Latest / Soul Salon with Ayandastood / Weeping Becomes a River Ft. Siphokazi Jonas

Transcript

Weeping Becomes a River Ft. Siphokazi Jonas · Soul Salon with Ayandastood

0:00
I started dreaming about publishing a book when I was in grade 11.
0:03
Wow.
0:04
It was actually a moment that first made me lose my confidence.
0:07
I had to release the shame, work through it,
0:10
and now I'm proud of what I have.
0:12
I'm just creating the Frankenstein's monster type of thing.
0:15
That's just like, this is it.
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Feels like there's so much attention and care
0:20
that went into every single line.
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I was born in 86, which is during the emergency years of South Africa.
0:27
But then I grew up during the transition years of South Africa.
0:30
Very struck by this maternal lineage of storytelling.
0:34
Does anything come through for you
0:35
on the role that black women have played?
0:38
So it is a little bit more of a modern setting,
0:40
but the stories are the same, you know, over the decades.
0:43
But this is the moment I said,
0:47
wow.
0:48
I love how you listen to yourself, the meditation, the waiting.
0:54
I didn't even know a book like this was possible.
0:56
I'm so curious with that.
0:58
What does the soul mean to you?
1:00
So I've been thinking about this because it is.
1:14
There are books and stories that leap off the page into your spirit,
1:19
dancing with your spirit, your soul, your essence,
1:22
that change you, that transport you,
1:24
and that move you in ways you won't,
1:26
you didn't even know you were seeking to be moved.
1:28
And I'm so honored to be sitting next to the author, the creator,
1:33
the, oh, the ashera of a stunning world,
1:36
into our hearts, into our world.
1:39
I want to welcome Sipo Guazi Jonas to the source salon.
1:42
How are you?
1:43
Thank you so, so much.
1:44
I'm very well, thank you.
1:45
Amazing introduction, by the way.
1:47
I feel like usually you get bios
1:48
and all of these boring things that I want to take a clip of it.
1:52
I'm so, I'm so, I'm so, I'm so, so honored to be sitting next to you.
2:01
Firstly, the title of this work, I just want to start there.
2:05
Weeping becomes a river.
2:06
Anyone who watches this, my hope is your takeaway is to go and read,
2:10
receive, dance with this book if you haven't already.
2:13
I'm so honored to be with you today.
2:15
So thank you, thank you, thank you.
2:17
I'm very, very well and excited.
2:19
And the first question I'd love to ask before we get into
2:22
the source salon question, is just to introduce you to us, to your world, to your work.
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I am a, you know, okay, let me actually put it like this,
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whenever I think if I wasn't doing what I'm doing, what would I be?
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What would I be doing?
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If I had another life, another completely different timeline.
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And I believe I'd be an inventor because I'm constantly thinking about
2:47
not just, you know, effective or more efficient or more interesting,
2:50
more creative ways to think about things, to look at things, to look at the world,
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but in terms of bringing something into being and using what's already there, right?
2:59
So it's not always just about the blank page.
3:01
I think about inventors as people who are able to piece together things,
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to transform things, to help us see things that we think we know, but in different ways.
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So in a way, it feels like that's what I do still creatively,
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even though I haven't invented something that changes how we live.
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But I'm a creator of things, of bring things into being.
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Because I think even the imagination doesn't come from a completely blank place.
3:29
It comes from the things we read, how we've been conditioned and raised,
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all the things we encounter, the things that we consume,
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and that, you know, are all living within this large world within us.
3:39
So I'm a storyteller.
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I'm a story creator.
3:43
I'm just trying to shift something, some needle in the world.
3:49
And I will say, if people have encountered what I do,
3:53
and they leave a little bit changed, or leave feeling a little more sensitized,
3:56
leave feeling, then I've done my job, then I've done what I'm here to do.
4:03
Yeah. Wow.
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Yeah.
4:07
I felt, oh, the resonance of that, that was so stunning.
4:11
You called yourself an inventor.
4:14
Oh, and the way you just described a creator of things,
4:19
someone who brings things into being.
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And the way you have invented and innovated what is possible for a book to be in this book
4:28
and in your audio production of it, I have only tasted the world of this work
4:34
and know with the depth of my spirit that you are an inventor.
4:37
Like I felt completely transported and how you ended off by saying that
4:42
if I could just move the needle a little bit, if I can just leave someone feeling,
4:47
create a tiny shift while you have moved mountains within me.
4:51
I didn't even know a book like this was possible.
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So I really thank you for your invention, for your innovation.
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And how did you come to see that within yourself,
5:03
that gift of invention of creation?
5:06
I think I grew up to a certain degree with it.
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There's something about blackness in South Africa growing up.
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So I was born in 86, which is during the emergency years of South Africa.
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But then I grew up during the transition years of South Africa.
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And I think, you know, when I think about my parents,
5:26
when I say there's something about blackness and creativity,
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whether it's putting things together with what you have,
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you know, making the most of anything,
5:34
being able to create a meal, being able to, whatever it is,
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whether it's, you know, making the most of hand me down,
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or those kinds of things.
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So I think there's something that intrinsically
5:45
in growing up that I experienced with my parents
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and the life that they were creating for us
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and the eldest of three girls.
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So the life that they're creating that was different
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from the life that they experienced when they were growing up
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already told me something without really being aware of it.
6:00
And then probably the easiest would be in school, you know,
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my mom is a teacher.
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And so she really encouraged reading.
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She really, really encouraged reading.
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My dad, you know, he'd do homework with us.
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So all of those things, there was this kind of presence
6:14
of my parents that was really quite significant.
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And then that meant, you know, once you read,
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your imagination is opened up.
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Spend a lot of time in the library.
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I was a drama kid through and through.
6:24
I love sharing that my first role was a hippopotamus in Noah's Ark.
6:28
Wow, when I was nine in a school play,
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and then I stayed for some so on.
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So I was, I was just always drawn to the creativity
6:38
and creative side of even my experience of being at school.
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And that, that, we know, went with me right through
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up to high school, university.
6:47
And then it's been quite an interesting journey,
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but eventually it got to this place of doing us full time,
6:52
which is incredibly fulfilling.
6:55
Yeah, wow.
6:56
I really feel into the way that you just described that.
7:00
But there's something inherently creative about blackness,
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about the black experience.
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Thank you for sharing about, you know, growing up
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in those emergency about it that years.
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And how you just described finding,
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creating moments of beauty, moments of a song, you know,
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a shared moment, a prayer that we have this deep creativity
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within us that has allowed us to be a form of resilience on Earth,
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you know, and insist on ourselves and insist on beauty,
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even in the darkest of places,
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whether it's through stories, through connection,
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through the way we love, and the way you just described
7:33
how this unit of family with your parents, with your sisters.
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And I love the way that family and sort of shared destiny
7:43
comes through in the family in this tale, you know,
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where the one secret of it's not kept will affect the parents,
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will affect the village, like this togetherness that's,
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that's described.
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And then also that in school that you love to read
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and that your mother was an ashura of that form of story
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into your world.
