Nica Cornell: Hi Lillian. Where in the world do you find yourself and what do your days looks like right now?

LillianAkampurira: I am in Kampala, Uganda. My days are hot, sunny, and heavy with the reality of restricted movement. Private cars need a government issued sticker to be on the road. Public transport is banned, including boda bodas – unless they are carrying food. When I walk to the local market, I’m unnerved that it’s so crowded and most people are not wearing masks. At the entrance of the grocery store is a guard armed with a baton and a large bottle of hand sanitizer. The air has the sting of alcohol and all I can think of is the virus swimming in the air. I walk the ten minutes back home, with the handles of the loaded bags digging into the flesh of my palms.

And what about you?

Nica: I am in London, England. My days are all spent in our flat, with a visit to the park for fresh air. The air is still sharp with cold. The schools are open again and restaurants and cafes are doing takeaways but otherwise almost everything is closed. I have not seen anyone I know, other than my husband, for months. Under lockdown, it is a strange bubble of a universe that only stretches physically as far as about a block. It echoes when I was homebound due to mental illness. I’d only just begun to be well enough to be in the world again when the pandemic hit. So, I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve been beyond my little area in two years which chafes my soul.

I am working on a book chapter for a collection on African women’s intellectual histories and applying for jobs. I’ve been introducing myself to your writing and I was immediately struck by how immersive and sensory it is. Even when what you are describing is terrible or sore, I find myself taking comfort in the words. There is so much ferocity and vitality. I found that it mirrors how I experience the world. It makes me feel a little less lonesome. 

Lillian: “Immersive and sensory,” these are kind words to say of my work, Nica. Somewhere in my poetic journey it occurred to me that poetry is feeling, and feeling is poetry. That alone sounds vague, and one might reply, “But isn’t all art feeling?” What I am trying to say is that I seek for what a poem makes me feel when I read it, and when I write, I query whether what I have felt is reflected on the page. In both processes it matters to me that the poem should be memorable. As for lonesomeness, I wish it were alien to me, but then, again, what sort of human would I be if I didn’t retreat into myself every once in a while? I think life is such that one must feel detached from the world, sometimes. Maybe for artists and/or introverts like myself more so than others. So, yes, I think that lonesomeness that plagues me also bears a restlessness which pushes me to read and write, and maybe I might find some sort of meaning. Which, in itself, is an oddity because life is filled with vitality and ferociousness; and yet we remain on this rotating mouse wheel to express it. Am I making sense? I think in the process of answering your question I caught another thread? What do you think?

Nica: I think you have captured what it is to move through the world with soft skin and an itch to comprehend it all. I find it hard to make or find something to root myself in while also being pulled in opposing directions – to recognize the precarity of my world and simultaneously allow myself to be immersed in it. Your poem “Notice. Lake Kills” evokes this for me. It reminds me of a story I read by the Australian journalist, Bunty Avieson, in her book The Dragon’s Voice: How Modern Media Found Bhutan. In the book, seven schoolboys lie to their parents on a Sunday; they sneak off to a popular swimming spot. After a sunny afternoon of picnicking and wading, the weather changes. The river rises and – despite a rescue attempt – all but one of the boys drown. There is something both slippery and sore about the echoes between these two poems – how quickly the victims go from wholly alive to lost; it’s in the language you use to tell how Rashid and his friends, “are loping into the lake / as if the water is air, / they are buoyed by a slow wave, / fingers teasing the tip of a crest, / and we never see them again, / this version of twelve, strappling men, laughing…”

Lillian: I’m not familiar with Bunty Avieson’s book. You mention that she is a journalist which is interesting because when I wrote this poem I went through various scraps of newspapers on the incident in Uganda. I suppose that explains its “reportage narrative” in some areas. At the time of the incident, I was too emotionally spent to engage creatively with it. After the fact, I relied on several secondary sources to write the poem. It is uncanny that the human experience across life’s divides is essentially the same; we all know something of life, death, happiness, loss, and we can all relate whether the circumstances are similar or not. In this poem, the undistinguished personae, the witnesses to a morbid scene, echo a sense of “a detached community” because they are helpless to do anything about the tragedy. Is there a sense of collective national trauma when such an incident happens? What can anyone do but watch and feel guilty? Who is to blame when such a thing happens? Does apportioning blame quell anything? I have no right answers for these questions, but in such cases, they are my obsession. The best I can do as a writer is record that they happened, whatever good that will do. What has been your experience about writing trauma?

