Dusty casefiles, potholes of blank nurtured to life

THE VALUE OF a simple haircut for one’s self-esteem cannot be underplayed. Charles James, a patient at the Fort England Psychiatric Hospital in former Grahamstown, became the hospital’s barber in the 1920s. This fact premises arguably one of Rory du Plessis most haunting poems, in Automaton(tik), his second anthology of 24 works premised on the records of patients from that hospital. The anthology launches tonight at the Masker Theatre, Pretoria University campus, and will be followed by a brief season of performances by members of the university’s drama department, in response to the poetry, December 4-6.

Charles James, who was admitted to the hospital in 1908 at the age of 30, was deemed to be ‘drifting into dementia’. He spent the almost 50 years in Fort England, before his death, grooming his peers and supporting their dignity. And it is this spark of humanity, noticed between the interstices of medical officialdom and a Victorian mindset that are the impetus of du Plessis’s poems.

How can one give value to a life that was condemned as being ‘lunatic’ by the medical establishment of the time? The focus in Automaton(tik) is on male patients, and in many respects, in its sense of universal anonymity, like Paul Emmanuel’s Lost Men series of 2014, contemplating First World War casualties, becomes very specific. The men from Fort England’s wards and casefiles, condemned to a lifetime of observation and basic incarceration, are you and I, with all our idiosyncrasies intact and notarised. But not addressed.

Du Plessis does more than just observe the individual through the eyes and words of medical professionals with a Victorian mindset. He looks beyond the basic description of a man admitted to a psychiatric hospital for being considered clinically unworkable by the medical fraternity. Indeed, he gazes at the crumbs left by the reports and almost throwaway descriptions – all that remains of these individuals, who lived and died ignominiously because they danced to a slightly different tune from everyone else.

And as you gasp and rest your head against the words which conjure each person simply and gloriously back to dignified life by du Plessis, you are forced to contemplate the value of anyone in our world. What is the significance of memorialising a person who lived and died without being acknowledged even by their family? It’s a gesture which borders on the religious in a broad poetic sense, as it is a gesture which teeters on the abstract. Does it matter that Frederick who was admitted to the hospital in 1901 and lived for some 30 years in a room full of things that were important to him: 330 books, drawings and arithmetic, that his work was frustrating as it was limited by the passage of time and interfered with by interruption?

There is no unequivocal answer to this question, here; poems stand their own, individual in metre and texture and discrete from the analytical psychiatric discourses of the early twentieth century. It is very like building tombstones in memory of unknown soldiers. It offers a kind of magic that stands back from academic material and gazes at it through the muscle of personhood. Du Plessis uses slang from a diversity of languages, including words made up by the inmates themselves. In his choice of words, he evokes the fragrance of early twentieth century pastoral poetry, but uses contemporary ideas such as the verb ‘to gift’ in his work, which is at once fresh and timeless, easy to read but deep in its reach.

Like the character Leo Schugger, a professional mourner in Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum, the characters in this anthology are beautiful and endearing in their rule breaking. They can dance with whimsy at the thought of a tin of biscuits, and stomp with pollen-sodden feet in jubilation at the thought of outside. They have humour and deep sadness and an even deeper sense of purpose that is inaccessible to the so-called real world. They are lives filled with colourful thoughts stumped by society’s urge to reform or contain them.

• Automaton(tik): In Remembrance of the Patients of the Fort England Psychiatric Hospital by Rory du Plessis is published by ESI (Emerging Scholars Initiative) Press, the University Pretoria (2023).
• The publication launches this evening, 3 December, at the Masker Theatre, on the Pretoria University Campus, with a performance tangential to the work, performed by students of the Drama Department at the University of Pretoria.
• This performance will enjoy a brief season thereafter, until 6 December 2025, at 7pm daily at the Masker Theatre.