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So I'm so fascinated by, you know, these two worlds of stories,
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you were reading books and then you were receiving
8:06
a different kind of storytelling at home,
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which I'd love for you to teach us about.
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And then I'm going to ask you about the soul.
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I'm just, we're blind, love it, love it.
8:15
So a big part of this book is about my mission to just
8:21
just not restore because this work is already happening.
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And I'm learning to be aware that if something is absent
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in my world does not mean it's absent elsewhere.
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Right, so if I'm thinking as a creative
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that I'm helping us to remember something,
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helping us to reconnect to something,
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doesn't mean it's not happening elsewhere, right?
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So just being cognizant of I'm not doing anything new,
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I always feel that I'm linking to a chain that's already,
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in motion somewhere, right?
8:52
So I think about Insom in particular,
8:56
I grew up with my mother telling us, Insom in which
8:59
we used to be called folklore.
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I mean rather folk tale, but I think there's been some
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moving back from this idea of folk
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because of colonial things.
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But traditional, it's a traditional form of storytelling.
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It exists in multiple cultures.
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It's in Inganekwane, Inesizulu, It's Dichomo, In Sasuto.
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So we all have these aversion of that,
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of those tales that were told to us as a way
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of passing down values, passing down knowledge,
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speaking to social issues, speaking to social,
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how are children supposed to behave?
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And what are the consequences?
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If the children are not well behaved,
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it would often involve a cannibal.
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Iqongongong, the socials like this villainous figure
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that was there to scare children
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into sort of behaving correctly,
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but also spoke to transitions between states.
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So for example, a young boy becoming a young man.
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So they were insomely that would speak about those transitions
9:55
that end up shifting between thinking about characters.
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For example, personifying animals
10:00
with thinking, the wolf in the jackal,
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this is the widely cunning character.
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This is the less intelligent character.
10:06
These are the consequences of not being wise
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and all of these things.
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So these are the stories that I grew up being told.
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And I love sharing that when we think about
10:16
insomely in the village, it would often be around a fire.
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Once the work is done for the day,
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people are resting before bed,
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then the mother is in the grandmothers
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who tell these stories.
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But often what it looked like in our house
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because we weren't living in the village was a heater.
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And in the parents' bed blanket,
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so there's a little bit more of a modern setting,
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but the stories were the same.
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And so that has been such a significant foundation
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of why I'm as a storyteller.
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And it will come in little bursts
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through other work that I've done over the decades.
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But this is the moment I said,
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not only am I trying to recover something,
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but I also want to create something new
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that I feel with the tools that I've been given
10:58
within theater making, for example.
11:00
But also some of the things that I've lost
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that don't allow me to perhaps connect to
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the same proficiency of this course
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so that my mother has or that my grandmother would have had
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is what does it mean for someone who's
11:12
rapidly fascinated by Shakespeare
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to then take Prospero and take the tempest
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and bring it into Insolmen and say,
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hey, I want Insolmen to occupy the same prominence
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as Shakespeare on this page.
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And what is there?
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What is existing when we start bringing
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all these different cultural influences
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and all these different frameworks?
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And so that inspiration and that foundation
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I've transformed it into something else for myself.
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And hopefully it will lead people back,
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but also forward to say, how do we imagine?
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How do we reimagine things?
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And not just it's not just the archiving
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of what's been in the past,
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but so what is the future for us?
11:51
Wow, yeah.
11:57
Wow.
12:01
I felt very transported by that.
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Thank you for taking us on that journey
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and connecting it to this inheritance,
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this lineage of Insolmen and of this oral tradition
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that has been passed down to you.
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And it links to what you said about the chain
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that you are always linking to and not reinventing,
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but adding to and holding the conversation
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of the multiple identities or constructions of your being
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that you are in conversation with all that you've read
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and all that has read you and all that you have inherited.
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And I'm also very struck by this maternal lineage
12:35
of storytelling.
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Does anything come through for you on the role
12:38
that black women have played in this,
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you mentioned the fire, it really felt like we were there
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with you, with your ancestors.
12:46
With our ancestors, who are storytellers,
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but are not always positioned as such,
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and who are deep with wisdom as you mentioned,
12:54
how these characters were this sort of a live way
12:59
of expressing these consequences that you share.
13:02
And this book really does do that.
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And with Iqbalanga and with the characters
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that you bring forth in this work,
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it has that feeling of sharing what morality is
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but through stories and what it means to do right
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and wrong and have consequences
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and also complicating that easy binary.
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So yeah, I'm so curious if anything comes through
13:22
for you on the maternal lineage
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and on this weaving together that you've done in this work.
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Well, this is the heart actually of my work,
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not only because a lot of my poetry speaks
13:34
to the experiences of black women,
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but because insomni is the domain of our mothers,
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our foremothers, this is who tells insomni.
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The whoever in the community is listening,
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children, adults, but it's always belonged to women.
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So that's where in the sort of intimate private space
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that this is where the things were being worked out
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and there's some funny stories that I've heard
13:59
and even read and listened to
14:01
where if women were upset about what men were doing,
14:04
they would use insomni to speak to that.
14:07
So they may not have had maybe the equal power positioning,
14:12
but insomni wasn't just about saying,
14:15
we accept what the social status quo is.
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It was also challenging it.
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Just like when people think about
14:21
praising praise poor Chimimongo,
14:23
they just think owners about praising the king,
14:25
praising the chief, no,
14:26
people would actually use that to critique
14:29
on behalf of the community,
14:31
to critique the actions of the king.
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So for me, it's not just thinking of women as sitting back
14:36
and just accepting their fate.
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These were used to actually say,
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there's somewhere just the perhaps a man is just irresponsible
14:46
and maybe threatening the destiny
14:50
of the community of all the home.
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And there's insomni about that that actually say
14:54
that men who don't have who aren't wise
14:57
in how they conduct themselves
14:59
are going to have these certain consequences.
15:00
So I think there's a creative space
15:02
and it really was and is the domain of women.
15:05
So that's probably what attracts me to it
15:07
because I always think, you know,
15:09
when you think about feminism,
15:10
you think about womenism within a Western framework
15:14
for sure, there's ways in which that's articulated
15:17
and it often has.
15:19
And I mean, there's many writers,
15:21
certainly who say that's not the case,
15:23
but there is a way of saying that our mothers
15:26
and grandmothers just accept their fate.
15:28
They're like, okay, you know what, we are oppressed.
15:30
This is how things are.
15:31
There are so many ways in the domestic space
15:34
that women, I mean, you don't want to mess around
15:36
with the person who cooks.
15:37
The person who's Ezeka who's taking care
15:41
of the nutrition of the family,
15:44
you don't want to mess around with that.
15:45
So I think there are ways in which our mothers pushed back
15:49
against their own oppression
15:50
that are subtle, that are gentle,
15:53
that are maybe not always gentle,
15:55
that are for me are so powerful
15:56
that it felt important to have, first of all,
15:59
this girl as the main character.