Nica: As you say, we all experience loss, pain, and trauma. Living with complex PTSD, which happens when you are trapped in a traumatizing experience for a long time and cannot act to escape it, writing is my way out from inside that space/place.

For me, that has manifested in different ways. I explained this to Ugochukwu Damian when he interviewed me for Africa in Dialogue last year, that, “my poetry is the one place I only feel responsible to myself. I’m telling the truth about how I feel and experience the world. When that resonates with another human being, it is such a gift. But when it comes to my poetry, specifically, that isn’t why I write it. I write it to heal. In it, I am finding the words for pain. It doesn’t mean that it doesn’t continue to have its echoes and effects. There are certainly moments when visiting a poem is a kind of picking at a scar. But there are also moments such as this one. Publishing “Thirteenth” in 20.35 Africa, six years after writing it, allowed me to pass a quiet hand over an old scar and keep breathing.

Then I have also had the experience of writing about a trauma to the perpetrator or person responsible as a kind of purging myself of the poison. Sometimes this has affected change. In my first year at university, I was hazed, forced to take part in degrading, sexist, and objectifying initiation rituals. Writing to the university leadership about it led to a debate about the policy on campus which led to it being changed. This can be the power of truth-telling. You can never know what the consequences of speaking out will be, sometimes they are positive, sometimes negative; but I have spoken out many times when I felt that I needed to, for myself. It’s a reclamation of power, of my voice.

Lillian: The pain continues, and healing may not altogether be immediate. Still, the catharsis of writing about trauma cannot be understated. While reading poetry and fiction, I underline and highlight the things I have experienced before. The other thing that happens is that an experience or trauma lies in a filmy dimension of your conscience or imagination and can only be recognized when encountered while reading. That is helpful because I can name my pain, it is comforting because then I know another human has experienced my pain. “Scratching the scar” as you put it is like marking a milestone you did not know was there to mark; because if it is a scar presently, then there was once a time it was a fresh wound, then a putrid or potentially septic engorgement that has now come to healing. So revisiting work serves as prospective relief. And you are brave for speaking out.  

Nica: Thank you. What are you reading currently?

Lillian: I am reading Artist, the Ruler: Essays on Art, Culture and Values by Okot P’Bitek. The title essay leaves me apprehensive as an artist in the world right now. For example, is my mind “powerful, sensitive, and imaginative” enough to influence the thought system of my people? I then wonder, who, anyway, are my people? Who considers me their people? The two surnames I bear are testament to the constant tensions among our fifty-plus nationalities that make up the colonial construct that is Uganda. I have seen great artists in Uganda, like Okot P’Bitek said, “these/those supreme artists, the imaginative creators of their time, who form the consciousness of their time,” be let down by their populace because of variant “sectarianisms.” When some artists protest against the colonial, puritan Ugandan speech to fight oppression and impunity, many Ugandans bury their heads in the sand, yet they are under the same yoke.

It is uncanny that the human experience across life’s divides is essentially the same; we all know something of life, death, happiness, loss, and we can all relate whether the circumstances are similar or not.

– Lillian Akampurira

Nica: You’ve captured something important by distinguishing between the question of “Who are my people?” and “Who considers me their people?” Does belonging require mutual recognition? This is what chases me. There’s a murkiness to my identity as a white South African woman. I was born in 1993, the year before South Africa’s first democratic election and raised by an anti-apartheid activist mother. But the legacies of apartheid and colonialism always hang low and near. Thus far, I have probably come closest to articulating those tensions in my poem about my grandmother, “Granny B(e)a” which concludes:

I tend her
with my crochet
my typing speed
my monogamy
my difficulty losing weight
all a white woman should be when she is born in the 1920s

I tend her
with my humanism
my activism
my writing
my loyalty
my morality
my Spirit
all a white woman is
when she is also an African.

