Written in the Sand 1
Written in the Sand: Namibia's Literary Voice
Namibia, like any newly liberated country, must (re)build its national literature out of its birthing. Many of the ideas and images of the former rule remain, and struggle rises at national, local and private levels. Pre-liberation writing tended to focus on the struggle for independence, and post-liberation writing also retells and amplifies what the country and the people have been through. While such protest literature, such as Kapache Victor's excellent "small beginning" (Dedication n.p.), On the Run, is important to the nation's literary formation, it is not until indigenous writers can go beyond the struggle for liberty that a broad national literature begins. As Njabulo S. Ndebele wrote in neighboring South Africa of his own struggle for liberty, do not crowd my mind with studied images of my past; let me feel it first. (75)
Liz McClain's Desert Detritus, a slim book-length prose poem does just this; it feels the country rather than studies it.
This is not to say that racial tension or other national issues are absent from her writing. Rather, the national issues are subsumed in the large allusive image of the Namib. What can profitably be read as a celebratory description of the desert yields deep roots into world poetry as well as metaphors of contemporary life in Namibia.

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McClain's use of the Namib to represent Namibia is similar to the landscape paintings in Barto Smit's "I Take Back My Country." When the narrator examines the art, he responds: "Like a sleeping animal, Silwane Nxumalo's work stirred and came to life before my eyes. All at once I realised: this is Africa -- rougher and far greater than the land I had known until now, throbbing with life under a scorching sun" (136). The same can be said for McClain's prose poem, which draws life and meaning from what first appears barren and dead.
Earlier in the century, T.S. Eliot wrote of a similar wasteland that he found teeming with hopeless life. While McClain's technique and attitude bear little resemblance to Eliot's, the apparent wasteland with which they begin connects them. The "loosened fragments" (31) to which McClain ambiguously refers late in the poem are the very fragments of modernism of which Eliot makes, or unmakes, sense. McClain's fragments, though, are more hopeful. The pieces are synergistic rather than chaotic. The shantih, a peace or contentment that transcends intellectual understanding, that is chanted at the end of Eliot's poem indicates McClain's starting point for Desert Detritus. McClain says "perfect peace" is "mirrored in the undulating dunes" (2). This shantih is much like the bell tolled by the British Romantic poets, emphasizing optimism born out of revolt and emotional intuition overthrowing rationalism. Likewise, the scientific background that McClain brings to the poem is overwhelmed by the poignantly Romantic treatment of the desert. Life, while admittedly a biological construct, "just happens" (13) in McClain's poem, more in the tradition of Aristotle than of
Leeuwenhoek.

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Much like The Wasteland, Desert Detritus comes to life not only in depiction but in allusion. Both poems take on a quality of scrutiny well characterized by Denise Levertov in her poem "Pleasures," where the persona of the poem claims:
I like to find what's not found at once, but lies within something of another nature, in repose, distinct. . . . (90)
McClain urges the reader, "Train your eye, think small, and the rewards are plenty" (15). A similar attitude can be found in Nigerian poet Gabriel Okara's
"One Night at Victoria Beach" where the persona sees "with eyes fixed hard / on what only hearts can see" (175). That seeing with the heart shown by Smit and
Levertov and Okara is what makes Desert Detritus far more that literary detritus.
The "[a]geless pebbles" of the poem's opening line, for example, might just as easily be the ageless people that she discusses later. And, the focus on night rather than day to begin the poem is in keeping with the rich culture of the people collectively called Bushmen that celebrate the night and the hope of renewal illustrated by the moon. From their oral tradition, Stephen Watson writes:
Moon, when new, you tell us that that which dies returns; your face returning says to me

