Sjaka Septembir

An Interview with Sjaka Septembir

When life is varied and we meet a plenitude of people we find many sources of inspiration. This is the immediate thought I have when it comes to Sjaka S Septmebir. From an Afrikaans Christian background, conscription in the Navy, self-publishing his novels and immersing himself in performance arts and poetry: Sjaka’s history is a rich one. He is a natural story-teller and I become absorbed in the yarns he tells and think to myself that he must have directed at some point as well. He confirms this and he has recently returned from Grahamstown with The Way Out, which he will hopefully bring to the Western Cape as well before he heads off to Italy for his first time out of the country where he will be joining the exclusive physical theatre group Helikos. He has, however, been all over South Africa Jack Kerouac-style: all the major cities, plenty of little dorpies, hitch-hiking: the whole nine yards.

It is clear that when Sjaka commits to something, he goes full tilt. Initially, his inspiration and work was rebellious; as he states: “I burst onto the Gothic scene” and it was painted fingernails, several piercings and spray-painting toilets gold and calling it “The Seat of God”. He has adopted many names through the years such as Jan Afghanistan and Dr. Adam Chaos. But “nothing is solid, everything changes” and eventually he mellowed out.

His enlightened mindset keeps him open and receptive. These are key qualities for a writer and above all Sjaka is a writer with his true passion being poetry and for him poetry is about enlightenment. I question him about the relevance of poetry in today’s world of multiple and subjective meanings and he states that “poetry is intimate” and writing in general is intimate. In a world becoming devoid of meaning through the expansion of technology and the loss of privacy, something which allows intimacy is important.

Sjaka is also involved, as a performance artist, in physical theatre and to me this is a genre which is particularly receptive to poetry. The one art form expresses itself through the body, the other through words and combing the two lends itself to many exciting possibilities and Sjaka is an important proponent of this.

His delightful story about how he first came to write poetry is a true testament to the beauty of the form. At school he constantly rebuffed teachers’ attempts to get him to write poems, until he met a girl who loved poetry and he said “I write that”. However, his results were criticised by their recipient. Nevertheless, the joy he received from the process was more important than the original intent and just because the first critic wasn’t happy, wasn’t going to cause him to sop writing. Herein lies proof for my argument that poetry is not something to be broken down and analysed the way we’ve done for years. Poetry is personal and intimate, with a beauty and a meaning personal to each reader and thus, although the creation of poetry has declined in the past few decades, the form has not died and Sjaka helps propels this expressive form on into the future.

Originally published in A Look Away.

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