Sihle Ntuli: One looks around and finds a world of complication and compromise. Amid all this calamity, it is easy to overlook even the simple things concerning the human condition. The question that I will pose to you Sarah is a common one, possibly even passé. But before that, it is my pleasure to be having this conversation. I must add that as I learnt more about you, I recognized that we probably share as many similarities as we do differences and hopefully, we get to touch on a few of these. Here is the simple question, how are you?
Sarah Godsell: I too am incredibly happy to be paired with you, looking forward to a deepening conversation spanning spirit, poetry, word, grounding.
I am looking into myself to answer your question. We have transformed our standard South African answer of ‘fine’, meaning anything from dwelling in pain to floating in joy, to a kind of teeth-gritting fine; a fine that is laced with survival, hope and despair. A fine that means that I am alive and there is no security in that, that means I have food on my table and there is no security in that, a fine that means my daughter is safe (thank all the gods) but there is no security in that.
Dear Sihle, I wonder if you are experiencing this kind of ‘fine’ too? It is strange to be number five in the world in terms of new cases of Covid-19, in a continent that seems to not have had this virus sink its teeth into it so completely. Yet, it makes me feel like we are an island, and perhaps a self-inflicted xenophobic island, in an African sea.
Let me tell you about me beyond the veil of ‘fine’: there are things that ground and grow me in hope and joy. I am a lecturer. I teach history education. I believe in radical pedagogy, in transforming education, education that believes in a better world. I believe in that better world and when I am interacting with my students, to quote Arundhati Roy: I can hear her breathing. I miss my students. I miss what they teach me about being human.
I am grounded in the earth-joy of a 10-month old (today!) daughter. She is strong and busy. She is so brave! She is learning to walk, and the enormity of this humbles me. I imagine what it must mean for a brain to be figuring out a relationship to the body – sending out calls and responses and slowly letting the responses grow. I wish we kept our relationship with our bodies that connected.
I call and call sometimes but cannot hear the response.
I am grounded – and to be honest – in privilege. I am fed. I am working. None of us is safe, but safe is always a word relative to power. I am bubbled in my car, biting my lip as people on the road grow thinner.
I am working for smoke, for white beads, for light. I do not know when my next ceremony will be, but I know the world needs healers now more than ever.
I am ‘fine’, Sihle. How are you?
Sihle: So profound Sarah considering that I too have days of being ‘fine’ when I know very well about the shielded element of this guarded answer. It is like what you have said about the veil of fine. I am in disbelief at our lives being so directly threatened by the “invisible enemy”. There are other real dangers that are just as invisible which will inevitably be overlooked based on the immediacy of this health crisis.
I wonder about the minds of some people, especially those intent on disseminating fake news, misinformation and conspiracy theories. I think about ways in which we cope and how they vary from person to person. Nowadays, I tend to say that I am well, well enough to look forward to what is coming, and this is how I cope.
Perhaps I am naive, but I feel we only move forward with a cultivation of hope and joy in the most fertile parts of us. The restoration of nature has become more apparent during a period devoid of human intervention. The current pandemic has exposed a god complex in some of us, a sort of hubris that says it is alright to disrupt the hope and joy of others.
I resonate with Zukiswa Wanner’s 2019 article ‘Caught in a diplomatic crossfire’ as I reflect on matters of Afrophobia. I concede that there is an ideological fire ravaging through South Africa. When I say that I am ‘well’ I mean that I feel that I am in a decent space to dream of doing better. We need introspection of right and wrong and the question of whether we could be or do better is one that needs to be confronted with urgency.
I cannot speak for all South Africans, but I hope to contribute to a more positive change through my work. I feel indebted to the editors of Saraba and Bakwa who were among the first to give my work a home away from South Africa, right now I am grateful that 20.35 Africa has invited me to have this conversation partially outside the label of ‘poet’.
When I read ‘Ten lessons in bleeding’ I am captivated by its personal and intimate quality. The different contexts of blood are so poignant and deeply moving especially in the context of gender-based violence. As a mother, a teacher, and more especially a healer perhaps you could tell me more a bit about your motivations behind the poem.
