Ianne: I just came back from a six-day hike in the Tsitsikamma National Park. Can you just tell me how you are? I’ll tell you all about the mountains and the forest tomorrow morning after I pass out and sleep ALL NIGHT!
Michelle: How was the hike? What did you do? I’m doing well, I think. I’m currently spending the weekend in Mombasa, pretending to work.
Ianne: I hope your weekend was lovely. We spent a week in the Tsitsikamma forests and mountains. It was magical fairyland stuff, and really tough physically. But there’s something about that sort of untouched nature that really gives me peace.
Do you think of yourself as a particularly African Poet? What does that mean for you?
Michelle: I’ve done a quick google of the place: it looks splendid! And I agree. It might sound like a cliche, but being outside, in such a beautiful place, really does calm one down.
That is something I ask myself a lot – what it means to be an African poet, an African anything. I often end up with the word “African” simply serving as a descriptor of a simple fact, that I am African because my parents are, and because I was born and brought up here. When it comes to poetry, it’s difficult to say what an African poem is, and therefore, what an African poet is. What I know is that there are human and other complexities that are rarely ever made apparent whenever the word “Africa” is used to describe something. What about you? And what do you think it means for your work that you may be referred to as an African poet?
Ianne: This might not be particularly combative, but I agree with you. The term “African” seems always to be asked to do a little bit too much heavy lifting. Beyond any possibility. Even within South Africa it feels like there are so many countries bound within a single country, and the cohering gesture of “African Poetry” definitely lacks nuance.
That being said, I am happy to lean into a definition of Africa that explodes from a complexity. If Africa can mean so much, then I think I am lucky to be a writer who can write from and of that “so much.” This continent is where I come from, and place impacts the way one speaks, the way one listens. This place impacts the music I listen to, the colours of the sky, you know?
Is it helpful at all to say it means so much to my work and also so very little? I often dislike the way Africa is read onto art from the outside, and the expectations that this casts. But I enjoy being able to work from Africa and being excited by my understanding of that possibility. If poetry is a gesture of care, then a number of my cares – like myself – were born in this place. My parents and our histories were born in this place.
Is there some responsibility you feel to Africa in your poetry?
Michelle: I love what you say about place and how it affects the way we express ourselves. Do you sometimes think that the things we write – as poets, or as writers, really – are a constant expression of continuous longing for a place, whether physical, or otherwise? Could we talk about poetry as a descriptor of place?
I think my first responsibility is to the work, what it’s trying to say. And just as you’ve said, place often, maybe always, finds itself at the centre. Whether I like it or not, whether I’m aware of it or not, I will return to Africa in my work, even when it’s not explicitly so. And this place, this Africa, is broken down further: right now, that looks like Kilifi for me. This is where I am writing from, and what I am writing with.
Ianne: I’m really interested in your offering of poetry as a descriptor of place, of poetry as a continuous yearning and maybe, even a place itself – every poem being a place. And the longing for that place. I think this view is captivating because in some sense it both ties us to and removes us from the place described. But the sometimes-unspoken connection to place is always emotive, and always attentive in the effort squeezed from every word. The places we’re from, the places we’re going, and the places we’re in – all of them, all of the ones we carry with us. Perhaps our poems are maps of our own broken down Africas. Perhaps they are.
And I don’t have the same emotion towards all of those. In fact, there’s usually more than one feeling going on at once. Even as I celebrate place in my work, I mourn the same place.
Michelle: The other day, I ran into a tweet that quoted Jericho Brown: “A poem is a gesture towards home,” and I think that speaks to what you are saying of poems as maps, and in our case, of our bits of Africa.
How do you write poems? What does your process look like, if you have any? How does it look like, from conceptualization to editing, when you set out to write a poem? And do you consciously choose to write about one thing over another, or does that become apparent once the poem is written?
Ianne: Jericho Brown with the truth. That’s a lovely echo of what I tried to say. I’m wondering how your poems come into being, how they move from you into the world, and from the world into you. What does that look like for you?
I’m reading Adrienne Rich What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics and she said this, “And poetry, too, begins in this way: the crossing of trajectories of two (or more) elements that might not otherwise have known simultaneity. When this happens, a piece of the universe is revealed for the first time.”
I was thinking of that as I pondered your question. For me, poetry has always been an impulsive form, almost sub-conscious and instinctive. I spend a lot of time in prose form, which is a much more deliberate direction that I choose when I want to carry an idea. Poetry bursts from me. I find that my poetry makes demands of me. It comes from a slightly different centre of me and often forces its way out quite violently onto the page.
