Can you introduce yourself for me?
I am a healer and writer. I love poetry and classical art – unfortunately (because it’s so Eurocentric). I love the ocean and mountains. And love, and loving and eating.
What were the pivotal moments of becoming?
I think the church and leaving the church was a pivotal moment. I got kicked out of my church in Sharpeville because I was like, “Well, this doesn't seem okay”. I got kicked out of my church and that's when I really started to really think about how I identified myself because I'd always just identified myself through the lens of Christianity, that's who I was. And then I couldn't— after the church, I knew that the problem wasn't just the church. It felt like there was a lot of scripture that made space for the way that church was, so I couldn't identify with that anymore, and I didn't know how to identify myself.
So, I was out of the church and I really started to allow myself to be queer because I was like, “God's dead” [laughs]. “God's dead, now I'm gonna do whatever I wanna do”, and I found myself on Black Twitter. I don't even know how I found myself in that space. But that was one of the most affirming spaces for me, and it was necessary for that time because I was like, all those things I've thought about in the church, like some of the stuff I didn't even have words for, I could understand. It was so affirming for other people to say, “This is wrong”, and I'm like, “Right?!” So, that was really great and because I was no longer in the church, I could allow myself to be queer. And because I was no longer in the church, when the healing process started, I could also allow myself to do that because in Christianity, African spirituality is very demonized.
So, that's when I started to think about who I was because I no longer had that defined for me by religion anymore, so I had to really think about it. But for a while, I identified myself exclusively politically. So, if somebody was like, “Who are you?” I would say I was Black, I would say, “I'm a Black woman, I'm queer”, you know? Which is great for a while. All those identities are important but they're just social categories. And there was a time when I started to think about, okay, what's beyond those social categories? What if we didn't live in the world that we lived in? Who would I be? What would I write about, and when am I gonna write about it? When do we stop? When does the fight stop and when do our actual lives stop out of defense? So, I've kind of been thinking more about that now in the work that I do and in the interactions that I have now, thinking more about who would I be if I wasn't constantly defending myself.
Then, I moved to another part of Joburg and during that time I had discovered Black Twitter and I was thinking differently. I was working for this NGO place that was very LGBTI centered and did work around sex work as well, and that was really— it was great to not be thinking about myself within the confines of Christianity.
But I was really really struggling also to set down an identity for myself and I find that- I found of myself that what I did is what, like - and I think a lot of people do this - I started to over-identify with that community on Black Twitter even though they were a community on my cell phone, and I began to really really need affirmation of anything I was thinking. And affirmation would be people responding, people reacting… And I dated someone from Black Twitter - like a bunch of people - and from that specific community of Black Twitter. And that didn't work out great because when that relationship— Even within the relationship when I was like, “Okay, this person is manipulative and not really nice, they're not kind”. I also was just stuck socially because I need my community and they [the person] were a big part of that community and I didn't know how to exist outside of it. And I guess that was the end of that phase, that overidentification. After that, I couldn't identify with it anymore because when we did break up and I tried to communicate that our relationship was harmful, I felt like lost the community. And I mean, people don't say this but you'll still see the people hanging out with that person, and that's the thing that tells you. For me, that's the thing that said you've lost this community now and so I moved on from that, which was also great cause I needed to stop identifying a lot with… Because there isn't space. Black Twitter is really important for when you're needing somebody to say, “You're okay, it's okay that you feel this way”, and it was my first exposure to people who really think a lot about feminism and think a lot about queer politics and I was like, “Okay, cool”.
There's my space, but it became like an echo chamber...
Yeah, exactly. So, that was maybe around two to three years after I was out of the church, and then I moved to Cape Town maybe in the fourth year, and I've been in Cape Town for four years now. And Cape Town was a different space for me altogether. The community that I found was the poetry community which is very interesting because you find that people can write really good work that resonates with a lot of people without really being politically sober at all. Or in other parts of the community it's just this hyper-politicization of everything that we are, which is also hard to navigate. I'm just like, I can't do that anymore, you know? [laughs] I can't do that anymore, I can't do it anymore. Like, I spent so many years so angry and that anger, it had a function; it was important to remove me from certain spaces and to allow me to speak about the things that made me uncomfortable, and without that anger I never would've been kicked out of my church, which is one of the best things that's ever happened to me. But also, there’s that I was always so depressed because I was so angry all the time. And that anger keeps you preoccupied with the past and the future and never right now, and I just needed to... you know?
How do you maintain that becoming process?