Sarah: I have been walking with your phrase, the cultivation of hope and joy in the most fertile parts of us, under my tongue. If you are naive, I pray for your naivety to rain on us all, to cultivate us all. I take up your challenge of introspection on right or wrong – the complexities in the grayness, in mist, in grains of sand. I think this is what poetry does for me, it interconnects us in a giant spiderweb that we are each building all the time, each of us tiny spiders, and the strands go bravely into the grays, because where else must we tether our silk? I am reminded of Warsan Shire’s poem where she opens an atlas and is reminded, reminds us, that it hurts everywhere, everywhere.
I think the 20.35 anthologies, so as not to speak of all poetry, of Africa and the diaspora, in one breath, show layers of grayness in bursts of colour? Does that make sense? Perhaps it should not. I hope your dreams are well, that they are feeding on your desire for positive change and are building for you in your sleep.
I wrote ‘Ten lessons in bleeding’ over a long time, which is unusual for me. I am often the kind of poet who scrawls a full draft on something only to come back later to edit, but I rarely have lines for the poem appearing slowly, month by month. Perhaps this is because I was pulling together so many personal layers of blood; perhaps each line came to me through another moon-called bleeding time.
When I went to an acupuncturist the other day, she said I needed to be bled, that I had too much fire in my blood and that my blood was too dark, too heavy. She poked holes on either side of my spine and sucked the blood out with a round glass cup.
Healing and blood have a strange relationship. Healing relies on donated blood, often. Blood also shows the wound. If blood is working well it can clot, stop itself, you know? I think in the poem I was exploring the different ways that women bleed and how we hold gender-based violence in our bodies and tongues and scars and silences. As a healer, my relationship with blood is hard: blood associated with pain, illness, death, suffering – so often caused by men. We have the statistics. One woman murdered every three hours. Yet, as a healer, I must be based in love. Healing comes through the serious, hard, and dark work of love. It is difficult to want to cause the blood of perpetrators and heal the blood of survivors and still find myself as a healer. I have not secured that strand of silk yet.
When I read ‘Raw Sugar’, I was also struck by the mention of blood – the blood of the sugar cane, linked with sweetness and violence. I was transported from Kwa-Zulu Natal to Haiti, to other places where the pleasure of sugar was obtained through blood. May you speak on the histories you access with that poem. It is so layered, short and powerful, each stanza feels like the epigraph to an unwritten book. What was your process with the poem?
The restoration of nature has become more apparent during a period devoid of human intervention. The current pandemic has exposed a god complex in some of us, a sort of hubris that says it is alright to disrupt the hope and joy of others.
– Sihle Ntuli
Sihle: In 2018, I was a junior lecturer in Bloemfontein and found the going quite tough due to the very intense culture clash in that space. It was a lonely time for me and to remind myself of home I wrote the poem ‘Raw Sugar’. It is quite interesting that you have asked me to talk you through the histories of the poem because they are the very foundation of the poem. Sugarcane or ‘umoba’ as we call it in isiZulu was an important component during my process of writing the poem.
Back home the land is rich with natural resources, one of which is sugarcane. KZN’s subtropical climate makes sugarcane a popular summer delicacy alongside other fruits. The act of eating sugarcane has always felt like a violent act to me, particularly the step towards the outpouring of sugarcane juice using teeth. The relationship between human pleasures versus the human destruction of nature over the years was one of my concerns with the poem.