So, it isn’t a particularly methodical process for me. The patterns I have noticed feel less to do with myself as a poet and more to do with the world as full, or too full. I run out of buckets and Tupperware to catch all the world and the overflow lands on pages. I’ve never really articulated this stuff before; it is a sign of an excellent series of questions from you.
After the overflow, then, the editing. Normally, the overflow first shows itself in a particular image, or a series of words that I find powerful. Once that is on the page then it is work. The work of movement and arranging. But always, I try to honour that first image – that demanding word – that forced me in the first place. Returning to the Adrienne Rich quote, that word “revealed” strikes me as true. An unavoidable embrace between what the universe is and what I am reveals itself in the poem. So less creating, then, right? Not me in charge as writer. More a pulling away of a curtain, the dropping of a veil, the excavating of land to reveal something that was there. Something that was living and breathing and existing before me.
Michelle: I’m going to go back to three things you’ve mentioned about poetry: “a piece of the universe is revealed for the first time,” “poetry makes demands of me” and “not so much a matter of my being in charge as a writer. More a pulling away of a curtain…”
How well put these are. Sometimes the task is not so much to say something, as it is to reveal, and then release. I agree with that. There is a force to poetry, one that is so sure of itself in what needs to be said, and how. Perhaps this is something that comes after language, after words. Have you ever felt that, whichever language it is you write in, the poem is something different from it?
I haven’t been writing much poetry this year, for whatever reason. I don’t think I’ve had enough moments of that striking clarity of emotion as we’ve discussed above, but here’s something from January, I think:
the injustice of fate:
its strength. it’s a bright afternoon,
looking in the same direction,
smiling sideways – of course it would happen to me:
and you, with that one brief sentence
slim eyes, no room for light,
no room for both of us,
anywhere; on the bed, on the way
back; to back
a delicacy in this refusal – sweet, difficult
fragile at the secret place it opens, almost
honest. and what i have no need for:
morning. after, morning.
i want to sit with you, and imagine, perhaps,
what it is you won’t say, that long scream
hanging inaudible in the middle of this,
red, red note from Nthuli;
no words, no space even – imagine that, written, where
your hand passes through my hair,
and then falls asleep there.
we are unfinished,
then you say you will return. held
again, in that trembling, torn note.
Please send me something of yours too!
Poetry allows us to gleefully abandon the structures that are our strictures. Poetry isn’t narrow. Its language is not the language of the census, the interview, the identity document. It is so much more liberated than those texts that seek to define us. That bind our reality down and pin us in place on that bandage. Poetry does definitional work almost precisely by loosening the taut cloth of definition. Poetry is something to swim in.
– Ianne
Ianne: I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the types of writing that one is able to do – and I’ll try and come back to that later in this conversation.
I’m right now invigilating a 3-hour exam for some of the students, which is why I’ve actually got time to sit and think and breathe and write to you.
I sometimes feel like we’re all impostors. And that there’s this nod that self-aware impostors can give each other in public places, a swift and short nod of the head to say “I see you. I recognize you. Also, me.” It’s kind of like the nod that queer couples or mixed-race couples or foreigners give one another. Can you see I’m out of writing practice? Out of talking practice? Out of thinking practice?
On the impostor note, I’m thinking of starting a novel that engages a little with a feeling that I’ve had recently which can be summed by saying: I don’t think I chose any of this.
Maybe it’s another way to think about impostor-ish feelings, as finding yourself in a place that you can’t quite say for sure you put yourself in. I feel this all the time. Like a string of occurrences befell me and suddenly I’m in this classroom in Potchefstroom, or you’re in this new job that’s faraway on a coast, and we’re all being locked down and none of it feels much like agency. Do you know what I mean? I look at some of my friends and their relationships (to themselves, to romantic partners, to their works) and wonder if they feel the same way: maybe they made choices years ago that nudged them in this direction, but did they choose this? Did they choose this apartment, this life, this partner, this meal, in any real way? Or did it kind of just happen to them? I sat on my balcony in Joburg and wondered/wandered about that feeling – when did I last really choose?
I’m happy to say that writing feels like a combination of necessity and choice. Whereas earning money feels more necessity, haha!
But I was thinking: the writing that I, or you, dearest Michelle, are able to do – what are the constraints and borders of that? I often think of this as a boon, that perhaps I am able to write things that nobody else is, because of the uniqueness of my positionality, politics, identity, geography, family, cultural influences, podcasts – all the happy accidents that go into the artist and their art. And then I was thinking about our conversation, and about Africa, and what that means as a border of what we are able to write about. Maybe border is just one way of looking at it, maybe it is liberation too, that this place, these influences are not a limit but rather something whose full extent we can explore. And I know we have to disclaim every single time because it still isn’t taken for granted that Africa is vast and complex and sort of incoherent as a concept. But do you think that, being young writers (people, lovers, workers, children) in Africa, there are certain things we are able to write?
