"In Detention" - Chris van Wyk

He fell from the ninth floor

He hanged himself
He slipped on a piece of soap while washing
He hanged himself
He slipped on a piece of soap while washing
He fell from the ninth floor
He hanged himself while washing
He slipped from the ninth floor
He hung from the ninth floor
He slipped on the ninth floor while washing
He fell from a piece of soap while slipping
He hung from the ninth floor
He washed from the ninth floor while slipping
He hung from a piece of soap while washing.

© Chris van Wyk. Published in van Wyk’s collection It Is Time To Go Home (1979)

Where exactly was this poem written, where could it have been written? Uruguay? Singapore? Ireland? Canada or the United States? Israel? Iran? Zimbabwe? Czechoslovakia? It happens that this "In Detention" was written in apartheid-era South Africa. But it  - with its attention to the dizzying, mystifying, denying, slippery patter of "explanations" for deaths in custody resulting from state torture - might have been written earlier (say of French officials "explaining" deaths in their Algerian prisons) and it definitely could be written today.

Contemporary governments (along with most modernized publics) officially abhor "torture," forbid its practice (while sanctioning or excusing torture under other names), and will go to telling lengths, when torture's practice and results leak into public view, to deny its use. That's why Chris van Wyk's poem still feels immediate - especially its rendering of the modern state's habitual press conference patter, a patter characterized by the effort to keep its actual loopiness from notice, and whose aim is to mesmerize us away from our felt-sense and intelligence. 

In the current era, torture always needs an excuse: named as an exception or an accident or an incident, or by one of its proliferating pseudo names (enhanced interrogation is but one), or as a difficult but necessary measure that will save us from harm. And thus those who order and carry out torture are helped to continue.