Portia Opare: Hello Tjawangwa. It’s a pleasure to be talking with you. The internet is usually quick to spit out interesting titbits about people. I’d wanted to find your nationality – where you come from, what your name means, where and what you call home. There was nothing. Of course, one can infer from pieces here and there that you’re originally from Botswana. I found that some of your poems feature a clear sense of home, even a definite theme of nostalgia. Others, for example, “Biography or The Good News,” have the speaker shedding themselves of “country and border and borders.” I guess I have two questions: what is home to you?
Tjawangwa Dema: There is no great secret. I have no spectacular tale of woe and while curiousity is a large part of my own work I rather like the idea of having vast swaths of privacy. Home is anywhere – I insist on that possibility even as I recognise that officials have the power to put you on a plane and ship you to a country you haven’t ever been to – Rwanda, Cambodia, etc – rather than let you stay where you are. Or that you can put your babies to sleep and wake up to an invasion before breakfast. Home has not been one place for me for a long time and so my idea of home, perhaps naively, contains the premise that I should be able to leave and come back when I wish though many who have ever applied for visas will tell you how tightly regulated and expensive this movement often is.
Home is also complicated by family, law, society, politics, environmental conditions and so on and so I suspect poets will be grappling with this rich question for a long time still. Within Botswana’s borders my name – which is iKalanga and means “it has been found” – can locate me quite specifically. It “outs” me as someone who likely has a first language before Setswana, who possibly does not belong to the eight Tswana tribes and therein lies another complication of what home can mean, even in a country that has been widely touted as exemplary and stable.
Portia Opare: In preparing for this interview, I found that most of your early works were spoken word pieces. Spoken word was a big deal for contemporary African poets in the early 2000s. Do you get to do a lot of spoken word these days? And is spoken word radically different from poetry in its written form?
Tjawangwa Dema: I had been performing or reading my work out loud for a good ten years before I sought publication. That said, through word of mouth I had been invited to read not just in Botswana but in New Delhi, Paris, Johannesburg and so on, so I knew I had something of an audience, a potential readership. And I was at these festivals and people would walk up to me afterwards and want to know where they could buy the book. The one I hadn’t written yet. The trouble was, at various points, I didn’t feel the work was ready to be published and at another, there weren’t really any Botswana-based publishers that were interested in publishing poetry collections. There still aren’t as far as I know.
While I don’t particularly refer to my readings as spoken word (the distinction doesn’t even exist in Setswana, a poem is always spoken whatever else you do with it) I certainly think I have a performer’s sense of what it means to engage an audience. I don’t assume the audience’s attention, I court it – within reason – until the reading is done. Sometimes I think the main difference is about the formality and informality of structures, the ‘where’ a listener/reader accesses the “text.” A number of people who came up through the spoken word scene as I did, talk a lot about community, about the “live” aspects of their literature and how they were supported or rarely critiqued in rigorous ways. Not every scene engenders this response but I personally needed to step back from the scene in order to focus on what the poem, the words, and the line (and not I or my literal voice) looked like while the poem was happening. But I want to be clear, Setswana literary culture still retains proximity to its oral origins and I continue to learn much from performance. It would be a mistake, I think, to imagine that spoken word requires a sharp ear while “page” poetry does not. To this day I manage my lines on the page more as units of breath than I do as iambs and so on. But here’s the trick, we are essentially grappling with the same thing.
Portia: I was trawling the internet for some of your spoken word pieces. I was captivated by “Neon Poem.” It says this: “The trouble with poetry is that poems are bullshit unless they teach…poems have no purpose unless they reach the audience they are written for, the ears they are meant for.”
This claim contrasts with a conversation I read some time ago, where another poet suggested that if a child scribbles some words and calls it a poem, then it should be a poem. His primary argument was that poems – and art – do not need a definition, a purpose, or a goal. I disagree, of course, I’m old school old school when it comes to art, audience, and intention. So, do you still stand by this claim in “Neon Poem?” If yes, what sustains your conviction?