16:01
Of course, it speaks to my own experience
16:03
with modestly schools in many ways,
16:05
but that the protagonist who has a hand in her own destiny
16:09
would be a young black girl
16:11
and how her mother and grandmother,
16:13
yes, the father figure is certainly there,
16:15
but the mother and grandmother are the ones that are busy
16:19
active in the, again,
16:21
I love the word destiny that you used earlier
16:24
in being involved in their own destiny,
16:28
in having a say and kind of sense of control
16:31
of their own lives.
16:33
Yeah, thank you for that emphasis.
16:35
It's so important to remember,
16:39
to re-configure the body of our stories,
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which is that I love what you just described,
16:44
black women were not passive, you know,
16:47
players or characters within this role,
16:49
they did find domestic ways to resist,
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as you're telling this, I'm thinking of the story
16:53
in my family where my uncle was in exile,
16:58
but before that, my grandmother, his mother,
17:00
you found out that the police were gonna come for him
17:03
as he was an activist in a part date
17:06
and she bought rat poison,
17:10
and she was like, I'm gonna, I'm a poison this man.
17:12
He says it's gonna be this,
17:14
when he said, you don't wanna miss
17:16
with the person who cooks.
17:19
Very very dangerous.
17:21
Oh yes, she didn't go through it,
17:23
but I just think that is, it was a warning.
17:26
It was a warning, honestly.
17:28
She had to be dissuaded by probably my grandfather,
17:31
like, but yes, oh my word, yeah, wow, that's incredible.
17:35
I love how you described the use of insomnia
17:38
at this time to create a way of accountability,
17:42
holding the men in the structure accountable,
17:44
holding the powers that be accountable.
17:47
It's so important that we retell this.
17:48
And as you're speaking this, I heard this shift,
17:50
which is from decolonized to re-indigenized.
17:54
And whenever we sort of focus on decolonizing,
17:57
storytelling, decolonized,
17:58
we're still centering the colonizer,
17:59
although that language is useful.
18:01
But I think this work that you do
18:04
where you are weaving together
18:06
a form of storytelling that is so inherent
18:09
and so, ooh, like life giving,
18:12
and that gave you life around that heater
18:15
and has given sustenance to us
18:19
and sisterly for so many years.
18:20
It does like re-indigenize what it means to tell stories,
18:23
which we are like the original storytellers.
18:26
And what I also love is, I think that often,
18:29
all of our different traditions get written out
18:32
of an understanding of wisdom.
18:34
Wisdom is either from the West or from the East,
18:36
but they don't mean, they don't mean anyway
18:38
on the continent, so I really love,
18:40
because we are oral storytellers,
18:41
it's so important to safeguard that.
18:43
So I just think this work is so deeply important.
18:46
And when it comes to this work,
18:47
there's something very like rich and deep
18:50
about the way you create.
18:51
And I'm so curious with that,
18:53
what does the soul mean to you?
18:55
What is the soul, the spirit,
18:56
however you receive that word?
18:58
What does that mean to you when you hear those words?
19:01
So I've been thinking about this,
19:03
because it is, my understanding is in flux at the moment,
19:09
because I've grown up in a Judeo-Christian frame
19:15
over the world, and that obviously has,
19:19
there's a significance that I hold there
19:21
in terms of God breathing breath into body,
19:25
but also the feeling and understanding
19:28
of spirit surpassing body, right?
19:32
When body decays becomes earth again,
19:35
that the soul, the spirit, remain.
19:39
And then, contending with, I think,
19:41
my own journey of figuring out that upbringing,
19:46
that belief system, parts of which I still hold,
19:50
and then thinking about the idea of African spirituality,
19:53
and what it means to co-exist,
19:57
to co-exist, those who are here, those who are no longer here,
20:03
and then the idea of us being a soul,
20:07
a spirit having a human experience,
20:09
so that we are, the body is kind of a container,
20:13
in essence, of something ethereal, something that's just,
20:19
it's in flux, my own understanding is in flux,
20:22
but it's, it's difficult to actually pin down particularly,
20:32
because I think the soul itself is difficult to articulate.
20:35
Yes, right?
20:35
So it's something that's,
20:37
I'm actually thinking of very silly example,
20:40
the Empty of the Show, the X-Factor,
20:42
but also the idea of an X-Factor, and it, right?
20:46
So I think about judges,
20:47
when people come for editions and they find someone,
20:51
and if you're watching, and we all have tools,
20:55
and you all have, you know, you see,
20:56
like we all realize we're watching something being born,
20:59
we're watching something, well, we know this person,
21:02
all these people can sing the same song,
21:05
but only this person makes us feel a certain way, right?
21:08
Because they have the X-Factor, they haven't it,
21:10
so it feels like that, like trying for me to explain,
21:14
what a soul is or how I see it feels like,
21:17
something that I cannot touch, something I cannot feel,
21:19
but it's recognizable, it's recognizable.
21:24
This is when we see someone acting away,
21:28
that's just, you know, inhumane, that's just,
21:31
you know, it's not there, you know, this thing is not there.
21:34
So, yeah, I definitely do not have an answer for you,
21:36
except it's something that's recognizable,
21:39
that when there's there's like a spark,
21:42
beyond what I think of, you know,
21:43
spirit as the other part of the body,
21:48
that's not, that we can't touch,
21:50
is also something that allows for recognition,
21:55
you know, it's energetic as well, like I can recognize,
21:57
you can write people, okay, this is a person that,
21:59
yeah, so I definitely don't have a clear answer for you,
22:01
but that's cool.
22:03
I think that's actually what it is as well.
22:05
Absolutely, absolutely.
22:07
And I think it honors this, it, this X-Factor,
22:10
to state that it is beyond language.
22:14
It's beyond what we can easily define
22:16
or wrap into words or a framework.
22:19
And I think that how you described,
22:21
there is an embodied experience.
22:23
And I also think that that poetry can move that in you.
22:26
So, I mean, all forms of art,
22:28
but there's certain lines in this book, for example,
22:30
where you just feel like something,
22:32
the tiktonic plates of something shift within you,
22:35
like when you speak about how the grandmother reminded
22:38
the mother that it was the woman's responsibility
22:41
to carry the site to, you know, keep the secrets
22:44
of other women, that's how we keep each other safe.
22:46
And then towards the end of that unfolding,
22:48
you say the woman returned to their homes,
22:51
carrying the silences of that night with them.
22:55
And something in my body just shifts, you know,
22:57
and I feel like that feel, it's like inexplicable,
23:00
but that embodied experience that a poem
23:03
can move within you, that you do so many times in this
23:06
and your poetry, lines that really stay with you
23:09
and feel like beyond words, like something is happening,
23:12
you know, in the body, also where you, where you say,
23:16
I mean, I could name so many, but where you say,
23:19
basically something around, oh, wait, actually,
23:22
I'm gonna ask you to read that word.
23:23
I want it a compensation one.
23:25
Oh, yes.
23:26
And oh, there's so many parts of that where I'm like,
23:29
chills, chills, chills.