Lillian: One would not feel that one does not belong without mutual recognition. It would be a case of unrequited love, that one would always feel a stranger in one’s own home country despite being in proximity with people of one’s genome or biotype. When you say “this is what chases me,” I am struck by the power of this present emptiness that crosses over into your reality. I sense you feel desolate from this being “chased,” which in a way affirms the lack of mutual recognition from your country or country folk. I imagine you get exhausted not only by having to defend your South Africanness, but also the process of coming to terms with it must have been difficult. That’s the feeling I get from the first three lines of your poem: “I don’t know if she called herself an African. / She died before I called myself one. / She died before I called my Self.” Which leads me to ask, what did you identify as before you called yourself South African? It seems to me you had a choice, or one was denied you by history and/or the colour of your skin. I also cannot help but notice the silence on identity in your poem. I suppose this is the case with many white South African women of your generation. I think you see where I’m going with this? Can you articulate what sort of trauma roots in your identity? Was it any different from that of your grandmother and her generation? Which parts of her trauma (if at all), did you inherit from her? I love the succinctness and simplicity of the “self” in the third line. It reminds me of how we as humans journey or do self-discovery. It always surprises me how your eye sees, and I mean really gets to see a part of you that was previously hidden, mysterious or inconsequential. And there is bravery and maturity that come with discovering the specific self. But, unfortunately, it also comes with the desolateness of being in that frame of mind when other people around you are not. Daad Sharfi, in the poem, “Be(coming) Home to Myself,” in the first volume of 20.35 Africa, intuits that one must peel several layers off to discover their identity, that identifiers such as country suffocate one’s being and by extension prevent them from coming into their self and their home. She is Sudanese, and grapples with the same questions. What’s your take on the poem? On the other hand, Karen Jennings’ poem, “Let Me Go,” also in the first volume of 20.35 Africa, centers on the persona’s bloodlines and their sense of home being tied to the land. Her poem jumps to my attention because, like you, she is white and South African. Do you feel any sense of kinship with the land of your birthplace? 

Nica: South African is the only identifier I’ve always known – long before I identified myself by my gender or race, I think probably because of my mother most of all. The whole arc of my life has been shaped by my mother’s rootedness as a South African. My mom had visited my dad in Holland where he was working as a musician a year before I was born. But she left because she wanted to be home when South Africa became a democratic country. So that sense of not only belonging to my country but bearing the responsibility to change it for the better, deeply pervaded my upbringing, with my mom’s anti-apartheid activism being the stories I imbibed. So, I was embedded in South African and African political symbols and music growing up, but it was only when I went to live in Accra at 18, to be a human rights volunteer, that I developed the language to identify actively as an African. Between South African exceptionalism and the silences about broader African history in the school curriculum, or even just the role of other African countries in the anti-apartheid struggle; it was not an identity that I claimed to myself until then. My Africanness has kind of been subsumed by the “easier,” or more legible, South African identity until then. But being in Ghana as the only volunteer from another African country with all the other Europeans and Americans, it was so clear that I had more in common with the students we were working with than the other volunteers that I struggled to relate with even though we shared the same skin color.

I defended my South Africanness in Ghana – where people struggled to grasp the concept of a white African. It was always, “So you live in South Africa, but where were your parents or grandparents born?” But, far beyond that, you have struck the tender truth with that word, “desolate,” because it’s more the “kind” of South African I am, or the South Africa I was raised to believe in, that has always made me an outlier. It’s my family history, my culture, my ethics, my life choices, my activism, my politics, and, more than defending, drowning myself in silence because I have also felt that as a white South African woman, I do not have the right to defend myself.