Tjawangwa: I suspect that the speaker in the poem – who is not always the same person as the poet – stands by their grandiose certainty. I as a poet am much more interested in inviting, provoking and intervening in conversations than I am in proclamations. I’m happy in the intersections and I don’t much care for fixed meanings (unless I’m speaking to my doctor or banker). This is one of those debates I find useful for the manyness of responses to it rather than for any correct response. I think any child or any person doing something creative for personal benefit, to aid therapy, for fun, etc. should always be encouraged. If, however, you are one of my students, my way of supporting you will differ – it becomes more exacting to match your ambition to publish, to be read, and to be taken seriously by a literary community. That requires rigour and setting standards of a sort. You may very well – after the lesson or a time of practice – come to the realisation that you disagree with all or parts of what I’ve said. Good for you, for us all.
I should also say that “Neon Poem” is of course in conversation with and borrows language from Amiri Baraka’s “Black Art”.
Portia: If you were the God of Art for a day, and you had the power to construct a poet out of whole cloth, what attributes would you give them? What is the greatest quality your poet could have? Would it be formal, or would it be their mastery of language or their quality of thinking?
Tjawangwa: A single quality?! I’m far too beholden to multiplicity to be any good at this game. I have questions. What will the poet’s assignment be? What kind of poet do they want to be and so on? When I go out for a fancy dinner, I tend to favour rather soft, naturally luxurious fabrics. When my husband and I go for 6-hour long walks I fully appreciate the cover my waterproofs and lightweight wick-friendly fabrics provide. If good clothing is sometimes about high-grade natural fibre and excellent construction the poet too must be an amalgam. But here is a pretence at answering your question – all of those poets must read. I’m answering your question from the UK and I’m conscious that here nine or so million adults are functionally illiterate so I don’t want to take that for granted. I understand reading, as I mean it here, to include active listening, noticing, enquiry and imaginative quality so I would make a poet who is inclined towards that kind of “reading.” One hopes that they could learn anything else they wanted by beginning there.
I understand reading, as I mean it here, to include active listening, noticing, enquiry and imaginative quality so I would make a poet who is inclined towards that kind of “reading.”
– Tjawangwa Dema
Portia: If we are going to speak about African poetry, wouldn’t we need to define what home is, have borders in place? Is it possible to conceptualize such expansive borderlessness at all?
Tjawangwa: Our elder, Keorapetse Kgositsile, has told us “In my language there is no word for citizen, which is an ingredient of that 19th-century omelette. That word came to us as part of the package that contained the bible and the rifle. But moagi, resident, is there and it has nothing to do with any border or boundary you may or may not have crossed before waking up on the piece of earth where you currently live.” Moagi, the one who lives there, who builds there, already belongs to that space and therefore it is by one/every definition their home. Real world borderlessness is beyond my scope, that’s a question for the experts. I can only say that I don’t think it is something enough of us, with the power to do something about it, want enough to make happen. At least not in my lifetime. To allow persons to move freely and not only to render desirable services or deliver goods? It seems to me that this mobile, porous, self-governing existence ‘threatens’ structures, does it not? As others have pointed out, how will “they” know who to tax, who to kick out, who to arrest, how will “they” keep your life unstable until you “voluntarily” leave if we can all come and go? Will power and its midwife-offspring, capital, not move from one echelon to the masses? No, borders serve clear and profitable purposes. The question is, for who?
Portia: Your “Elegy of the Half-Done Quilt” brought up familiar thoughts and feelings one considers best if left buried. I guess that’s the danger of poetry. How many women did you have to watch to write this poem and others like it? Of course, the poem is about a specific mother, with her peculiar lot in life. But somehow, it reads like the story of many mothers around the world, with their secret hurts, unspoken regrets and thankless loves. For instance, it felt like I was reading about my mother, the thankless sacrifices she made, and the sorries I couldn’t and haven’t said. How did you manage this – write about a mother, and at once write about a familiar, almost universal experience of motherhood, of knowing pain and regret?