23:30
So yes, I think that there is something
23:32
that happens beyond words, but also that is quite embodied.
23:36
The chills, the feeling that, oh, like there's something
23:39
in the room, the energy like you described.
23:41
So thank you for describing that.
23:43
And I'm curious then what you believe that it,
23:48
when do you feel connected to it within yourself?
23:52
I'm actually happy you mentioned compensation patterns
23:55
because my personal experience has been often
24:00
of a feeling of disembodiment, right?
24:03
So a kind of cerebral perspective of the world
24:08
or kind of moving through and art can also serve that.
24:16
I mean, it's the same way if they want,
24:17
it's like language, language can be healing,
24:20
but language can be propaganda, right?
24:23
So it's the scalpel, is it, right?
24:25
Is it in a surgeon's hands, it's healing,
24:27
in someone else's hands, it's murderous, for example.
24:32
So there are ways in which art for me,
24:35
again, because of the conditioning of my upbringing,
24:40
has, you know, I've had to,
24:42
let me say exactly how I mean it.
24:44
So you use poetry of the way in which for a long time,
24:47
I use poetry as a kind of proselytizing,
24:49
like evangelistic kind of framing, right?
24:52
That's what it was for, because I was, you know,
24:54
as a Christian poet, that's what my mission was,
24:57
like this is what poetry should do.
24:58
So it only started with an end in mind,
25:00
like this must be the outcome.
25:02
And then with the kind of transition
25:04
of my own becoming and feeling and COVID,
25:07
also playing a really, really big role
25:10
in thinking about, you know,
25:12
how I want to move through the world.
25:15
And a lot of it was actually about moving from the mind
25:17
into the body, you know.
25:19
So it was that kind of connection.
25:22
And I found that, and also really want to credit,
25:25
even my editor, Urvangu Le Kanjo,
25:27
it's the act of listening that for me
25:31
is about connection to soul.
25:33
It's very difficult to connect if I'm not listening.
25:36
If I'm just speaking, or, you know,
25:38
when the ego is in the forefront,
25:40
so it's the act of listening that often,
25:43
you know, I've been watching you as well.
25:45
Because there's moments when you just breathe
25:46
and kind of stop and still,
25:48
which we're not always encouraged to do.
25:50
You know, it's like move, have something to say.
25:52
No, you know, like be, present yourself
25:55
as super knowledgeable about it,
25:56
but it's just actually this moment,
25:57
the act of listening is where the alignment happens for me.
26:02
And so this work was a work of listening for me.
26:06
Oh, can you say more about that?
26:08
Well, first, it was having my head to say,
26:12
you're explaining yourself too much.
26:15
You're using too many words.
26:17
So that she asked me, who do you write for?
26:19
And then that sent me into a spiral.
26:21
I'm not even gonna lie to you.
26:22
Send me into a spiral because I had to ask,
26:26
I had to ask myself this question
26:27
and I hadn't really, really asked in a way
26:29
that's not just about who's the audience,
26:31
but who's in my head, who am I thinking about?
26:34
Because that determines what I say on the page.
26:37
And so she said, write as if you're just writing for yourself.
26:42
And I'm the only one who's gonna be reading it.
26:46
And then we could sort of work
26:47
from the way we could tailor is the safe,
26:49
is this not for me to be able to put it out
26:53
on the page like that.
26:54
But she'd also encounter and say,
26:55
just listen to what the poem is saying to you.
26:58
It wasn't just about what I have to say.
27:00
It was listen to what the poem is saying to you.
27:02
Then I started getting into more meditation practice,
27:05
which helped even further
27:07
because meditation allowed me kind of still my mind,
27:10
release distraction, there's a mantra,
27:13
exactly release distraction,
27:14
release all distraction, embrace clarity.
27:16
So that's my pre-writing ritual now of that meditation.
27:21
But it's also just even sitting.
27:23
Sometimes I just have to sit at the computer and wait.
27:29
Yeah, so these are all for someone who used to write.
27:31
And I think also this had to do not just with my upbringing,
27:34
but also because I'd studied English,
27:36
and so on.
27:37
So there's that training where you kind of,
27:39
you're thinking from a literary analysis lens.
27:43
So you think of work almost as how it would be critiqued.
27:47
So I had to this, there are those things
27:48
that I had to sort of release.
27:50
You know, a lot of people only start
27:51
because I actually have some poems from high school
27:54
and everything was all hot.
27:57
It was all emotion, there was no craft,
27:59
but it was like feelings on the page.
28:00
And then you work sometimes to the opposite extreme
28:03
where you're trained to take all of that away
28:07
and just focus on craft.
28:09
And then so now it's finding this place of in-betweenness,
28:12
of having craft.
28:13
But first, the first point is listening.
28:16
So it may be listening to the space and maybe listening
28:19
to what we're saying, what's unsaid,
28:22
is listening to what's in the body.
28:26
It's listening to what's been said before,
28:28
as I said, within the ancestral lineage.
28:30
And when I was, I mean,
28:33
when I speak truth about an active listening,
28:35
part of my research for the book was just listening
28:39
to old recordings of Insomni,
28:41
that are available on a university archive
28:44
by a woman called Massachusetts, and she was telling
28:48
these stories in the 1970s.
28:52
There's a professor, Harold Schroib,
28:54
who traveled through Southern Africa
28:55
for about six years going around villages
28:58
and recording people telling Insomni.
29:01
And so there's this rich archive
29:02
and I spent weeks just listening.
29:05
So with my training, if you think about the archive
29:11
or the canon of you must read, obviously reading,
29:15
but I found listening to be an active reading.
29:17
So my research wasn't all just,
29:19
yes, I read the tempest so many times
29:21
because I wanted to use it.
29:22
But of all the books I was reading, the papers I was reading,
29:25
I listened for weeks.
29:27
And so her voice was in my head, in my body for weeks.
29:30
And that was a significant influence
29:34
in how I wrote this book, the Insomni.
29:38
Yeah.
29:43
Wow.
29:44
He just took us on a listening journey.
29:47
All the ways you listened,
29:48
I love how you listened to yourself,
29:50
the meditation, the waiting, the listening to the room.
29:55
And then how you described listening to this Insomni,
29:57
this lineage, this weeks of listening and of receiving.
30:04
And then I think also what you shared about this drop
30:06
into your body, going from this intellectualizing,
30:09
which can be a way of avoiding, of not feeling,
30:13
of not allowing something to happen,
30:14
it also has its beauty to it.
30:17
Compensation pattern, please do.
30:20
I mean, we're on the same page about this.
30:23
And actually, so it is the first poem,
30:28
because it is that confession of my transition
30:31
from that kind of approach to writing
30:34
to everything that's body,
30:35
because it's also very personal in ways
30:38
that I hadn't quite written about before,
30:40
which is, as I said, ironic,
30:42
because when I started writing when I was 14,
30:45
all I wrote about, okay, besides, you know,
30:47
I remember there's a poem that I found
30:49
that was about the Iraqi war.
30:52
This is a writing like 2000, 2001.
