Who are you? How do you introduce yourself? What are the things that define you?
I am Qondiswa, I am from the rural Eastern Cape, I grew up in primarily middle class environments even though that’s not necessarily where I’m from. I’m a theatre maker, performance artist, actor, writer, and I would say a decolonial or post colonial thinker. I’m also an activist.
What does becoming mean to you?
There’s this thing in the theatre where they say “emerging”, where you are an emerging theatre maker, emerging playwright. Becoming is that thing, when you’re in that emerging phase. It takes like 5 years, apparently [chuckles], and then you have Become! You are the expert! But on an interpersonal level, I would associate becoming with more of myself, becoming more of myself or yourself or oneself. And that’s a constant negotiation, and something that is not stagnant, it's not a finished project. And that its affected by where you are, like geographies, but also communities, and the people you are speaking to, the kinds of things you’re building, the kinds of things you’re doing all have an effect. And that’s part of the reason of why I don’t think it's finished, it doesn’t get finished.
What is the process of becoming who you are? What were some of the pivotal moments?
I’m becoming less and less sure… but in a moment just now when I was more sure, I would say it's maybe things like getting expelled from school, high school, going to arts university, leaving school and going to South America, coming back to school and then the student uprisings. And then from then on, you’re forced to encounter that at almost every intersection in whatever way you’re engaging with society, that it’s pivotal. It feels that was with the kind of stuff I was engaging in, like trying to do something. From 2015 on, everything has been the same.
What about art school and arts broadly played a role in your becoming?
First, I think there was a sense of pedagogical disalignment, and arriving at school thinking, “I am the artist, I’ve just come here to develop”. But that’s not what it is, actually what the academy does is that it makes of you a vessel, to receive it. So my first year, I was running up against that, or really throughout university, feeling like I don’t know how to do student agency, or autonomy. Feeling like I didn’t exist, like I’m not allowed to exist inside my education, inside the framing of my education. So, that was like a big thing and one of the reasons of why I left, it’s not working. It’s not working for someone to try to take ownership of your becoming and you’re like, “No but I’m on it”. So, when it was during the protest and when I was at art school, we did a first version of a kind of decolonial school, during occupation in 2017 and we tried to do some kind of school, trying to centralize ourselves. It came as a result of Umhlangano, the protest the year before, and what came out of it was that there was this Wednesday slot that the drama and art department where people would be dealing with social, political decolonial kind of issues, and I was working with CWG, I was a research assistant at CWG and I was sometimes hosting workshops about curriculum development, about trying to ask students about how do they feel about curriculum, about being assessed, what can people dream up? What are the ways? When there was the shutdown at the end of 2017, we were like, “Ok cool, we’ve been thinking it through it the whole year, let’s try to implement some of these things”. So, that was key for me, the counter curriculum. And then it was my first foray into popular education, people’s education, but specifically towards community building and collective ownership of societies as opposed to state-based top down kind of structures. So yeah, the individual properly engaged with their own learning. I love this Freire thing, where he says, “Nobody teaches anybody anything, everyone learns together, mediate our world”. It's kind of still where I’m at right now, trying to figure out this education thing. How do we as people move together towards our freedom or what we want?
How has art helped you become who you are?
I’ve been lucky because I’ve always had art, so before anything, even this thing of singing in the church choir, but I’ve always been writing for as long as I can remember - sometimes yes for school, but oftentimes for myself. And having some kind of expressive medium to help you mediate your experience of the world is a massive thing, it’s hella taken for granted. Even the people who eventually become doctors and mathematicians, having something where I’m just expressing how I’m going through the world and how I’m understanding and seeing things outside of product, very important. And then as I got older, I just started to diversify my mediums, my tools. Even now I’m in a new kind of stage, where I’m trying to figure out singing ‘cause there’s something about it in a society that encourages voicelessness, I would say encourages to keep your head down - “Don’t worry democracy’s got you!” There’s something about having tools to voice. A friend of mine has recently started to think through the space of silence and danger, she’s a white Afrikaans friend, I don’t know if I really understand them, I’ll have to ask her again, but I was like I don’t know what you’re saying, like I couldn’t. Ok so, the space of silence, like I understand the chosen the space of I want to rest now. I don’t know, voicelessness is not a vibe. It's not a vibe [chuckles], and that’s where the arts medium is doing their work, storytelling capabilities about the past and how we are engaging with the present, but it is also modes of archiving ourselves in the present. And this thing of storytelling, that’s part of the community building aspect - telling stories to each other, telling stories to try to deal with the ethics of this community, speaking to each other and having modes to say “I know sometimes when I speak you don’t understand me so this is what I mean” in this picture or this rhythm.