As I have grown up and learned to carry even more what it means to move through the world with white privilege and the specific history of whiteness in South Africa, this became more and more confusing and alienating. Because it leaves you in a kind of eternal unbelonging; or worse, what in Afrikaans we call volks-veraaier, people-betrayer. I physically lost my voice at one point and could not write when I was in the Black Student Movement at university – because of how deeply I had internalized that combination of shame, confusion, and self-abnegation. For an abuse survivor, that’s a particularly dangerous mix. 

And apart from that, it’s happened my whole life – high school friends saying, “You don’t dance like you’re white;” the Kinshasa border guards who discussed how I must have “an African parent because you have an African body, apart from the color;” not to mention the university friends who routinely declared, “Nica, you’re not one of them, you’re one of our whites,” or simply, “You’re not white.” None of these things are meant cruelly. They’re meant to reassure. I used to take them as compliments when I was younger. But I’ve come to realize it requires a kind of silence, or self-denial, because this also just is my body, my identity, my Self. And these statements, as much as I comprehend the structural frameworks that inform them, also require a kind of repudiation of my history – of my mother, and my father, and my grandmother; all flawed and wounded human beings, but deeply ethical, and deeply committed to our country and continent.        

Lillian: What are you reading right now?

Nica: I am reading Love Like Salt, a memoir by Helen Stevenson about living with her daughter’s cystic fibrosis and listening to The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans by David Abulafia.  

Lillian: The book sounds interesting. A daughter suffering from a disease they inherited from their mother has been the more told story, so, is there a sort of reversal trauma from the daughter to the mother? Otherwise, I know it’s getting nippy over there, do you feel more at home in London or South Africa?

Nica: I still feel more at home in South Africa. I miss it profoundly. The two poems you brought together earlier give me words for the opposing forces that have held my center taut. Karen Jennings articulates this so well:

Let me go,
homeward
to the mountain’s grip,
the accent of fynbos, of
vineyards verdant-bright
gathered on the slopes. I need
the crush of grapes and earth,
the comfort of a view.

This struck me because I have always longed for the sea which has always been my home, no matter how frigid the water. But during lockdown, I began to long for the long landscapes of my father’s beloved Karoo, where he knows the name and history of every plant in the veld.

At the same time, she closes with such painful heft, “…my failure to come home,” which speaks to the guilt I have carried for leaving; and the fact that I have been locked out of returning for almost two years now, because of my immigration status here and now the pandemic.
It also speaks to the truth – that I never imagined myself rooting anywhere. But falling in love changed things for me – both times. I was with my first partner for four years while we were students in South Africa. He was Namibian. And the scourge of Afrophobic violence haunted him – so I knew when we finished our studies, I couldn’t ask him to stay. Living with that changed things for me. I began to really imagine other possibilities for the first time. Then later I met my now-husband three months before he left South Africa for England to study – a place that I couldn’t comprehend living, even then. But learning how to (which I am still doing every day) and being pinned in place like a dead butterfly (by my visa struggles, my panic disorder, and then COVID-19) has forced me to do exactly what Daad Sharfi describes with such delicacy and delight in “Be(coming) Home to Myself”:

I undress until I can call nothing but this body a home
…
I do not make boundaries of my being
I become porous
And always,
Always
Ready to welcome you back.

I have been tremendously lonely here. But I have also learned to enjoy certain things about England – it has made me realize how much the heavy threat of sexual violence has shaped my everyday life. It took me a long time to learn to walk in the dark – which you must do here because the sun goes down so early in winter! I look forward to autumn which we don’t really have at home and I revel in here. I love watching the leaves change.

Lillian: The only season I am looking forward to is the post Covid-19 season. I am at home and still feel suffocated by this virus, so I can only imagine how much harder it would be if I was not in a familiar environment. Covid-19 has cut the world up in ways a globalized world could not imagine.

