This is the New South Africa, a nation at the centre of what is being termed ‘the African Renaissance’, a phenomenon that is both real and imaginary; real in that there is a genuinely engaged awareness of the history both of this country and this continent, and imaginary in that the economic circumstances of the majority of the continent’s people are yet to improve. The notion of an African Renaissance is viewed with scepticism from various quarters.

Apart from economic inequality, the most pressing issue confronting this country is AIDS. This was made clear to all the participants on the day before the festival. Only a few hours off the plane from Europe, an Israeli poet was attacked and robbed in a beachfront public toilet. One of the attackers bit him on the shoulder. That afternoon he was put on AZT, the AIDS drug. Some say that more than one-third of people in Durban aged between fifteen and thirty have HIV.

I repeatedly found that I was required to be positive in my opinion of South Africa. An unfair expectation, I think. This is a complicated country, so anyone’s feelings about it should be complex. Reading a description of myself as an exile filled me with anxiety. The article gave the impression that I was a self-important returnee. I am not that, not at all. Not once did I suggest to the interviewer that South Africa was my home. The reason for my desire to remain ambivalent, to be viewed neither as Australian nor South African, was apparently lost on him.

I was pleased to see that I succeeded in putting across my suspicion of the notion of a nationality, that a person can embody national culture. I had tried to communicate that instead of nationality I am in favour of the notion of the local, that is of the locale and of being local. This point is not easily made in the New South Africa because there is an overwhelming desire to create a national identity. A figure like myself, especially someone who is willing to witness aspects of the culture thought better forgotten, is not welcomed without a certain amount of reticence.

Venturing to another country as a poet, particularly for a poet with the name of your ‘usual’ country in brackets after your name, is a risk. Here in Durban, this country’s Indian Ocean city, I’d thought it would be easier, especially among poets from countries as diverse as Nigeria, Switzerland, the United States and Guyana, and in the company of the legendary African poets Taban Lo Liong, Kofi Anyidono and Mazisi Kunene. My advantage as someone born in Johannesburg was actually a hindrance as it meant that some of the South African audience – if I read them correctly – came to hear me with a certain amount of scepticism, a sense, perhaps, of betrayal. When I read my South African poems, the response seemed positive. But when I read my poems about Australia and Indonesia, I had the impression that I was becoming incomprehensible, my words abstract, my voice fugitive.

On the first night of the festival, I’d read a poem that I’d written about ten years ago. It was a dream about the beachfront where our hotel was located. Coincidentally, our hotel overlooking South Beach was only a short walk from the hotel I’d stayed in on holidays with my parents about twenty years before. I’d only been to Durban once since then, so my sense of déjà vu was acute – I recognised the hotels, the beach, the oceanarium, the children’s swimming pools, the kiosks, but the place had been transformed. Unlike the place of my memory, today’s beachfront is filled with people and activity, Indian families promenading, tourists sunbaking, black lifeguards, white surfer boys and girls, hundreds of hawkers, children busking by performing ethnic African dances, and the famous Zulu rickshaws. I remembered the rickshaws and the surfers, but the rest was new. The place of my memory had been an empty place. Today’s place is peopled with New South Africans.

In the dream, I’d seen a Zulu man striding along the foreshore at night, singing a song in his mother tongue. It had been a powerful, positive vision. The resonance of the voice had been welcoming. When I’d woken, I’d felt filled with the energy of his song, as if it were itself a psychotopography, a landscape of valleys pure as a bride. The poem had been popular with the audience.

During the festival, whenever we had some spare time between visiting schools, giving readings, and sitting around eating and drinking, chatting about poetry and politics, I went for walks in the streets surrounding our hotel. In one of the main streets, shops selling Bangra CDs and bunny-chows (curry served in a half a loaf of bread) flanked down-market telephone bureaus and sex shops. One adult shop had a sign which advised, sans irony, ‘Avoid AIDS, come in here’. Down one narrow street, I found Ned Kelly, a bar frequented by poor whites, mostly Afrikaners. I caught sight of a bus that had a slogan from the isolationist years emblazoned on its windscreen: Local is lekker (i.e. We are cool). Near our hotel, there was a dive called African Paradise. Nightly it was filled with Congolese and Senegalese, most of whom, I assume, were illegal aliens. On the ground floor of many of the residential flats in the streets parallel with the beach strip – the holiday city’s dark side – there were a few brothels. Some of the buildings were also, conspicuously, drug dens. More than once, I was offered something I had to decline.

One afternoon, I came out of the mall known as The Wheel to find soldiers on the street. I crossed the road to see what was going on from a distance. A bit further down the street, there were three armoured vehicles and a number of soldiers emerging from a doorway. A drug raid. I wasn’t supposed to notice this. I was supposed to adhere to my social contract as a visitor: Be blind, be silent. Enjoy.

On the last night of the festival, before reading a short poem I’d written about a dolphin in the oceanarium literally under my window – an animal that had been there since the Soweto Uprising – I mentioned my experience of the back streets as well as of the beach. I described seeing the drug raid and my feelings of concern being around so much suffering. I instantly felt the audience clamming up.

They don’t want to hear that. You are a foreigner criticising their country, I told myself. My conscience instructed me: Your responsibility is to yourself, to the poem, to the empathy that causes poetry.

Then I read the poem.