Written in the Sand 4 that my face, dead, shall live. (7)
The nation of Namibia is metaphorically just such a moon, rising from the death and domination that have been its graveclothes to take on a new face, a face which McClain begins to show us.
"Those first people knew the desert ways" (25), McClain writes. They have left reminders of the past in the artifacts and physical marks that remain to be covered, uncovered, re-covered, and recovered. With the word too, she implies a comparison of those ageless ones and modern Namibians, asking, "had they too accumulated toxins in their souls and come in for the 'cure'?" (25). The healing of the desert can be as beneficial to today's war-worn people as it was to their forebears centuries before. She concludes the section with the assertion:
"Their eyes saw what we see today. Their dreams, like our own, floated freely on night highways" (25), tying together more forcibly the connection for modern
Namibians with the past. The desert binds the country together symbolically, as well as geographically and historically. An image transcending time, the wind of change "invigorates, charges the being, washes away old structured thoughts and creates new boundaries for others" (8). The ambiguity of McClain's wind here is important. Change brings different effects, depending on a person's viewpoint. The new independent Namibia will invigorate many of its citizens; for others, the comfort of the old structures is "washe[d] away" by the withdrawal of outside forces, leaving them with uncomfortable, even painful, "new boundaries."
One important image implicit in McClain's treatment of the Namib is that of adolescent awakening. The colonized were treated as adolescents, unable to

Written in the Sand 5 govern themselves, and with the removal of South African impositions, like an adolescent the Namibians must begin to test their own ability to rule themselves.
"[R]esearch always goes on -- in human living" (28), she writes. Research can be done chiefly in two ways, which correspond to the literary movements of
Neoclassicism and Romanticism. One either learns through the words of others or one learns through personal experience. The adolescent is bent toward the latter.
Not surprisingly, then, we find McClain's description of the desert sometimes to well up in near eroticism, like the sexual probings and experimentation often associated with adolescent culture shown, for example, by other Namibian writing, such as Janice Mumbangala's "A sad mistake" and Elna
Visser's "A mother's letter." What Dennis Brutus calls an "unarticulated simple lust" ("A simple lust is all my woe" 176) may be, as he describes in "Does the heart survive the death of love," as forceful as "the fierce insensate impulses / that drive me out in paroxysms of desire / -- insatiable" (168), or as complex as
Andrew Marvell's speaker in "To His Coy Mistress" urging the implied woman to
"roll all our Strength and all / Our sweetness up into one Ball" (24), or as simple as the "male and female / paper dolls . . . bang[ing] together / at the hips like chips of flint" in Sharon Olds's "I Go Back to May 1937."
The rising night opening McClain's poem brings us dunes that are
"sensuous . . . like the feel of a lover's skin" (2). The sensuous sandscape here is reminiscent of Edward Weston's and Ansel Adams's classic photographic studies of Mexico and the American Southwest. Nature emulates the human form

Written in the Sand 6 and inversely the human form can emulate the natural landscape. In poetry, such a depiction is similar to the image Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm creates in
"rainstorm in volcano":
. . . rain is a woman's fingers moving down
down
the expectant skin
of her lover the moon an eye half-closed in ecstasy.
McClain follows a long tradition of nature poetry that describes sensual experience in terms of nature. The dunes here provide "a place of safety and solace" (2), a place where anxiety often associated with tentative sexual experimentation can find peace. Springing from Marvell's poem, Diane
Ackerman provides a similar merging of nature with the erotic. Her poem "A Fine, a Private Place" uses marine imagery to depict and reinforce the natural and the sexual. The unnamed couple in the poem "made love / mask to mask" (195) while scuba diving -- octopus, abalone and anemone providing metaphor to their action. The peace associated with McClain's dunes shows in the contented place she of Ackerman's poem recalls as "that blue boudoir / pillow-soft" (198).
Likewise, the "vegetable love" of Marvell's speaker is portrayed by Wilma

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Stockenstrom's "Africa Love." Here the relationship of a man and woman is compared to Mozambique's island of Inhaca and its relation to the mainland. The poem's persona asks,
How long before I merge into your wide cashew-nut forests, before we fit into each other, your reed-overgrown arm around me, your brown body my body. (100)
Stockenstrom here implies the human presence in an extended metaphor which merges nature with human sexuality.
The nighttime setting for sexual encounter is ubiquitous. American Rita
Dove shows those first tentative sexual explorations "[i]n water-heavy nights behind grandmother's porch" ("Adolescence--I" 42) where secretive talk moves eventually to "[s]weat prickl[ing] behind [her] knees, the baby-breasts . . . alert"
("Adolescence--II 43) leading to sexual encounter. Lisa Combrinck's South
African poems claim with a more mature persona, "I came in the moonlight"
"slowly honing into the song of your soul" ("In the Moonlight" 269) and "My eyes are simply skewered slits / blinded by lust and celestial brightness" under Orion's belt "flog[ging] the bony sky" ("Ghazal" 268). Chile's Isabel Allende narrates
Hermelinda's more practiced exploits playing "toad's mouth" with the laborers while next door the superintendent and his wife "sat sipping a last cup of Ceylon tea before bed" (62).
Yet, McClain's sensual depiction differs from these forerunners and contemporaries in that she achieves it without the presence of people. It is the