30:55
So things that are happening in the world,
30:57
but a lot of it would just be about how I was feeling
30:59
as a teenager.
31:01
And then you get sort of moved away from that.
31:05
And yeah, so I guess there's a kind of,
31:08
a number of homecomings for me in this work.
31:11
So I had to first confess.
31:13
I thought I'm coming from.
31:15
Then the other poems
31:16
it kind of makes sense within that.
31:19
Compensation patterns.
31:23
I tried to learn French for two weeks at university,
31:26
tripped on conjugations and quit.
31:29
Even less fluent in comprehending
31:31
how my pain ached for attention.
31:35
Two signs.
31:36
One in left breast.
31:38
The other, my right foot.
31:40
Body gathered breath to scream.
31:43
It's thrust pinned under a skin of silence,
31:46
made an abscess and assist.
31:49
Antibiotics and syringe cleared symptoms
31:52
but not years of unsaid things fermented in my throat.
31:57
Distraction, soft medication.
32:00
When cancer has soaked its feet in your blood line
32:03
and you wake up to a mass,
32:05
your first thought is a tumor.
32:07
The next is dying with a malignant tongue.
32:11
Silence and agreeability prevent love from leaving.
32:15
This is what poetry becomes to you.
32:17
A decoy for loved ones who beg you
32:20
to express your feelings
32:21
without the language to receive them.
32:24
Retreat into your mind, abandon your heart
32:28
and write God's people into his kingdom with your poems.
32:32
Press play on Brené Brown's TED Talk
32:34
and soon you are crying
32:36
under your blankets reaching for grief,
32:39
for rage, for love, breath
32:43
and everything the scan reveals.
32:45
Miovo preveni ke gari prevention is better than cure.
32:57
There's something a friend of mine who is,
32:58
so just, I want to explain the title.
33:01
He's a massage therapist
33:03
and so he introduced me to this idea of compensation patterns
33:06
and he says in the body,
33:09
the body overcompensates for injury.
33:12
And so that's why you'll find sometimes
33:15
something happening in your right knee,
33:17
manifests in your left leg,
33:19
might be in your left hip.
33:20
So this, so the body might tell you there's an injury
33:23
before you know.
33:25
So, and this is what he does.
33:26
He'll look at you and say,
33:28
you might think I'm here for a shoulder
33:29
and he's actually, there's a tightness in your spine.
33:33
So, so yes, the idea of the body compensating
33:37
for, for an injury.
33:38
So it's already, it's already kind of making
33:40
all these concessions and compensations
33:43
in order to take the, the pressure and the pain
33:47
of that particular site of injury.
33:49
So your diagnosis of what's wrong in one area
33:52
may actually be the, the site of pain may actually be elsewhere.
33:57
So that was, it was me thinking about all of the other
34:00
sort of compensations in my own life
34:02
that was speaking to pain elsewhere.
34:06
So I thought the body is fascinating, right?
34:08
And how it speaks to us.
34:10
And so I thought, I mean, I'm just sharing
34:12
this idea of compensation patterns
34:13
because I think it's so important.
34:15
You might be throwing painkillers at it,
34:18
but the solution is way, way elsewhere.
34:22
Wow, thank you for that context.
34:24
I did not know that, that poem that you just read.
34:27
I mean, listening to you,
34:28
read it was so wonderful.
34:30
And there's so many moments that just like shift
34:33
something in my essence, as you say it,
34:35
because the breath gathering a scream
34:39
and the way you describe, oh, and then also just the way
34:42
it maps this landscape, the right breast, the left foot.
34:48
And I feel this, this deep connection
34:56
like to something so fundamentally human when you say
35:00
that loved ones who asked for my feelings
35:03
but lack the language to receive it.
35:05
I literally, when I read that poem out loud yesterday,
35:09
I read that line like four times.
35:11
And it just like, you know, when your voice almost cracks
35:14
because you feel so, just in awe of what someone is able
35:17
to put into language, this poem, there's so many moments
35:20
that I'm just so in awe of, you know,
35:22
the body gathered breath to scream.
35:25
It's thrust pinned under a skin of silence
35:27
made in absence and assist.
35:29
Antibiotics and syringe cleared symptoms
35:31
but not yours of unsaid things for meant in my throat.
35:34
I'm so in awe of this and as I read this, you know,
35:36
there's something poetry is so magical
35:39
but there's someone listening to this or watching this
35:41
who feels like they don't get it.
35:44
You know, like they don't, it's like it,
35:49
what are we missing in the way poetry is taught?
35:52
It kind of links to this whole conversation
35:53
with what it can be, you know,
35:56
because I used to think I wasn't into poetry
35:58
and then I read this and like, what?
36:01
You know, and you're also an educator.
36:04
So, I mean, thank you so much.
36:05
And this poem instantly changed me.
36:07
I'm so grateful.
36:09
But yeah, I'd love to hear your reflections on
36:12
maybe some of the masks that poetry is made to wear
36:15
in this more colonial, yeah, framing.
36:19
This is a hard one because, you know,
36:22
I encounter people who have been injured
36:24
by this experience of being taught poetry.
36:28
My mission is I have no desire to be obscure.
36:34
You know, we all want to sound smart.
36:36
Oh, I don't want to be like, hey, hey, hey.
36:39
Like, you know, almost like there's this street cred
36:41
around like, yeah, the more difficult it is
36:44
than like, you know, then the deep head must be.
36:47
I feel like not always.
36:50
So being clear and understood is important to me.
36:53
I think part of it comes from being a spoken word artist as well.
36:56
Right.
36:57
Standing on stage behind a mic, you need to be understood.
37:00
People need to hear what you're saying.
37:01
As you know, you don't want to get to the end of a poem
37:03
and people are like, huh?
37:06
So theater for me, obviously, has had a played a big role
37:11
in bringing the audience closer.
37:14
I think for a lot of people who are authors, writers,
37:17
but don't do any kind of performance or reading,
37:19
it may be difficult to remember
37:22
that there's someone who's receiving,
37:24
there's someone in the, you're not going to know who it is,
37:26
but performance brings the audience closer.
37:28
And so there are things that you're able to do on stage
37:31
using the body, using the voice to, you know,
37:33
as, for example, someone who may not have seen the book,
37:36
but is listening to the audiobook version of it.
37:39
I've had to, you know, I had to think quite carefully
37:40
like, how do I make sure that this travels
37:44
into that audio auditory experience?
37:48
It's, I mean, it's, it's, it's, um,
37:51
thinking about the teaching of it.
37:53
Right. That's really traumatized by a lot of people
37:55
because, you know, they'll say, oh, my sister, like,
37:58
she does not love, she's not a huge fan of poetry.
38:01
And she'd be like, roses are red, roses are red gay.
38:03
Like, why are you trying to tell me red means like passion?
38:07
It's roses are red, but just, it is what it is, you know?
38:12
I think there's obviously the, the discipline itself.
38:17
And it is, it is the language, obviously metaphoric language
38:22
can make, can create that level or that layer
38:24
or that distance to meaning, right?