My trek into history begins with the juxtaposition between the Atlantic slave trade and the Bhambhatha Rebellion. There is my awareness of the underlying oppressive elements that existed in both the Atlantic slave trade and the inaugural imposition of tax laws, this alongside identifying the transition from initial to modernised forms of the same exploitation. During my lecturing tenure, I felt the sentiments of both, from slaving at the office to yearning for a rebellion based on certain injustices. My reality, unfortunately, was that I was alone, there would be no pan-African rebellion to speak of other than a commitment to black exceptionalism in the face of my adversity. The pan-African undertones come from my own ideology. I am someone who believes in the unity of black Africans on the continent and those in the diaspora. There are a few experiences that are similar but mainly there is a common marginalization and disregard of black people. ‘Raw Sugar’ also has its contemporary context(s) based on the pleasure of the oppressors at the expense of the marginalized. So, Sarah, I do agree with what you have said earlier about the world needing healers now more than ever. I am yet to confront the ‘healing’ aspect of my own poetic endeavours. I am not too sure whether any of what I write could be considered healing, or is it just art? I use words like ‘ventilation’, ‘design’ and ‘expression’ to note the intentions of my poetry.
You place a large emphasis on healing which reminds me of a line by one of my favourite poets, in his poem ‘For Johnny Dyani’ the late Keorapetse Kgositsile alluded to the witchdoctor paradox with the lines: in the spell of the witch doctor’s son/ where I cannot even ponder/ how a witch and a doctor paradox/ could be one entity. The line speaks to the historical misrepresentation of healers as witchdoctors as opposed to legitimate alternatives to the west, an argument that you may already be familiar with by way of having experienced acupuncture whilst being a healer. To locate you, I feel it quite important to trace your journey or your deep dive into African poetry. I am fascinated by your calling to ceremonial healing. I recognize this as a truly selfless act, but it is also one that sparks my intrigue and curiosity. Please pardon my rather long-winded way of asking, but how do you think your poetry informs the ways that you may identify as an African.
Sarah: The journey through history – personal, global, and planet – through one beautifully simple poem is to me the height of the poetic craft. Your juxtaposition of pleasure and death held in a historical and present casing of exploitative labour, slavery, and environmental destruction, is palpable in the air around the poem. I suppose that it is this layering that led me into African poetry. As a historian, as a healer in words before I was called on a different healing path, I feel my healing is in history as well. Relating to your Keorapetse Kgositsile quote, it is interesting that in isiXhosa the word for traditional healer and doctor is the same: ‘igqirha’. My tongue is still bending around the clicks, my body so unfamiliar in the rural Eastern Cape. I have used poetry, writing and reading, to work through histories and identities in the country, the continent, the world. I would love to claim an identity as African, but I believe white people have done so much damage to this continent that we cannot have that privilege. Then, with this strong conviction, and strong convictions about cultural appropriation, I got sick, had been sick, and found my calling as a healer. And I had to grapple with being honest about my history, my ancestors, in this soil, in this continent. One of the poems that really resonated with me in Volume II of 20.35 Africa was ‘Stones’ by Adeeko Ibukun:
First, you call the map a song
and the song is as a love hidden in
stones as if to say all of human
history is about building still,
some towering halls leaning towards
me, and to this you say, history
is about movements too, but how
does a stone move in it? …
Mapping connects healing and history. I find myself at once song and stone. Moving and stuck. As Tsitsti Jaji writes, equally silent, equally flammable.
I love the word you used in relation to your poetry: ‘ventilation’. This is the air in the sugar cane fields and the air powering the ships in the Atlantic slave trade, the air moving history, moving us, unless, until, we are stone. I think that it is this ventilation of history that I find so often in African poetry – a history lived with, mourned with, grappled with. Sometimes stuck in. Sometimes thrown away. I feel these poems growing as tiny seeds and then immense trees in the histories, in the continent and diaspora. My position on history is that it is always immediate: in our mouth, in our pockets, in our blood.
On the complexity of identity politics in my journey, the answer I have is ‘yes’ – there is blood in my mouth (this country of blood, where if I spit, your blood comes out of my mouth). A desire to be healed so I may heal others. I am pursuing my Cornish (Celtic) ancestry as well. White ancestors are a lot. A lot. So much damage that has been done, so much blood, so much taking. I am inspired by Megan Ross’s words in the poem ‘God is a Mother and She is Everywhere, Everywhere’. In the poem she ends with an almost-invocation, in this sweet unorthodoxy: i hear my answered prayer: we sleep all the night, waking to a new sun, the whole room smelling / like a mouth.