Written in the Sand 8 sand that is sensual and undulating (2). It is nature that performs the quasi-erotic act: "Release all, and let the residue roam and swirl like detritus over the smooth, warm, sand. Let the wind sort and mix the mind husks. Rooted, we partake of this nightly ritual, the resonance of all things!" (2). The wind of the Namib appears rather male in this passage. It is the volitional force releasing its creative force on the "lover's skin" of the sand. Wind here is like the Greek pneuma, translated wind or spirit, as in John 3:8 -- "The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit" [emphasis added]
-- where context provides wind or Spirit from the same Greek word. It is the lifegiving element, similar in the Hebrew, the N e shamah of God, which raises Adam from the dust. And Job, in that classic ancient poem affirms, "O remember that my life is wind" (7:7). Here it is the Hebrew word ruach, which again means either wind or spirit, specifically "the air put in motion by divine breath" (Zodiates
1659). The wind is not only active, but it has been seen as life-giving from ancient times. It provides spiritual animation. McClain shows this later when the sand (11) and the fog (9) both rely on the wind for definition and movement, and still later where she affirms that the beetles are "living on what's brought in on the wings of the wind" (18).
At a more human level, we might see the wind as the male force in sexual contact with a traditionally female earth. One might readily think of the wind in terms of Dennis Brutus' "Someday" where the wind represents the pursuit of lechery

Written in the Sand 9 running through the runnels of the mind in a slow, exquisite and luxuriant play. (161)
Later McClain points out that after "the air is spent" the desert is "awash in a new glow" (8), a kind of post-coital female shantih.
But later the unpredictable wind, just as some males, can assault as well as comfort, can make contact for domination instead of union. The east wind of the poem, like some self-centered marauder, "uncoils a furnace of fast flowing heat! For days, stretching and pulling the life out of us and sucking at the core of what's left" (7). The wind, a different wind, becomes rapist instead of lover.
The correlation with Adrienne Rich's poem "Rape" is significant for
Namibian readers who have suffered under authorities meant to protect but who have been abusive and self-concerned. In Rich's poem, it is the policeman who is also "both prowler and father" (206) who revels voyeuristically in the recounting of the rape. The wind, in McClain's poem seems to find pleasure, or at best indifference, in the pain of others. The victim, to answer W.B. Yeats's question concerning Leda's rape, does not "put on his knowledge with his power" (212); instead, "[i]t feels like the interior of the earth ripped a bit and let fly with a fragment of hell" (McClain 7). The humiliation implicit in Rich's poem is the internalized form of the callous rape of Namibian women in recent decades. It is the characteristic response of one soldier to his commander when the woman questioned has no information: "She is beautiful. Let's rape her" (Anonymous
38); such a response typifies not only the capricious wind of the poem but the

Written in the Sand 10 capricious military action that has riddled the beauty of the land. Metaphorically it refers to the people in general oppressed by forcible rule.
If the wind is masculine, then the sand is feminine. The wind "holds the desire of the sand" (7) and the sand is the "lover's skin" (2). "Sand waits for the wind" and "marries here in the Namib" (11). Later the sand is portrayed as a maternal, womb-like entity holding the beetles "tucked now in blankets of soft warm sand" (18) much like embryos awaiting the birth in the morning sun. And, while biologically the desert sand is far from fertile, the sand throughout the poem is welcoming and nurturing against the onslaught of the sun and wind, just as a mother, as best she can, shelters her young from an abrasive society.
The wind and the sand are not the only elements invested with significance. The rain clouds, the fog and the sea become important natural and symbolic elements as well.
Rain clouds are unusual but not absent in the Namib. McClain portrays them as a kind of perversion, a promise unfulfilled. The raindrops that come from them "do little to slake the desert's thirst" (8). Solomon compares this kind of cloud to a man bragging about gifts that he then refuses to give (Proverbs 25:14).
These are the clouds that Bessie Head uses to open her novel Maru.
[T]hroughout that hot, dry summer those black storm clouds clung in thick folds of brooding darkness along the low horizon. There seemed to be a secret activity, because each evening they broke the long, sullen silence of the day, and sent soft rumbles of thunder and flickering slicks of lightning across the empty sky. They were

