159. Pass Me a Meatball, Jones by James Matthews

This collection of poems by anti-apartheid campaigner James Matthews (author of No Time for Dreams and Cry Rage!) was written while under detention at Victor Verster Maximum Security Prison in 1976. It was published the following year, and, like his other work, promptly banned. A highly personal volume, it contains much about loneliness, despair, fear of torture and yearning for freedom, but nothing about meatballs, or anyone by the name of Jones. Matthews said in an interview in 2002 that the title came about after the inmates won a legal battle for the right to buy provisions from outside, and he was thus at long last able to indulge his craving for meatballs: Jones was Peter Jones, a fellow prisoner. The volume was later shorn of its baffling title and re-published as Poems from a Prison Cell.

Consulted:
Adhikari, Mohamed: Not White Enough, Not Black Enough: Racial Identity in the South African Coloured Community (2005)

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