Why is it important to be who you are? Why is it important to get things out of your body that need expression?
I have things to say, and I feel righteous about the fact that I must be listened to. Sometimes I don’t know by who, sometimes I’m speaking to different people, but the people I am trying to speak to, I would like to be heard and to engage with them. And when other people ask of me to hear them, to engage with them in their mediations, in their community building, that I must have the grace to do the same. So yes, to get away from the space of voicelessness, but then when we’re there not not also just be, but to listen. And listening is as much a privilege as speaking. So I speak often because I’m trying to make connections with other people, so I’m speaking through the art. I’m trying to make connections with people outside of my particular context; if I stay within my context, I run the risk of retaining a myopic scope of issue, of what’s happening and especially how to solution (action verb), so to guard against helicoptering, we must engage and become a part of communities. I speak to connect. I speak to explain where I’m coming from. That I know that depending on where we are, as we move, the particularities of my intersection are not always going to be the primary frame, but that I am here, and that I do come with this and that there will be times where solidarity will mean doing the work from my particular frame. So I speak to say this is where I’m coming from and knowing that we don’t all think the same thing, but that the thing of overlap and be really transparent about this is what I think about things, and I know we are never gonna think the same way about things, but we’re never going to get to utopias either, so we can fight with each other for now, and these are the things we can do together. Where am I coming from, what do I want, what do I hope for the future, but also expressing to express what I hope for the future is one part of what we must all do, and that I speak as well to engage, to listen, to figure out how I must shift, how I must free up sometimes, my politics, my actions or activities, to become more porous, to allow things I haven’t considered in. And sometimes to accept that the way you’re doing the work right now, it's not always helpful, and maybe it can become more helpful if you do it like this. I speak to archive, especially because we come from lineages of lost histories, drowned archives. There’s something about the fact that we’ve got all these mediums- we have our phones, the fucking interwebs, photographs and digital cameras, and film cameras to youtube- archive yourself, archive your community and your reality, archive your struggle, and write into the discourse what do you, you as in we all, us, the left or whatever, assert it into the discourse, into the mainstream discourse. Mostly I speak to fight back. I feel systemically oppressed, it's in everything. And in all the work I do I am trying to connect with other people who are also trying to act against oppression, whether it’s conceptual, literal, but because of what I do, often times what I can do is go and share space with people to give space for them to talk to each other and use artistic tools to talk to each other, ‘cause oftentimes there’s too many chats, or it’s exhausting, or it makes fights. So, when you start with the artistic sense and questions of like how are people's realities, there’s some chance of “Oh shit, I recognize that picture,” and from that point we can begin to diversify and say “Oh shit, this is the particularity of this one, this one, this one, this is how we can help here, this is how we can help there”. It’s very painful, to express to engage, to fight, but it gives meaning to an otherwise formless existence. It helps give shape.
But I’m feeling very trapped by the choices I’ve made here in Cape Town, trapped by my own expectations and the expectations of others. Trapped by the community I became with. Becoming is all of ours and it means something and we’re all shaping it so I feel trapped, like I have to keep doing this work. It’s so important and like this voice is so important because this voice knows it is part of this moment, and its an artistic moment, and artistic is a moment. I’ve been saying this shit since before 2015 brah, this is the third avant-garde, you know what I mean. But also in a very real political moment, which has always been happening, and to come to this consciousness like you’re part of a long lineage of struggle. So feeling trapped by that as well and what is means to struggle here specifically, especially now because we have communities, interpersonal communities, so trapped by the eyes of others, of us. So, it’s back to the expectation of others as well. Although it isn’t real, like people don’t actually mind, it’s not for people who don’t mind, and you also have people who are going, and I’m going to go too because I feel trapped. Becoming here and Cape Town and feeling like you should be moving. How do I become more engaged with my existence? Yes it will always be political, but from me, from here, from the complex negotiations, negotiating the contradictions. The wanting to fight knowing that fighting gives me life but also I want to drink a mother fucking mai thai in Laos and just lie there for six months! On a boat! That somebody has paid for! I think I’m too hard on myself, yeah, I must stop that. No one is holding me up to a standard, and it is a growing pain, but I need to forgive myself and the politics. And see this interpersonal becoming is that shit. In the space of ideological reposition, it's still happening, but actually in some instances, some thing has begun to unlock. And there’s that sense of what does it mean to choose you when we are we.