Written in the Sand 11 not promising rain. They were prisoners pushed back, in trapped coils of boiling cloud. (1)
While McClain invests less of the sinister nature to her rain clouds, they are not the fertile, hope-inducing rain clouds of, say, Cry, the Beloved Country. In
Paton's novel, the rain, specifically through the leaking church roof, joins Mr.
Jarvis and Stephen Kumalo, the white man and the black man, in a productive common cause. McClain's rain brings no such unity. Like the clouds in Maru, the Namib's rain clouds are "rather an over-dramatic display -- majestic but lacking in substance" (McClain 8). These perverted symbols of life bring little growth. In many ways these clouds are the various European and African
"protectors" that have promised much to the nation but delivered little. Most specifically these are the German and South African authorities that have dried up the productivity, the life, of the indigenous peoples. Militarily the rumbles have deafened the people and the lightning strafed the land, leaving little intact.
In contrast to the oppressive rain clouds comes the benign if not friendly fog. The rain clouds brought niggard moisture; the fog "sticks to itself with wetness" (9). This fog, like Carl Sandburg's fog coming "on little cat feet" (33), sneaks in without spectacle. It fills the wind and "hugs and blankets" (McClain 9) the terrain. For all its quiet passing, it nurtures the land. In opposition to the cousin rain cloud promising moisture that never comes, McClain claims, "Stand in Namib fog, and you are awash, afloat" (9). The fog makes no promises but it regularly brings sustaining moisture for desert life.

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The fog stays "mostly" (9) near the coast, McClain says, but oddly this is the closest she gets to direct description of the ocean which bounds one side of the desert. Allusively, however, the sea is also an important emblem of the poem.
On several occasions the desert is referred to as a "sand sea" (e.g. 4, 14, 17) and "[h]ummocks of soft, green, grass swell like seaweed anchored offshore" (2).
"[E]lusive eels of heat float uncharted" (4) in its imagined waters. Such imagery ties even closer the parallels between Ackerman's "A Fine, a Private Place" and
McClain's poem. The invoked sea images bring a life to the desert that is rich and varied, a life that McClain goes on to describe after implying that marine biology and desert biology are kin. Even before people are considered, the desert has a sea-rich life worthy of consideration.
And even the Namib has its "ephemeral river" (27), which separates the sand from the boulder-strewn plain. The "tree-lined river" (27) effectively forbids the union of the two types of terrain, just as figuratively people groups remain separated though part of the same country. The trees lining the barrier river might be like the trees in Levertov's "Gathered at the River," which
. . . listen because the war we speak of, the human war with ourselves, the war against earth, against nature, is a war against them. (40)

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The natural elements in McClain's desert, likewise, might be listening, for the poem is oddly scant of sound images. The most notable sound comes from the hyena at the poem's end. These trees, perhaps, stand as mute testimony to the human ravages of the country.
When McClain does come to people, late in the poem, it is first the ancient people of the desert, then the village Gobabeb, "named after the fig tree close by" (27). The serendipitous fig tree is laden with connotation. One might easily think of the figs as a symbol of maturation, as used by Kate Chopin in her short story "Ripe Figs." Young Babette is told that she cannot travel alone until the figs are ripe. She sees the figs as "little, hard green marbles" (199) which need the rain and sunshine of summer to ripen, just as Babette herself must mature. One can easily read those marbles as Babette's own immature breasts waiting for the adolescent promptings to swell them, like figs, toward maturity. When the figs have ripened, Babette is entrusted with a message to take to her relatives who live some days' distance away. The Namibian people, likewise, after stepping out from the imposition of paternal governments, are able to travel freely and communicate with those who are far away. International commerce and tourism mark the ripening of the figs.
Continuing the sensuous imagery of the desert, the fig represents the female, according to D.H. Lawrence. It is a fruit "[f]olded upon itself, enclosed like any Mohammedan woman, / Its nakedness all within-walls, its flowering forever unseen" (97). The desert, too, keeps its beauty hidden, until such poems as Desert Detritus reveal what the sand has obscured from international eyes.

