Lionel Abrahams

CHAOS THEORY OF THE HEART

Ill-at-ease, these shaming months
when Truth Commissioners convene
to bargain pardons, pence and peace
for memories of injuries,
confessions, cries, apologies
for deeds of pitiless offence
inspired by selfless policies -
I’m made to know more than enough
about wet bags, electrodes, bullets, bombs,
methods and miseries deployed
in my home country in my times
that left me safe enough,
comfortable enough.

I happen in this time
to read - incredulous again,
numbly appalled again -
a further heavy chapter
of the Holocaust’s particulars.
Half-way through the book
I find an incidental case:
a girl, told that her brother died
among her shtetl’s able-bodied males
rounded up that day and shot,
weeping recalls the way
he used to cut her hair.
That vignette pulls the whole
Hitlerian enormity for me
into the focus of her grief,
my grief.

There must be no equating.
What history has equalled that?
Those intentions! that scale!
I will not tolerate equating.
No comparing.
No.

No, no:
whether to equate or not equate
this man-planned hell with that
is Politics’ banality.
The highest cause is likeliest to recruit
its corps of visionary elect,
impassioned, loyal, ravenous to serve,
whose sacrificial acts and consciences
can break the circuit of identity.
Connection breaking then
breaks for us all.
Dark covers everything.

Dark covers everything,
yet this at least the weather-eye
of empathy can half-foresee:
light is light which flickers up
against that dark.
Specific anguish visible
within the pulseless core
of any iron-frozen history
- electric tendril cancelling across
a suffocating sky - might well,
with no less shining keenness
than the tender brother’s scissors
in his sister’s falling hair,
cut through to me, invade
my guarded strongroom
of self-proven truth
with its sharp light.

Lionel Abrahams was a Jew and become one of the most influential figures in South African literature in his own right, publishing numerous poems, essays, and two novels. Most of his works were based on his experiences; full of regret and sorrow, especially “The Chaos Theory of Heart”. It was Abrahams’ response on Germany’s apology to the Jews. It was hard for him to accept because no matter how many apologies that the nation will release, still millions were perished and those sorry can’t bring back time and lives. He still felt the grief about what happened many years ago, the cruelty that his fellow Jews suffered from Hitler’s armies, especially in the Holocaust.

Peter Paul Aguilar & Lormie Ambid BEEN3 | Literary Criticism 2012