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.
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 everytime 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 antiblackness 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.
What comes out of your poetry expression?
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.
How does your art help you become?
As I'm writing it [work] 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.
Read Thabile’s full interview here