38:31
And then I think, you know, poems for me, I meant to be heard a lot
38:34
of the time. And if you're being taught that line by line
38:38
analysis, sometimes you kind of lose what the, what the whole
38:41
body of the poem is.
38:43
Some teachers themselves are traumatized.
38:45
They're teaching something that they don't enjoy.
38:47
So it's hard to actually inculcate a passion when you're not
38:49
feeling it.
38:52
So there's a number of things that I think.
38:53
And then, of course, the, the whole system of schooling itself is
38:56
not really set up to create critical thinkers.
39:00
It's you just supposed to go through this methodology, then show
39:04
at the end that you remember, you can regurgitate what you learned
39:07
and then we send you off to become, um, hopefully a, a helpful
39:12
citizen. So I don't know how much that, and that's why I think
39:15
teachers, because for me, just magnitude teacher, who actually
39:18
encouraged me a lot and was able to guide me during high school
39:22
and that, you know, led me to sort of continue.
39:24
So if you don't find someone who has that passion, it's, it's, it's
39:28
really tricky. So I think the system itself, it's, it's
39:31
probably a lot of the teaching with the system itself, the language
39:34
can feel obscure because it's, you know, it's metaphoric.
39:36
It is dense because you also want, it's unlike reading a novel.
39:39
We try to get as much meaning as possible in as little
39:42
time as possible, like he's as few words as possible to articulate
39:46
to yourself. So I think it's a lot.
39:47
And sometimes people are just scared because they've been told
39:49
to be scared.
39:50
So they don't approach poetry with an openness.
39:52
If you've already been told that this, this door is locked, you
39:55
can't get in.
39:57
You're not going to approach it with an assumption that, hey, I
40:00
can. I want to know what's on the other side of the door.
40:03
So I think there's also an inherited kind of fear around poetry.
40:06
And I'm just trying to make it.
40:08
So when I do workshops and schools, I try and, a lot of it for
40:10
me is the demystifying poetry and language itself, you know,
40:15
because there's also novels I've tried to read.
40:17
I'm like, let me try and read this for five years.
40:20
It's just, it's just not.
40:23
Sometimes it's okay.
40:24
You know, you'll just find you, you, you, you kind of gravitate
40:27
toward what resonates with you.
40:29
Unfortunately, again, because it's going to be assessed in the
40:31
classroom setting, you can't just choose whatever you want to do.
40:34
But there are a lot of hardworking teachers who are doing amazing
40:37
in even choosing, um, work, contemporary work that I think
40:42
reaches students a lot more than something written in the 1800s,
40:45
for example.
40:46
Yeah.
40:47
Hmm.
40:48
Oh, yeah.
40:49
I really appreciate the, the different, and also very compassionate
40:53
towards teachers, you know, their own trauma, their own experience of poetry,
40:57
then affecting them, of course, not being able to impart something.
41:00
They don't have space or they don't have within themselves.
41:03
And I love what you just, where you started, where you said,
41:05
I've no desire to be obscure.
41:06
I think that's so, so powerful.
41:09
It's, and even the, you know, Brittany Brown, like the, the specific,
41:13
the TED talk, the specific references and the, oh, she changed my life.
41:17
Oh, my word, she changed my life.
41:18
Oh, she changed my life.
41:20
Same vulnerability.
41:21
Oh, my goodness.
41:22
Completely.
41:22
Yes.
41:23
So what, what I mean by there's a clarity of that, like as you said,
41:26
it is so clear that you do write in a way that is for someone to really,
41:30
like, connect to and feel in the room and the evocativeness of your use of
41:35
metaphor of, like, reaching under the covers for grief.
41:37
And it's just, ah, it just makes me so like, makes my, like, inner student
41:41
and inner, like, love of beauty in language.
41:44
So like happy.
41:45
Um, and so I also adore what your editor said about right as though you
41:49
are writing for yourself, you know, that you trust your reader and you're
41:53
writing something that you would love to read.
41:54
Um, and I'm curious, you know, with translation and with the, the
42:00
beautiful way that you told this in a way that resisted instant
42:05
definition, like you asked the reader to come to you, you know,
42:08
in some of me is a crosser tradition.
42:11
This language is, I assume how language comes to you, which is a blend of your
42:15
languages.
42:16
And so I'm so curious just in the, in the unfolding of that,
42:20
was the book always the way that it is in the way, you know, in the way that you
42:25
express, which sounds so natural and beautiful, um, or was
42:29
their process to it coming to the form, you know, of, of how, how these
42:33
languages that are both yours, how they would, you know, play together.
42:37
Yeah.
42:38
So I, I, part of it was actually again, my editor, once, once you asked
42:41
that question, because what she said to me was, you're translating
42:45
yourself, you're, and, and generally to sort of a white reader,
42:49
because that's what you're, you're, you're taught.
42:53
And so you would like, the idea of being understood.
42:56
And so if you're, if you really are writing for yourself,
42:58
then you wouldn't translate yourself because you already know.
43:01
And that has changed my life and gave me space to do
43:06
what I wanted to do, which was to play around with language.
43:09
Um, the form itself, actually, I had quite a grappling,
43:12
because I, I thought, okay, I can't actually just write sort of a straight, uh,
43:17
just list of poems type of collection, you know, the traditional
43:21
form, but none of my other work on form on stage ever does that.
43:26
I'm always about fusion. I'm always about, um, playing with form, you know,
43:31
and, and figuring out what it, what it means to, to form poetry,
43:36
to have poetry on film, um, what it means to have poetry on stage,
43:41
what it means to bring theater into form, you know, all of those things for me
43:45
are constant questions. And so all of my work is, is, is that, um, exploration.
43:50
So I had to happen on the page as well. I did go back and forth
43:54
with this question of, okay, if I, if I, if I mix
43:58
poetry with insolomy, and also how to do it, do we just have the poem,
44:02
and then insolomy or vice versa? Or the way that I've done it, which is,
44:06
there's, there's thematic things that there's a specific way of, of thinking.
44:09
It is loose as well, but how it's broken up, how this, this, this one story
44:14
that is, is moving throughout the book is broken up by the poems.
44:20
It was, it was a question for me to release institutional expectation,
44:27
because it was again, like, how do you, how do you justify? I mean, people are doing
44:30
a lot of interesting things around that, but it did, there was this kind of thing
44:34
in the back of my head that was like, okay, but then you're going to have to explain
44:37
all the time, you're going to have to kind of justify it. Um, but it, the idea
44:42
had been with me for a while. And so I was glad that I had an editor who was,
44:46
you know, let's go, let's do it. However you want to. And then to think very carefully
44:50
about which poems go away, how do they speak to each other?