I have no idea what you might make of this, but I’m sending it to you along with so much of my love. I’ve also attached my poem, “Necklace” that was published in Volume II of the 20.35 Africa anthology that I felt both able and driven to write.
Then, onto your lovely poem: I’ve read it so many times and each time I’m struck by the bravery of the words in a different moment of the poem. It is so stealthy. Incisive. It conjures feeling in me, because I obviously was not in that moment with that partner, but the use of “you” positions me there. And I have been in positions, with partners, before. Pain. Love; “the injustice of fate.” I feel saddened and somehow sped-up by the poem, it grips somewhere in me and tugs. My heart quickens. All this is to say it accesses my grief in the way that only a block of words, broken by unusual punctuation, homophones all over the place, can access. I have a complex lock system on my grief-safe, so it can only be opened with a strange, wonderful, and honest set of keys. You have those.
Michelle: It’s so good to hear from you, and all that you’ve been thinking about. I think it’s such a pleasure to witness the walks you take within, and all the places they lead you to. That’s the beauty of the ramble – sometimes I like to think of that as a sort of conversation one has with oneself, a kind of discussion.
What you have said about impostor syndrome is something I have thought about as well, and I’m so glad at how you’ve articulated it brilliantly – how there is such a fine line between our ability to do something, and the necessity of doing it, one that is further complicated by our choices, or the illusion of choice. Sometimes, I feel like a good way to place oneself is to consider the compulsion that propels us into certain spaces – whether poetic, or otherwise. How do I find myself here? As you say, the word “African” because of all the various disclaimers we always have to attach to it, in certain ways, can only do so much to answer that question, even as it has always been the word that takes up the most space in response to it. Poetry is a space that allows for a kind of liberation, moments in which we can bring that which we imagine exists outside of reality into reality. And I think that’s what makes poetry really special, because it obliterates the lines between necessity and ability, between choice and its opposites.
And thank you so much for your kind words about my poem, and for what it has been able to do for you. It’s an honor, really, to have you tell me what it meant to you.
Reading “Necklace”, I am in awe of your ability to create such a vivid picture, even with the curt lines, short and sharp. They create a palpable tension, one that runs through this poem, hinging off taut moments like “in most awful orange” and “we are nailed together / two planks of time.” This poem is an incredible example of one of the things I love about poetry – suspending us inside a fragment of a moment, and having us there, grappling with its contours. Thank you so much for sharing this with me.
Ianne: Thank you so much for being such an attentive and kind reader of my poem. It makes me happy to be read by you. I’ll quote the lines you just said:
Poetry is a space that allows for a kind of liberation, moments in which we can bring that which we imagine exists outside of reality into reality. And I think that’s what makes poetry really special, because it obliterates the lines between necessity and ability, between choice and its opposites.
Slap that on the back of a prize-winning collection! I haven’t stopped thinking about the way in which obliteration can be liberation. Poetry allows us to gleefully abandon the structures that are our strictures. Poetry isn’t narrow. Its language is not the language of the census, the interview, the identity document. It is so much more liberated than those texts that seek to define us. That bind our reality down and pin us in place on that bandage. Poetry does definitional work almost precisely by loosening the taut cloth of definition. Poetry is something to swim in.
Ianne sometimes succeeds in juggling multiple dreams. ianne writes to manoeuvre through the world. they are a genderqueer south african writer, resisting power (and its many masks) from an aesthetic position. they have an M.A. in African Literature. they practice educational work, reading literature with young South Africans, decolonizing classroom spaces with pedagogies that reach towards a radical futurity. always seeking good questions to put between themselves and the page, ianne writes from, with and against the moments that knot their world. from poetry to children’s stories to novels, ianne hopes to write the rhythms that unfurl around them, rather than the one beat into africa from its outsides.
Michelle K. Angwenyi is a writer from Nairobi, Kenya, whose writing attempts to explore time and memory. She was shortlisted for the 2018 Brunel Africa International Poetry Prize, and for the 2017 Short Story Day Africa Prize. Her work has appeared in A Long House, Jalada, down river road, 20.35 Anthology and elsewhere, and is forthcoming in Wild Imperfections (Penguin Random House/Cassava Republic Press, 2021), a poetry anthology. She is the author of Gray Latitudes, selected for the New Generation African Poets Chapbook series (Akashic Books, 2020). Michelle is a Centre for Arts, Design and Social Research Fellow.