I think a lot of the ways that I can create communities- for me the biggest thing even in my friendships and my relationships, I always look for the people that I can be just like... You know how every time you walk into a room you become immediately aware of the politics of yourself within that room, and the politics of the room? I try to find spaces within which I'm not constantly aware of the- where I can just be and not hyper-politicize all the time. Because a lot of my friends are queer and are poly, when I talk to them I don't have to overexplain, I don't have to like… I feel like at work, I have to be queer, right? Because they're not queer and they struggle with identifying with queer people, so I have to constantly be queer and embody whatever that means in a social context. But in my relationships and in my close friendships then I can just be because all those people are queer. And when we talk about our relationships and our partnerships, we're just talking about relationships and partnerships. And when we're talking about our identity politics in our families, then we're talking about our parents, you know? There's a different language
So, I try to find people who are like that, who can do that for me. Toni Morrison says this and I never forget that, which is that one of the biggest things that whiteness does is that it preoccupies you with itself, and I think about how all oppressions just really do that, like, they make you busy with themselves all the time. The whole time you're just engaged in defense, you know? So, I'm really happy when I don't have to be in defense, but I can just be and just be a person, whatever that means. Because that also is a lot, like, once you're done being over other social categories there's that, like, you're still here being a person and all of that as well.
Why it is important to be who you are, maybe outside of defense?
I think we really do need to intentionally see ourselves beyond defense, like what else is there? What is beyond that lense, and how else do we define ourselves? All of our work is concerned with whiteness and everything we're running from, and our paintings and photos and poetry is about it, like, what else is there? How do we imagine ourselves out of that space? And is there even an identity, does it look like the same kind of social identity that we have now, beyond all of that and does it look the same? What's its function when racism doesn't exist and anti-Blackness and colourism doesn't exist? What does it mean when you say to someone that you're Black? Does it mean the same thing that it does right now? And what are some of the ways that we identify ourselves for the sake of whiteness? Because it would be a shame for us to miss ourselves completely, for all the record of who we were to be concerned with how we fought.
Because you know how people talk about people like Steve Biko? I know nothing about Steve Biko other than Steve Biko's fight against the apartheid, Winnie Mandela, I know nothing about who they were beyond that, and that's a shame. Like, that's all we know and there's something weird about that. There's something weird about how people write all these poems about - this happens a lot in poetry slams - when people talk about— People will just namedrop people who have been here, it will be people who were shot in Marikana, people who experienced a lot of violence, people from the apartheid. In the U.S, in the poetry slams I’ve been to, people will namedrop all the people who've been shot by the police and it's like, there's this name in this poem that really has nothing to do with them, just the experience. And who are those people? And who's going to tell us who those people are when we really need to know them beyond what happened to them? And who's going to remember us in those same ways?
Like, white people are remembered for things that we're not, you know? They're remembered for just being a brilliant playwright. We're remembered for being the first Black playwright to do this, and all of it is concerned with your Blackness. When we think about Prince, nobody can think about Prince as just brilliant, it's like Prince was a brilliant Black musician who did this in this category, but it's like that political focus is always there, and that's even the lens through which we see the work. And I always think that artistic work is a lot more nuanced than social categories, and sometimes I think we even miss what the art was about because we're trying to have it explain the politics of our lives even if it explains that and more than that, we can't see beyond that because that's the thing that we're trying to get the art to explain. So, I worry about that a lot, and I worry that that's it. The fight will be what the next generations will know of us, and I don't know who will tell them to stop fighting, if they'll think to stop fighting, if they'll think beyond that.
I read this book by Chris Abani called Graceland a few years ago and I remember this line where he was like, one of the characters said to the other— So the other had a really difficult relationship with his dad and he was always just angry and trying to fight his dad, and the other one was like, “You have to think beyond your guns. What happens when your father dies, what are you gonna do with all that anger?” And I was like, yeah, what is beyond our guns? Because even our NGO's and our spaces that are meant to help what is happening socially are not even focused beyond that. It's like, they have this long term sustainability focus which is like, if you're sustaining the work to fix a situation, then the focus is not to fix it, it's to continuously work at it. But what's beyond that, when are we done? Who's thinking about when are we done, what does that look like, and whose job is it to think about when are we done? I wanna be done.
What comes out of your poetry expression?