What is your relationship to home? Mine is one of blood and pulling, of hope and f(l)ight. I come back to your word ‘ventilation’ and think of how it is related to breath, but also, in this time of Covid-19, related to health. We must all be in ventilated places. We must all breathe ventilated air. We must not get sick. But how to build wellness in a society on which history is also a poison, also a weed? What is your relationship to ventilation? Where do you find yours? You speak of your difficult time as a junior lecturer in the Free State, which has been notorious for its racial violence. Did you use poetry as ventilation there? What helped you survive? And has this influenced your journey into African poetry?
Sihle: One cannot speak of ventilation and not touch on the concept of suffocation. In the context of our current pandemic, airflow and circulation issues can be signs of trouble. For my poetry, this idea of ventilation is important, I believe I owe it to myself to be true to myself and let ‘it’ out. I also realize that my introversion, shyness, my being reserved means that the need for ventilation for me is higher than most. As boy children, we were taught that ‘indoda ayikhali’ (men don’t cry) by our brothers, uncles and fathers and little did we know that we were being socialized into life-long suffocation.
When I arrived in Bloemfontein to become a lecturer, I had taken a sort of sabbatical from writing poetry and naively chose to focus on life as a member of the church (that later turned out to be a cult) while trying to be the best ancient historian I could be. By 2018 I had already been writing poetry for about nine years and so not writing was a different experience for me. My experience of the ‘social’ in relation to the world I found in Bloemfontein shook me to my core and after a while I found myself feeling lonely. A loneliness like the opening lines of Romeo Oriogun’s 20.35 Africa poem, ‘Loneliness’, where the poet invokes the imagery of a deserted car as he begins to grapple with the bare essence of loneliness.
Poetry became ventilation after months of reading, after which I felt that I needed to write again. It started with me saying that ‘if I die here, the people need to know what happened to me’, and then it ended up being defiance, ‘I will not die in the Free State’. I wrote a poem called ‘Free State’ that appears in 2019’s Agbowó’s 2019 Limits Issue. With this poem I found that poetry can be used to heal but can also become a form of self-harm. What I mean by this is that in Bloemfontein I was not kind to myself based on what I was internalizing. There were other forces that I were battling and there is still a mild grief that I am struggling to recover from.
I often go back to Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s interview on BBC’s Hardtalk where he emphatically states that ‘English is not an African language’. This was in the context of language playing a role in the hierarchies and systems of oppression. The language barrier was an obstacle during my time in the Free State, but it was not just the English of the intelligentsia that was suffocating me, it was also Afrikaans. In terms of the ‘social’ of African poetics, I feel there is much to be said about the dominance of poetry in English despite the vastness of indigenous languages on the continent. In another 20.35 Africa poem, ‘Poem to be read from Right to Left’, M.E Mustafa speaks on the erasure of Arabic that is making way for the dominant English. The late Dambudzo Marechera spoke on the internal turmoil of his being colonized, stating that contending with the English language feels like a duel.
In Bloemfontein, I could no longer speak for my Zulu self nor for my constructed English self. I felt like I was gradually being stripped down to nothingness. My relationship with the idea of home is love, and where there is no love, I cannot consider that place home. So, Sarah, I ask you in the context of the ‘social’, do you have any thoughts on whether South African poetics coexist within African poetics? There is so much that we have in common with other African countries. There is gender-based violence alongside the atrocious acts of violence towards those who identify as queer. There are also uniquely South African sociopolitical legacies of Apartheid that still bleed into the literary culture of South Africa; recent newsworthy incidents including the African Flavour Books controversy, not to forget the furor over the Media 24 Awards. In your view does the South African poetic exist in its own bubble?