44:52
How do the poems speak to Insomi? Because I think for me, Insomi allowed me to do
44:57
things to, or to figure out certain questions, certain themes in the
45:04
realm of Insomi, where the rules, the normal rules, you know, the, the kind of
45:10
rules that we function by don't exist or aren't, aren't, don't matter. Right? So in,
45:15
in a world where magic is the norm, there are certain things that you can question
45:19
and work out in a very different way to a poem that's maybe like, you know,
45:23
sit in, when I was in Spain or whatever, whatever it is. So I wanted the magic of Insomi
45:29
itself to be present in the book, but also what it lent me. There's a kind of freedom
45:35
that it gave to, I mean, there's a, there's a first line. Let me see if I can find it.
45:40
Um, I think it's in prosperous stomach or something where in this world,
45:45
just because they were eaten, spoiler alert. I don't, just because they are eaten by a
45:52
khalang, it doesn't mean they are digested. Yeah, that was so cool. And then there's a whole world
45:58
in there. You can sew, you can like kind of open sew them up and is he still fine? So that,
46:04
that magic is, is the norm. So in this world, the magic is the norm. How do I still think about
46:10
fragmentation? How do I still think about the impact of colonization on my culture, on my
46:17
linguistic experience and all of those things? So I just allowed myself to play.
46:23
And this was the, this was the result. Yeah. Yeah. Can you please, for anyone who's not familiar
46:28
with just the, what word do I use? The inventiveness, the innovation of the structure. And I love
46:35
how you humbly said people are inventing different forms or people are giving stories,
46:40
different skeletons, different structures. Um, this is a book that I have never, you know,
46:45
I've never experienced or had the honor of interacting with a form like this. And so I'm so
46:51
curious, just in your own words, for someone who hasn't interacted with this book, how is the book
46:56
structured? Okay. I want to start with an apology. To the reader.
47:04
Because you have to work, you have to work. I'm sorry. I think it's it's for me. I think reading
47:12
just, just as, as, as the, the listening, so when you listen to insomni, it's interactive.
47:17
You know, you start off, you start off with that opening, quite a giga long guns,
47:22
and the expectation is for the audience to go coast, coasts, oh, me,
47:25
Oganye, coast, coasting up, boom, I'm up on it. So like, it depends, the, the response will
47:30
depend on where you grow up. So there's, there's, there's a, it's dialogical, right, that
47:35
relationship between the storyteller and the listener. So I wanted to bring that in by, by making
47:41
you work. And also, I just wanted the, the act of reading to be an act, to be, to be, to be,
47:48
to not just sit back, because we do scroll, we do scroll, we, there's a, there's a way in which
47:53
our brains are kind of being constantly kidnapped and just like out hostage, by, by a lot of the,
48:00
the, the, the media and content and so on that's available to us. So I wanted to feel,
48:05
I wanted the act of reading to feel physical, because the, the work sort of pulls you in and out
48:12
of worlds. Just when you think, and it sort of undercuts any, any expectation, hopefully,
48:17
up to a point, we think, oh, here's a cliffhanger. Okay, what's next? Oh, it's a poem. Okay, so now
48:24
let me shift something in my mind, my shift. How am I going to read this? Okay, all right, I'm
48:27
getting into the rhythm of the poetry and the, okay, boom, the story is back. Now you have to,
48:32
so for me, it's, it's meant to be, you know, one of the most beautiful scenes that I saw was that
48:37
I launched in, in, in Jobberg, where two people were reading from the same book. I think the one
48:44
hadn't bought a copy yet. So I just saw someone, I take the picture from the balcony and he saw
48:48
two people sitting reading a book together and I was like, how often do you see that? It does, it
48:52
just doesn't happen. Yes. And so the structure is, as I said, so I have, in some, it's one story
48:59
that runs, the plot runs throughout the book. It's got episodes, but it's in between specific,
49:05
those specific parts, this poetry. It speaks to the same, you know, the same or similar themes,
49:11
or different themes, but they're tied together. Sometimes by character, you know, mother, you'll see
49:17
sometimes mother is in small, is capitalized, sometimes it's not, then you know, maybe there's
49:22
like a link to mother in the poem, to mother in the story. And sometimes it's setting, you know,
49:28
so there are some, some loose connections between the poetry. Sometimes it's thematic, right? If,
49:33
you know, speaking to, for example, where the scene in the village, the scenes of the village
49:40
have its cursor, but the scenes on the island don't. So that's the, that in a colonial experience
49:45
with the violence of the language being taken away. They're parts that are translated, they're
49:50
parts that are not translated. Yeah, so it's this poem and in between are all these different
49:56
poems, different forms as well of poetry. So it's quite eclectic. I've also said people are
50:01
also very welcome and some have done this to just read the story on its own. So you can follow
50:05
some people like, my ADHD cannot handle this. Okay, I need to read the entire story.
50:11
Know what happens and then I can come back to the poems. So the invitation is also to read it
50:15
differently. It doesn't have to be from beginning to end. You can read the poems on their own,
50:19
you can mix around with the story, especially if you're reading it for a second time,
50:23
you can really kind of play around with with the order of how you read as well. Yeah. Fantastic. Wow.
50:29
That's what you started. Wow. Yes, it was completely riveting because now I'm like,
50:36
oh, I mean, and then the poem, I'm like, oh, and then I'm like, okay, now that I'm at returning,
50:42
I go back. Okay, what's the last thing that happened? Because I wanted to be fresh in my mind.
50:45
Right. And I go forward. Yeah. So wow. Yes. And the way that it deals with these themes of
50:50
colonialism, of, oh, a family of custom and culture and loss of tradition and
50:56
exile, like not belonging, wanting belonging, what you're willing for that belong. There's so many
51:01
parts where I'm like, both in the poems and in the in the story, the dance between them is so
51:06
beautiful. For example, there's a time where you just introduce the ritual with the belly and
51:12
then you go into the sweet blood poem. Yeah. And it's sort of like, who's sweet blood? Is it the,
51:16
it's just amazing. There's so there's one page that I with the colonialism, I think,
51:23
aspect. I mean, there's so many, but I was like, I literally was like, and I'm trying to find
51:29
because there's so many though. Oh, my word. Do you remember what it might have been about?
51:35
I think the way you handled the loss, I don't know if it was the loss of language and how they
51:44
plucked their tongues and then they may, can you take us there because, oh, my goodness. Oh,
51:49
my goodness. Oh, gosh. Okay. I just have to remember where it is. Yeah. But it's after they've
51:55
landed on the island. Yes. Yes. Yes. Here it is. Okay. So quick recap. The listeners definitely
52:02
going to want one more than a recap. Yes. If you were reading, please read it. But the recap is
52:07
after this, the disaster that falls in the village because the ritual that they were given
52:13
is not completed. So now the child, Olinda Gutiwa, which means one who's waiting to be named,
52:19
one without a name. So she's now taken to the island of the Valkyres, whose king is Prospero.
52:26
And from Shakespeare fame, Prospero from the tempest, but he's a Valkyre. Right. And so they've
52:35
landed this the first evening and they're having dinner. So it's all these children from different
52:38
places. They don't speak the same language, but they're going to learn the language of the island
52:44
of the Valkyres. And so I'll read this paragraph. That evening, there was a ceremony to welcome
52:52
the children to the island. They stood in rows as the king of Amachalanga, Prospero,
52:57
arrived at the banquet. He was taller than the tallest man Olinda Gutiwa had ever seen.
