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Self Portrait as Brenda Fassie or Jesus as a Bad Girl – Vuyelwa Maluleke

I give up my ghost

to make other people’s problems my problems 

 

& I go platinum, I go statue

I go higher, to where the sky droops into heaven

 

& fall back into my body.

I’ll be shouting & shouting & no one will want to hear me

 

& sometimes I’ll sing at a funeral & a wedding at the same time

so you know, I’ve lived & died & seen it all

 

like      to marry is a woman problem

like      in both cases she is the outfit

 

& collecting all that darkness may make your tears into stars,

but only in photographs, when the flash is on & the night is on & you are Black

 

so do not give your presence away

they want you to. they will ask you to

 

not to the beautiful

or the body like a chandelier of mothballs

or the money thicker than expensive grass.

 

Borrow yourself to happiness

You wanna be loved. You just           wanna be loved

 

& I know I made dying famous

cause I can sing any song, but it’s a lot harder than it looks.

 

Anyway, I’m working on a come back

next year. Nothing is impossible


Vuyelwa Maluleke is a writer, theatre practitioner and performance poet who holds an MA in Creative Writing from Rhodes University as well as a BA in Dramatic Arts from the University of Witwatersrand. Maluleke describes her works as post-colonial transcriptions of race, gender and black social life in Post-Apartheid South Africa. Author of the poetry chapbook Things We Lost in the fire, her Manuscript The Blue Album was shortlisted in 2021 for The Sillerman First Book Prize. Maluleke is widely published in publications such as The Boston Annual Review, The Rialto, New Coin South African Poetry Journal and Guernica Magazine.