Sarah: I hear your yearning and silence, the stripping away of self through having and not having language. The reinventions of self, coming to poetry as a form of healing, as a form of self-harm. This idea of poetry as a form of self-harm resonates for me, as someone with scars on my arms that have been covered with tattoos, I have them on my thighs as well and those that have blended in with stretch marks. I think it is interesting to combine these aspects when I am thinking about South African poetics existing within African poetics, or in their own bubble. I think about South Africa being with/in/out of Africa a lot. I would be interested in your perspectives on this as an ancient historian – but for me, much damage has been and continues to be done by the idea of South African exceptionalism. Yes, there are unique hues to our country that are embedded in our poetry, but we also borrow and lean into a lot of Africanness, even diaspora-ness. Koleka Putuma’s ‘Water’ cascaded her and her record-breaking Collective Amnesia into our lives. ‘Water’ justifies the ocean’s memory of slavery. Can a continent have a memory? Do we slip into the ‘Africa is a country’ trope if we engage such thoughts?
[I am hesitant to say ‘our’. I am again hesitant of claiming African, or collective anything except a collective trauma that happens epigenetically to perpetrators and victims. White South Africans might be a ‘special category’ of those who are often happy to claim to be African while living off the spoils of the oppression and looting of the continent].
This is one of the reasons I find the 20.35 Africa collections so necessary, along with publications like New Daughters of Africa which came out in 2019. This is because they weave through the differences and similarities. Critical theory conversations are alive in this space also, and I would like to call them ‘poetics’. Saidiya Hartman’s book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments explores the often ignored, sidelined, unseen lives, the lives of a beautiful refusal. Maybe that is what can align with African and South African poetics – a beautiful refusal. I am thinking now of the very beginning of 20.35 Africa’s Volume II, Momtaza Mehri’s ‘I am keening. I end where I begin’.
There have been many beautiful refusals in South African literary scenes. The Media 24 awards (#sowhite) is a repeat of what for many other countries happened in the years after colonization: a refusal of the definitional cannon, a refusal to always be seen in relation to colonial power. Ngugi wa’Thiong’o’s argument in ‘For the Abolition of the English Department’ argued for Africa to be seen in relation to itself, first. The thing is, if we put South Africa in relation to itself, first, we risk the xenophobic South African exceptionalism that also has powerful tentacles.
In 20.35 Africa we are all poets in conversation. We are poets on pages (a phrase that often conceals the racism in the South African literary community) speaking love, longing, birth and death, blood and grit. This is in the context of an upsurge in Black womxn’s poetry in South Africa. Over the last few years, I can think about so many books – Koleka Putuma, Vangile Gantsho, Danai Mupotsa, Katleho Shoro, Busisiwe Mahlangu, Nkateko Masinga, Emma Mabye, Jolyn Philips – to name a few, and these are new names, with new books, sometimes two or three of them. In this rush, there is a market for them as well. This is what we were shown by African Flavour Books, as unfortunate as that incident turned out; while it was open it was alive as a place for African literature (not only South African). I belong to a book stokvel, specifically for African literature. People are hungry, I think. I start that sentence and cannot finish it. People are hungry. Words are food (yet they are not). And we are in conversation as a continent. Echezonachukwu Nduka writes that the only way to defeat departure is to say goodbye & stay. South Africa is maybe sometimes between staying and going – the white literature, and I mean this as in the all-white panels, the white literature festivals, the dismissal of all that is not recognised or assimilated – should secede from our emergent beautiful African literature republic and let us breathe. TJ Dema pens:
Shaking off the lonely sleep
of civilization, dead growth of revolutions. (New Daughters of Africa)
What are your thoughts on this Sihle? Am I throwing off our history too easily? Do the new markets that even the large-scale capitalist bookshops, like Exclusive Books, increasing and including African and Pan African sections mean nothing for African literature today? (Also, Sihle, keep ventilating, with poetry and air).
Sihle: Yes Sarah, Koleka Putuma’s collection was groundbreaking; it has been one of the more noteworthy collections in recent years. She has inspired a new generation of writers who resonate with her very personal and honest message and this is an incredible achievement. The radical tone of the collection reminded me of an incident in 2015 when Thando Mgqolozana famously said: Look at yourselves – It is very abnormal. This was when he quit the white South African literary scene, shortly afterwards the Abantu Book Festival was born. In our history, it seems change is accelerated by these rather forceful collisions, and for me, this is rather unfortunate.
