Xamissa

<p><em>Xamissa</em> is a book-length poem that sounds out the city of Cape Town in a joyful elegy for the city of alternate takes. <em>Xamissa </em>adapts the mythical name for the springs and streams running from Table Mountain to the sea under the city itself since before the colonial Dutch ships came--the X of the title standing in for the multiple ways in the languages of the Cape past and present the reader may pronounce the first consonant.</p><p>A work of documentary poetics that investigates the cost of whiteness in South Africa <em>Xamissa </em>code-switches at times into Lontara the subversive Indonesian script that undercuts the prevalence of Dutch in the colonial archive. Through serial questions around the ethics of its address <em>Xamissa </em>probes the interrelation of language sociality and resistance in its bid to interrogate the archive as a draft of the city's future.</p>