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But Lawrence provides a caution to such exposure. Once the fig has "burst into affirmation," he warns, "Ripe figs won't keep" (98).
It is just such a bursting into affirmation, though, that Namibian literature and the nation itself is performing. The picture-postcard Namibia no longer exists. In McClain's words, it is "[n]o longer a still life picture" (4). She addresses the dilemma John Keats struggled with in "Ode on a Grecian Urn." On Keats's urn, the youth is forever in pursuit of the maiden. And while she "cannot fade"
(208), he can never catch her to feel her embrace and taste her kisses. There is no growth in stasis, but neither is there decay. But Namibia is no urn. Instead the situation is like that portrayed in Adrienne Rich's poem, "Living in Sin." She of the poem believed that love would be
A plate of pears, a piano with a Persian shawl, a cat stalking the picturesque amusing mouse, (19) in short, a still life painting. Instead she finds that relationships must grow and change and be interrupted by such nuisances as "the milkman's tramp" (19).
Maturation requires tension and struggle to survive.
Even though the wind and sand have married, the sand "likes to wander," and "[i]f the fog has fooled around it leaves its mark" (11). The simple lust described by Brutus seems to betray the still-life vision of fidelity. Rather than the two becoming one, the two remain two, each an individual, each more intent on self-fulfillment than unity.

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The modern search for individual meaning, the attempt to purge
"accumulated toxins in [the] soul" (25), is essential in McClain's poem. It is such toxins that dehumanize the people. Near the poem's end she identifies death, a dead gecko at one point, then the sound of a distant hyena -- "to think we still have predators!" (31), she says. Such predators are not likely the Hyaenidae family, so much as the human counterpart. Rudyard Kipling, some eighty years earlier, in his poem "The Hyenas" made the comparison between the canine and human versions. Though both are "resolute they shall eat" and eat "whatever meat they may find," it is "reserved" that only the human kind can "defile the dead man's name" (257). Among other toxins, this moral toxin that drives people to treat other humans as animals has sickened the country. Such toxins cause people to forget where they have come from.
The wind, she says, "gives voice to buried tales of time untold" (7). But these are tales that we no longer understand. This search is "[s]o hard to figure out, as no book holds the words, no instruments can play the notes" (29). The tension springs from the same source that prompted Rich's "Diving into the
Wreck." Rich begins with "the book of myths" (196) then explores the seabottom detritus from which her life, and by extension the life of all people, comes.
She is looking for "the thing itself and not the myth" (197) but finds instead a book of myths in which our names do not appear. (198)

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While McClain claims "[t]he lessons are what you make of them" (28), it is clear that the lessons she refers to are intuitive rather than physical. The scientists have come to the desert to "seek knowledge" though "it is knowledge of the self that they are after" (27). Romanticism steeps her scientific eyes to such an extent that she has become like Walt Whitman's speaker in "When I
Heard the Learned Astronomer." After all the lecture and intellectual manipulation, the speaker finds greater understanding in simply looking at the stars. Knowledge cannot replace experience; "no careful dissection" can explain
"the origin of the beauty of the Namib" (27). "[O]nly the heart can understand, not the mind" (29). Hers is the Keatsian blending that claims "'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,' -- that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know" (208). This is the purgative that will relieve the modern toxins; "beauty makes us whole" (31), she says.
McClain does not expect readers to follow every allusion or every image.
Rather she indicates that the "truth" she has given in the poem, the truth that will bring healing to Namibia and other nations, is latent in the world around us. "Of course, you probably missed a lot," she says, "but it will be written in the sand come morning" (23).

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Works Cited
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New and Selected Poems. New York: Vintage-Random, 1993. 195-98.
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Brutus, Dennis. A Simple Lust. New York: Hill and Wang, 1973.
Chopin, Kate. "Ripe Figs." The Complete Works of Kate Chopin. Vol. 1. Ed.
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Combrinck, Lisa. "Ghazal." Hirson, 268.
---. "In the Moonlight." Hirson, 269.
Dove, Rita. Selected Poems. New York: Pantheon, 1993.
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