Tjawangwa: I’m always watching women. Not just as exceptions to expectations but as their whole complicated selves. Patriarchy, culture, the overturning of progressive laws, etc make it easy to see the social or structural borders of women’s existences but I’m careful not to think of us as tropes, objects or mere foils for men’s existences. How many women have I watched? A whole lifetime of women, in-person, online, in books, on TV, from childhood memories filtered through my own womanhood, records both reporting and misrepresenting, at weddings, during confinement, in the absent stories and I watch myself too as I navigate life and the world. Occasionally I ‘interview’ women, especially about things I have little or no personal experience with. But mostly, the specific is surprisingly often relatable, “universal.” The more I selectively tell you about the street I grew up on, the sharper your image of your own street can become. Suddenly you too knew a woman who fetched water with a steel bucket or sold fat cakes except she was old or tall and she did this instead of that and suddenly there we are; on neither street but on both.
Portia: The female subjects one reads about in The Careless Seamstress are rather powerful women. Take the persona in “Atropos,” “Vesta,” and “The Careless Seamstress.” These are women who at once “tack tiny gowns” for the christening of infants and turn to make the “perfect backstitch for a funeral pall.” These are women who dress corpses as children and then again as brides. They are women who know the way things “puncture and hold.” And yet, they seem to embrace the fate of terrible romantic unions that are doomed from the very beginning. Isn’t there a contradiction here? That a woman could be so powerful, so in control, and yet so doomed by a path she chose or was chosen for her?
Tjawangwa: Do they embrace fate or are they occasionally resigned to a set of seemingly insurmountable circumstances? I suspect that contradiction and nuance are willing, if strange, bedfellows. Take this with a pinch of salt but poetry sometimes feels like one of those last strongholds for nuance. It is unashamed to sit with a question or connection, to “hold both thoughts at once.” So, you are not wrong to see contrast there but do you not see it when you look up from the poem or back into memory? Life is complicated. The first woman I met who had been abused terribly by her husband worked, throughout that relationship, for an organisation that supported women to transition from abusive relationships. She was brilliant at her job.
Portia: So I came to contemporary poetry as a newbie. I’d mostly read classical Western poetry and older African poetry. I have noted that contemporary poets/writers make much of the body. Take Chris Abani’s forward to your an/other pastoral. He says:
“…the body precedes all things in this world; before thought, before language is this body, at once real and sculpted…when we say environment, we mean only as my body finds its way, when we say climate, we mean as I feel it on the largest of organs, skin. When we say cartography, we mean to chart, to map, not the world but this body’s journey through the world and this means, the world as I know and see and think.”
I have my own thoughts about the body, and so I have looked forward to the opportunity to ask any poet this question about why the body is so written about. You write about the body, its shape, its ways, its knowledge and memory in “Taxonomy,” The Borderland, Not No Body. an/other pastoral explores nature and its interaction with Black bodies. Is it just this network of tissue and bone that elicits so much interest? Why is it interesting at all? Is there something to say about the soul and spirit? Of the mind?
Tjawangwa: We are more than our bodies of course. It is important, I think, to know this. But a large part of what makes us us, our movements, our practices, our limitations, our selves as perceived by others, what makes all that visible is often the body. As Chris writes in his intro “when we say” x “we mean” as x relates to the body. Why write about the body? Well, poets are always both looking for points of contact and diversion – a shorthand that is legible to many can be useful. We all understand what a body is. Some may think of bodies in rather limited or fixed ways – as always binary, exact number of digits or limbs, hips or lips of a certain size, a brain that does this if you do this, etc – but we broadly know what a body is. So as a poet I can now work on other things, move the metaphor or imagery along. I can say to myself what if the body were a boat and vice versa, what if a body did this and not that, what if this same body in this same poem were black what else would change? What if language itself was a body, how would our chosen words move, how would they react if we placed them next to each other, would they be clichés that resemble atrophied muscles or would they flick and pulse, what senses would they deploy? The latter while not about the body is very much a fundamental writing lesson from the body. Is there something to say about the soul and mind? I’m almost certain of it, I just don’t know what besides the obvious – that the body is entangled with whichever of those aspects we believe exist. It is part of an ecosystem, a tree amongst many with branches and roots.
