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 it’s 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.
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 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, it’s 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 it encourages to keep your head down - “Don’t worry democracy’s got you!” There’s something about having tools to voice.
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 of 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 being 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 you do, ‘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, oftentimes 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 peoples realities, there’s a 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.
Read Qondiswa’s full interview here