Can you find yourself within the we?
I’ve been on this thing for a couple of years now. Yes it does happen at the same time, 100%. But in this thing like to be inside it, to be inside the political framework, and to be aware that it is myself, in this body doing this work, that work is happening at the same time, that the politics are becoming my politics, I’m becoming my politics, and that this body can’t separate from this. We’ve spoken about this before, it's not something you take on and put off. It's an all the time thing, but I think it's that thing of finding moments of rest, and that’s what I hope this white sister means, rest not silence. People need to speak! Shit’s fucking up! We need to encourage more people to speak all the time until everybody is fucking speaking, all the time. But finding those moments of rest. Encouraging myself to rest. I feel like I’ve become this hard shell of politics with nothing inside, and if I give myself rest which is what I’ve been doing a lot for the past month, like being with myself which I have not done in years! But being with myself and watching a series, eating junk food and getting high by myself, but also not doing that while you’re heartbroken or while you’re super traumatized, but just doing it in the meanwhile, it's part of the practice. And starting to see what either is inside the hard shell or what am I putting there or even just realizing that, “No I’ve just curled up in a tiny tiny corner of that hard shell” and that cool cool because I need a lot of space for politics at the expense of myself. But I miss myself, I miss the trajectory I was on before this, which was also political, but soft and spiritual and political, and I miss it, but I’m glad to have this as a base now, this political base and yelling and screaming! And I can’t help it. But I actually do want to help it and to try to help it to release. The iterations of freedom are done in the everyday performative like me with myself and choices that you’re making. Do I want to walk to work or do I want to take a taxi and pay that R10 because I have anxiety today? It's in these everyday kind of things. The relations where with myself when can I be free myself, not like the okay but I mean you’re paying R10 but it’s like eish aye blah blah capitalist machine you don’t even have that much money anyway blah blah, what does this mean for you, and you can’t just walk to work? And uuuuhhh, you to just stop with some of the stuff, with some of the critique, what you do or did is that we are all doing it with each other. It will kill you, to not pass, I want to help it, and help myself release. I’m traumatized and pent up and still very very very angry but because I’m now trying to do the work, and there’s actually no room to be angry, really, there’s only room to do the work. So, there’s no room to emote. Yeah, which is really interesting ‘cause when I do workshops with people, people oftentimes get a chance to emote, like oftentimes I’ll start a workshop and people to share on this topic, “How did you get here today, and when was the last time you were in the sun?” And that invites vulnerability, a creative kind of expressive, and it invites that emoting, like we must emote together, when we speak, but not in that way where we are all getting angry and torch shit and go out drinking and throwing bottles against shit and saying fuck the system. It's not that, it's more healthy, but it has to start with yourself… somehow. But I’m also getting tired of the solidarity, like when people say whenever I’m in liberal spaces, it begins with “How can I help the community if I haven’t helped myself, so it’s about me and my family, and me and my children, and me and my home”. And I’m like yes, and you’re not wrong, so you actually can’t say anything ‘cause of the self care shit. Because then in the next week, I’ll be in a high political space where people are like, yes it starts with me but it’s starting with me, I live there, I’m there, when it starts with me, I’m doing the politics, I’m doing everything and from the luxury of your home in Pinelands, and starting from yourself meaning you can take your kid to an expensive private school. Like I get it, and yes it starts with you promoting a healthy outlook on race, class and gender, and you taking your kids to a Waldorf school so that they can— yes. And also people are dying, so it’s like this crazy counter balance. So, that’s why I think it's so difficult on self care because you’re like if I start to be lenient with myself, I will become these neoliberal whackjobs who go on and on about self care and practice it lazily and here I am now, head of some company! [Belly laughs]. So, here I am teaching at UCT, doing my PhD ,and yes it’s enough but I don’t know and I want to stop being so difficult about things and stop being difficult on others as well. Because it’s ultimately the standard I hold myself to, and nobody else has those standards for themselves! Let alone for other fucking people, so how to work with the current moment , the contradictions...