What if language itself was a body, how would our chosen words move, how would they react if we placed them next to each other, would they be clichés that resemble atrophied muscles or would they flick and pulse, what senses would they deploy? The latter while not about the body is very much a fundamental writing lesson from the body.
– Tjawangwa Dema
Portia: an/other pastoral seeks to answer the question, “what does nature poetry read like when it reflects the experiences of People of Colour.” It’s an interesting question for someone like me, who has always had a universal view of all humanity, and nature. Are there distinct experiences and interactions people of colour have with nature in general, and with nature poetry? Did you find any answers to these questions, or did you have any hypotheses in mind from the onset of the project?
Tjawangwa: In the spirit of honesty, when I ask questions poetically I’m not always looking for answers or a solution, the asking creates its own path and that’s often generative. That said, the collection’s opening poem, and also the first poem I wrote for this collection, is titled “Prologue: Hypothesis” so certainly the speaker in that poem suggests at least one. There is a lot to say that we don’t have the space to get into.
This changes with geography but “the nature gap” exists – we aren’t all free to access nature. And when we do, for reasons related to class, race, gender and history, we are not all made to feel welcome. I won’t wade into reports or social media hashtags but it is clear to see that there are some shared experiences amongst people of colour. I’m not suggesting that these experiences are identical.
Portia: There are a lot of issues that could capture a poet’s creative interests. I have become so used to expecting certain themes – politics of power and identity, racial injustice, our disenchantment with democracy and development, and perhaps with religion – from African/ Black poetry. Dedicating an entire collection to ecological issues is perhaps very novel, is it not? How did your foray into ecopoetry begin?
Tjawangwa: To say that us dedicating work to ecological issues is novel risks unintentionally obscuring contributions by African writers who have thought about everything from totems to thunderstorms, snow to human-animal transformations. The question of how they employ those markers of nature in their poetry is for the scholars to wrangle and the publishers to label but the imagery, the symbolism, the engagement has always already been there. And while I understand that you are specifically talking about a single poet’s entire collection, outside of English I couldn’t look Bedouin or Batswana poets in the eye, for example, and say that we don’t think carefully about animals or landscapes, etc in poetry. Whether the focus is nature writing or environmental or ecopoetic writing complicates the question. Personally, to look back at my chapbook Mandible or at The Careless Seamstress is to already encounter an interest in the environment as Kwame Dawes alludes in the foreword to the latter. Part of what an/other pastoral hopes to do by looking at black and POC relationships to the environment is to offer an alternative lens through which to talk about life which brings us back to “politics of power and identity, racial injustice, our disenchantment with democracy and development, and perhaps with religion” as you say.
Portia: Most of the poems in an/other pastoral assume a symbiotic relationship between man and man, man and nature. Throw in a dash of spiritism and myth, and this view is quite like what some people in the village I grew up in believed. Here’s my question: how do we modern people walk our way back to believing that we are indeed (if we are at all) connected to all nature? Why should we care at all?
Tjawangwa: There is no question, we are an integral part of nature. Arguably, “we” are the weak link in the ecosystem; we take more than we give. We side-line ecological equilibrium in the name of development, growth, capital, power and so on. It’s no insult or myth to say this, it is a matter of record. Take the rainforests for example, I believe we’ve destroyed about 50% of them since the 1940s. The trouble is, about 20% of our oxygen is produced by rainforests, they stabilize the earth’s climate, provide a world for various species and there are medicines that can only be found there. Someone said “there is no planet b,” I think at the very least, even if you couldn’t care less about the baobab or the baboon’s existence, that statement alone should make one sit up.
Portia: So, I’m like Ama in Nationhood for the Domesticated. Like Ama, I think animals belong outside the house. And I could wager most Africans (at least West Africans, whom I am more familiar with) share the same view. Sure, we find animals important, and your poem Wena, Kgomo/You, Cow better captures our relationship to animals. Animals are more “goddess of joy and victory over hunger/ over thirst” than lovable companions whose teeth we brush and whose fur we groom. There is some distance. Would you say this distance indicts us in any way in our relationship with nature?