In a series of interviews with the African Poetry Book Fund, Gbenga Adesina was asked about the greatest challenge facing him as an African poet and it wasn’t surprising that he spoke about the inaccessibility of books particularly those of contemporary African poets. He then went on to speak about the challenge of the mainstream world and how it finds African metaphors to be alien. In the interview, he concludes by speaking of the delicate dance between power and periphery, between erasure and getting our songs heard in the world. In South African poetics I feel the issues are similar.
In my journey with South African poetics, I have found that a lot rests on contexts of selfhood and sociology. There are these ‘collisions’ but there have also been racial and cultural mergers since 1990. These mergers showcase the diversity in ideologies between contemporary black South Africans based on this generation’s unique context of blackness in the township versus being black in suburbia. For instance, when I read Song of Lawino by Ugandan poet Okot p’Bitek, I immediately thought that Ocol would most likely be deemed a ‘coconut’ in the context of the township. For those in my generation, thresholds of blackness are continuously questioned based on the spaces they occupy. I have found that my presence in certain spaces – writing poetry, the way I speak English, and even dreaming in English are treated as a betrayal. Whilst the existence of these mergers is one that I feel should not be denied, I do also feel that they will only intensify in pronounced tones. Let me conclude by saying that in the context of racial fetishism, the juxtapositions are the kind of things that I have been thinking about lately.
As we wind down Sarah, perhaps you could touch on your thoughts on the future of African poetics. There is the exciting expansion process that 20.35 Africa is currently undergoing alongside the emergence of new literary journals such as Lolwe, Doek and Down River Road; how do you feel about the future of what’s to come for African poetry?
Sarah: I am a historian and I believe in the future. I am a poet, and I believe in the future. I hear Aja Monet’s voice:
and our smiles will terrify you
because we will be laughing
and we will be cruel
and there will be no remorse
and your children will be ours
and we will make new ways without you
and you will miss who you could’ve been
…
and only love
only love
only
love will get you through.
It is hard not to feel the world fragmenting and welding together in this moment. My position is one of wanting to walk in the shadows, yet being a poet, I am called to speak even though at times I also should not. I think the Abantu Book Festival is watering a growing garden of need for space without any white gaze, without possibilities of the performance for power. That quote: Look at yourselves. This is abnormal, rings loud in South African literary spaces. But so does Koleka Putuma’s ‘lifeline’ and her you owe your dreams your courage, which is now on T-shirts and tote bags. I believe in African poetics because I believe there is a power emanating from a space we are scared to speak but which we (and you, and never me) and we (and her, and never me) taste. That is rising. That is where I believe the future of African poetics is: burning and rising. To close, a quote from Vangile Gantsho, from a poem to Fezeka “Khwezi” Kuzwayo.
I am burning mama. Mama, I am burning!
Sihle Ntuli, born in 1990, is poet and classicist from Durban. He holds a Master of Arts degree in Classical Civilizations and has lectured previously at the University of the Free State. During his tenure, he was awarded the 2019 CTL Innovation Award for Curriculum Design and Delivery. He is the author of 2015’s Stranger and Rumblin: a chapbook which is forthcoming from Uhlanga Press. He has had work published in various journals in South Africa and across the African continent. His poetry has been previously shortlisted for the DALRO Poetry Prize in 2017 and longlisted for the Sol Plaatjie EU Prize in 2016, 2017, and 2019 respectively. He currently resides in Durban.
Sarah Godsell is a poet, historian, and educator. She is currently a lecturer in History at the School of Education at the University of the Witwatersrand. She has two published collections of poetry, Seaweed Sky in 2016, with Poetree Publications, and Liquid Bones 2018, with impepho press. She was born in Johannesburg in 1985 and has a love and passion for the city. Her work explores themes of colonial violence, capitalist violence, intimate violence, and love and strength between women. The surreal, the more than real, and the images of nature fill her work. Although often pulled down, she consistently chooses up.