I think before, people would always, especially if I go to other countries and I read the work, whenever somebody was like, I'm from South Africa the expectation would be for me to talk about apartheid. And for some reason, because I'd be writing from that world, even when I try to imagine a different world, that context is there, you know? And the personal is political too, and all of those experiences are not divorced from this world but people would always expect it to be explicitly about the apartheid, and for the stories to tell that story. And I think that I've intentionally tried to write about- still about the apartheid, but about the things within the room, within the room of my life.
Because even when the apartheid was happening, I think about it as a house, and all the gunshots outside, all the running outside and how even in the apartheid people would come into the house and they would hide together in the house and then there was a dynamic within that space. And my concern is within that space, within the house. When we've all come into the house what sits there with all of us? And I think a lot about the kind of ancestral haunting, the trauma that transcends generations and the bizzare ways that we resemble each other beyond the physical. How for years, I would love the exact same ways that my mum loves, even though I've always hated it like, “Why would you love people like this?” Like my grandmother was married to a man who was- my grandfather was always in a bad mood, in a perpetual bad mood, and you would sometimes catch him in a good mood but that was rare. My mother's married to a bad mood man and I would be attracted to all these people in an unending bad mood. And I was always concerned about why that was, why did we love people like that? So, I think a lot about that, about what it means to be haunted, who is haunting, who's doing the haunting, what ends the haunting, what is born of the haunting when it stops, who stops it, how they stop it. I think about, when I say 'we' when I write poems and I say we, I think a lot about who the 'we' is, how much of the 'we' I take up. Am I fully the 'we', am I not fully?
I try to write imaginative poems of a different world, and different form. I think about medicine a lot, like what heals the wounds, and I think for me it's like, because the outside makes its way into the inside and whether or not the people who are politically thinking and the people who are not politically thinking, either way, what happens outside comes inside and then we become defined by what is outside. And then what is outside defines what's inside, what's inside gives birth to more and more of itself and then at the end of it all, we're just- you're sitting there, you don't have anything. Say in a world where there was no longer anything to run from on the outside, but everybody who emerged from the inside looks like everything there was to run for before. And that's it. That's the world that we would have then. We would continue to run even when there was nothing chasing us.
I think about how I do that in my interpersonal relationships, always running from one thing or another, always trying to make sense of things that could just be, trying to control situations because of this fear of a lack of control. Like, displacement even in the country of my parents, which is bizarre, it's the weirdest thing. My mum was born here, my dad was born here but I've felt displaced in this country from when I was little. I knew what it was like to just not feel like I belong here. I know that my grandmother who I was named after, moved around a lot and never really made home anywhere. And yeah, I think that's more my concern, and how do we heal? What does that mean, to heal? What does it mean to be okay, even if it's just for that one day, what does that look like? Yeah, what does that look like if we were okay and we just were? And I think for me the thing, I don't know many things like love that feel like okayness.
How does your art help you become?
I think by keeping me in right now, they do that. Because keeping me in the present does that for me, and when I write poetry it does that. It's always been a very strange experience for me because even when I write stories I never really know how they're gonna end or how they're gonna go, I just keep writing and writing and it's like the thoughts come as I write them. And then when I'm done with the story, I really don't know anything beyond that story. And I find that really fascinating that I have no idea where it comes from because it really does come phrase by phrase, like I'll write one thing then another thing comes, then another. So it's not like beforehand I have an idea of how it's gonna go, it's like the more I write the more it comes. Even poetry works like that for me. So, I know that it's not really new information, but in the way that it comes from me, then it feels textured and nuanced in a way that allows me to process things in ways that I wouldn't have before. So, if I'm going through a difficult time or trying to process anything, even good things, I haven't quite processed the thing until I write about it. And when I do, it feels like, I don't know how to explain it, I don't know if this happens to you as well, I'll literally write one word and then follow it with another and another and then the things will come, it won't all come at once. I won't have like an idea…it just pours out...
As I'm writing it and then after I'll read back through everything and I'll be like, “Okay, now I understand that”. So, I think it helps me in that way cause then I can really go into that narrative world and that world doesn't always look like this world, which helps me feel more rooted within myself. Love, intimacy helps me do that, helps me be really rooted in myself. Meditation, physical activity like hiking helps me do that. The healing work definitely, because I'm just the whole time in a very grounded space to be able to do the work so that helps. Yeah, things that bring me into the room, into my body, into a space help me do that. Art helps me do that, I like post impressionist art. Very nice contextual art helps me feel very rooted. Even sickness [laughs]. Sickness does that for me as well because it kind of brings me into my body, like when I have a headache, my attention is brought to my head, to my body and then I can like focus there. Art is a way of knowing.