture in such a hostile environment made the work too costly and they abandoned their mines.
Maybe it is because I have picked up so many bones and skulls of birds and seals and small buck in my beachcombing rambles along West Coast that I have such a clear image of these bleaching skulls with diamonds in their deep eye sockets – staring at the sky.