Nica: Absolutely. I think your use of the word “suffocated” is apt. In my poem “Virus 2.0,” I explore how the two sensations of COVID-19 – being pinned in place and drowning in one’s lungs – evoke my trauma at Oxford University. As we’ve both explored, the refuge from that feeling, for me, has once again been the written word. That’s how I conclude “Travelling with Kapuscinski”: “I cannot leave…but I am travelling again. I am in Uzbekistan with Colin Thubron; on the Mediterranean with David Abulafia; in Cairo with Amitav Ghosh; with Kapuscinski at the foot of the mountain.”

To close, I think Jeanette Winterson acutely articulates this in her book Why Be Happy When You Could be Normal in which she writes about her life as a survivor of child abuse.

“I had no one to help me, but the T.S. Eliot helped me. So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn’t be read at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange and stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language—and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is.”

I think the present tense of that is vital. We need language because life is tough for so many of us. That’s what we have seen with this COVID-19 season – whatever else was going on, whatever struggles we were fighting individually or collectively, the world has been cut up in unimaginable ways as you rightly say. I have just finished listening to Michael Wood’s The Story of China. In it, he tells how, “In Chinese culture, poets have always been historians too.” Wood shows how vast and cyclical is human history, so far beyond the current events even of the last few centuries that can feel both searing and unshakable. And how words can be, how we continue to live in their midst. Chinese poet Du Fu died over 1000 years ago. He lived through and wrote about one of the deadliest wars in history, the An Lushan Rebellion. Du Fu died in obscurity, but since then, he has come to be viewed as China’s greatest poet. In 1937, during the Nanjing Massacre, his words were graffitied on fire-scorched walls – “The state is destroyed but the country remains” – and he is still taught in the national curriculum today. Wood reflects on why that is – and concludes that Du Fu’s poetry continues to resonate with meaning today because “his writings are a sustained articulation of remembrance in the face of loss.” I think that is what writing proffers us – as writers and readers, a path to living even in the midst of pain.

Thank you for speaking to me across the seas. I hope we are both able to enjoy freedom of movement again soon.

Lillian: I am glad I can turn to  poetry in tough times like this. And yes, it is inevitable that poets will be historians because they are observers of life. I can see how someone who has never met poetry can think of it as luxury, etc, like Jeannette Winterson says. But I believe we all have our processes and when time comes for poetry to show her hand, whoever is seeing it will have no choice but to walk the journey.

Thank you too Nica, I enjoyed this conversation very much. For now we remain traveling in words of story and poetry; at least we can go somewhere, metaphorically.

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Nica Cornell is a South African writer with her Masters in African Studies. Over the past 13 years, she has published poetry, academic research, essays, and columns, both online and in hardcopy. Most recently, her poems “How, Milkbox Tray, Virus & Part II” and essay “Travelling with Kapuscinski” were published in the inaugural edition of Taint Taint Taint Magazine. Her work can be read at www.nicacornell.com. She currently lives in London with her husband and grumpy cat.

Lillian Akampurira Aujo is a poet and fiction writer from Uganda. She is the winner of the Jalada Prize for Literature 2015 and the Babishai-Niwe Poetry Award 2009. She has been shortlisted for the Gerald Kraak Award 2019,  the Brittle Paper Anniversary Award 2018, and longlisted for a Nommo Award 2018 (from the African Speculative Fiction Society). She is a 2017 fellow of the Ebedi Residency in Nigeria. She has presented poetry at the 2017 GIMAC meeting in Addis Ababa. Her work has been published by the Caine Prize, Prairie Schooner, Transition, Jalada, Gerald Kraak Award, Babishai-Niwe Poetry Award, Bahati Books, Omenana, Enkare Review, Brittle Paper, and 20.35 Africa: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry. Some of her poetry have been translated or are set to be translated to Malayalam and Italian. She has been a mentor in the WritivismAt5 Online Mentoring program and also facilitated creative writing workshops in Kampala. She is one of three editors for “Go Tell Home,” a 2019 poetry-poster anthology by FEMRITE (Uganda Women Writers Association); it is a collaborative work with poetry, translation into multiple Ugandan local languages, and Ugandan visual artists.