Tjawangwa: You are the fifth or so person to read an/other pastoral and focus on pets in this way. I understand why people living with little to no yard space or in cold weather might develop intimate social relationships with animals. There are many other reasons of course why folks adopt pets as companions, accessories, or family. It’s not for me but I can respect that this is one way of kinship. For instance, during the lockdowns a number of people felt that having pets helped their mental health; that the care was reciprocal.
So much shapes human beings; familial, tribal and national culture, personality, experience, and geography. If you grow up outside the cities in Botswana you are in close proximity to out-there-nature. Everything from elephants up north to a desert in the west or the Okavango delta or just good old farmland. That we generally don’t spend hours petting domestic or farm animals or praising daffodils is only one measure of “distance.” However, when you turn to language, to the months or seasons for example, suddenly the attentiveness to nature is quite apparent. Don’t get me started on people’s names, ploughing practices or proverbs and idioms that rely entirely on an intimate understanding of and entanglement with nature. Distant is the last word I would use.
Portia: Okay. I read from your bio that you were formerly chairperson of the Writers’ Association of Botswana, and an Honorary Fellow of the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program. Additionally, you formerly co-produced the Africa Writes Bristol Festival and currently serve on the Lyra: Bristol Poetry Festival steering committee as well as the Bristol Poetry Institute Partnerships Board. Will it be safe to assume that you’ve encountered many young writers in your career, some of whom are your contemporaries and some of whom you have mentored? Does this exposure allow you to venture an insight into what it is contemporary African writers are writing about? Can you say anything about contemporary African poetry, the shape it is taking, the commitment that drives its poets, and what it means to African peoples?
Tjawangwa: This is a big question so I’m going to redirect; by looking at the necessary and interventional work of organisations such as the African Poetry Book Fund (APBF) which has its many fingers on the many pulses of African poetry, we can infer a number of things. As with poetry from any continent, the issues African poetry is interested in are varied and too many to list. But luckily for us all, the APBF has published over 60 chapbooks in well under a decade, which makes for convenient and beautifully packaged ‘insight into what contemporary African writers are writing about.
The ecosystem of African poetry today is not just robust it is a network that demonstrates how African poets are not only reading each other but reading globally and critically. At the various national levels, this ‘network’ encompasses journals, festivals, libraries, book clubs, podcasts, self-published and traditionally published writers as well as readers who seek out poetry by Africans, specifically.
In general, African poetry is not static, it evolves like any other body of writing because it is engaged not only with itself but with a global circulation of texts. What it looks like at any stage is a reflection of that.
Portia: Here is my penultimate question: you have dedicated significant commitment to poetry. You must believe that literature matters, that poetry makes a difference. What hopes does poetry have for the world as we know it?
Tjawangwa: I cannot speak for poetry. I can only say that I enjoy poetry that questions, that treats even hope with great suspicion. Poetry that looks closely, names, recovers, reflects, researches, revivifies. All those useful things we think of as belonging to science or analytical thought. Poetry loves alternative sources – mythology, cosmologies, rumour, imagination, the local news, whatever lies beyond our navels. We can only hope it can archive what has been erased or is perhaps slipping out of memory. It may also offer representation, joy or fantasy to someone who needs it. That too is a kind of hope.
Portia: Lastly, are you working on any new projects at the moment? Do you have any final words?
Tjawangwa: I’m always working. Publishing is a different matter.
Tjawangwa Dema is author of The Careless Seamstress (University of Nebraska Press, 2019) and winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poetry. Her chapbook Mandible (Slapering Hol, 2014) was published as part of the New-Generation African Poets box set series and her latest collection, an/other pastoral (No Bindings, 2022) was longlisted for the 2022 Poetry Book Awards and is an Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize Award finalist.
Tjawangwa has given readings in over twenty countries as well as received fellowships and residencies from institutions including the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program, Northwestern University’s Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities and the Danish International Visiting Artist program. Her poetry has appeared in multiple publications and been translated into numerous languages.