53:04
And his wings were as wide as the widest hut. If only her best friend could have come to see
53:11
these wonders. After the most delicious supper they had ever eaten, the children were then
53:17
brought to Prospero's perch. He offered each child a berry to eat, then plucked their tongues
53:24
out of their mouths. He would then give them a new name to stop the bleeding. One child followed
53:31
another until eventually it was her turn. No longer called Olinda Gutiwa, named one celebrated her
53:39
new name, even as she struggled to pronounce it. That was the exact paragraph. And then actually,
53:48
if I can read straining cloths, because I think this is the poem they kind of write. Never have I
53:53
thought so much about ginger. Thank you, please take a seat. Straining cloth. After crucifying
54:03
ubikosabam, wounds dressed in school uniform, tongue bound for six hours to avoid detection and
54:11
detention, then migrating home by bus to hydrate with ginger bear. I wish I'd asked the ground ginger
54:19
dredged through a straining cloth, how it felt to surrender the flavour of its body to a drink,
54:25
then be discarded. Wars are one and lost with bodies. In former white schools we were
54:31
thrown as bones securing victory for Athens, breaking the architect of apartheid's curse of
54:37
a banter education in exchange for new accents, to finesse our way into white economy.
54:44
Had I foreseen my excavation, a heap of ex-minus and domestic workers eroded to silicosis and arthritis,
54:52
black employees called switching daily, wounds dressed in traditional costume on heritage day.
54:59
I would have been less annoyed by traces of ginger escaping a straining cloth to look at the bottom
55:06
of my glass and in my throat. You know, I think about, so I grew up in the time when you'd actually
55:15
go to detention for speaking your mother tongue. And you know, you'd think, oh my gosh, that was the
55:21
90s, uh, 2000s. And then there's a story, I think it was around actually the release of this book.
55:29
There are 2004 where there was a racist WhatsApp group in some school,
55:34
where it was, I think it was a co-school. And there was some, you know, so the, the racism,
55:39
and they're not too long ago, we think about the hey, those things were happening when I was at
55:44
school. And so that experience of having to put down your culture, your history, your language
55:52
in order to take up a colonial language, culture, history, but obviously not getting the supposed
55:57
benefits of that belonging of trying to fit in. So that experience of the plucked tongue is one
56:04
that one carries. And I think using insolomy and poetry in this way for me is recognizing that
56:10
there isn't full recovery. There is no place to which one goes back in history and finds themselves.
56:17
But I think we can again, as one, you know, if you think about a mosaic, for example, weaving or
56:25
quilting, the pieces that we have for me are good enough to create something new, to create a new
56:31
language, to mix ourselves, to present all of who we are in that, in that fragmentation.
56:37
And that's what we go into the future. That's what we, that's how we navigate ourselves into
56:43
the future. That's what I believe. I keep saying, wow, because I'm so in awe. Thank you for
56:49
reading both of those. It's so divine because that poem and the ginger and the six hours kept in,
56:58
oh, the way, I mean, I'm just at a loss words, but the plucked tongues and the name that they,
57:03
they couldn't even pronounce. It was just, it's so incredible. And the way you've just told this,
57:08
this history and shared more about this loss of language or this repression of what is ours. And
57:16
I think that didn't happen also voluntarily within. So for example, I am Zulu, but I didn't grow up.
57:22
My parents are different, you know, I'm Namibian and South African. And my parents struggled so much
57:27
to learn English that when we were born, it was, they were like, no, our children are going to be
57:33
good at English. And yeah, there was that cultural loss of, you know, both me and my brother not
57:40
growing up, speaking either of our languages. And them, you know, doing their best to all of
57:46
all parents, all of us are, you know, I honor them. And I also love the way you write about your father
57:52
the protagonist's father in this book. But that deep sort of like death that you carry with you
57:58
of something that as you try to resurrect, there's the shame of how you then have an accent. And now
58:03
all of these, the perfectionism that you learned at these very same schools, not allowing you to just
58:08
say, okay, fine, I'm not, I'm not going to be perfect, but I get to do it anyway. And so I think
58:12
that the way that that that plucking and that stealing of something and then the sort of meta irony
58:19
of being called named one, but actually being deprived of a deep name that you would have had in
58:25
your own, you know, like an, it's just, it's really you have, I want to say, I have such a gift,
58:30
but also I'm sure such a devotion to committing yourself to the actual work of bringing this work
58:37
to life, which I'm sure took so much. So wow, I feel a lot of resonance and also intrigue at your
58:50
relationship with these multiple forms of art, you know, they sang in the audiobook, please,
58:55
huh, I didn't expect that day to be sung to. And I love being, I must say, there is the one,
59:02
um, so the, the, the, the, the, the more tremulous singing is me, but then there's one point that
59:08
a friend of mine said, because she's a musician and I was like, listen, I'm not going to, but there's
59:12
the one that when it comes in, it gave me goosebumps. Um, when, when I was about just before
59:19
mothers at the river, so I had a friend of mine, I bought, because I was like, I need you to be
59:22
more, the mother's voice. I mean, oh gosh, she's incredible. So yes, so and then some just
59:28
drawing from, there's this hymn that I sing a little extract of and in the one that I'd,
59:32
I'd written sort of just a few lines for it. So it's all me mixes all those things. It's all
59:37
me has chanting, because things must happen in threes. Um, there's a music, music is able to unlock
59:44
things, you know, it's, it's, it's a very, very rich form and I'm going to explore it for a very
59:48
long time. Oh, yeah, you're so lucky. That is so magical. Yes, it's reminding me of the conversation
59:54
around also when a lot of like parasite and sort of these different films from South Korea and
1:00:02
from Asia, there was this conversation about how genre is such a Western concept, you know, and the
1:00:08
fixed idea of one category, one and this multimedia expression is, is, it's so beautiful. It's the
1:00:15
norm for us. Yeah. I mean, this is, this is how it is. Exactly. This is definitely how it is. And
1:00:20
humor is with grief is with everything is just yes and amalgamation. Uh, wow. I would really love
1:00:27
to ask you about the title. I'm so curious what comes through for you when you hear the words
1:00:33
weeping becomes a river. It's so stunning and it really moves something in me and I've been
1:00:38
curious to hear within your own words like what that title means and represents. Yeah. So I have
1:00:44
an official answer, right? Which is like, oh, it's what do you make of it? But it's actually the answer is in
1:00:51
two poems. It's in compensation patterns and melting point. So the this poem, this title is about
1:00:59
this book being a moment for me where all these answered things are finally being said, allowing
1:01:07
things that have been blocked to flow. Right? It's like sort of removing that. It's it's it's
1:01:14
letting that ice melt. There's um, there's an image in melting point where I write about my dad
1:01:20
like the, I feel like I should read it. Oh my goodness. But there's this idea of of of things
1:01:27
that have been blocked up or blocked finally being in flow. And you then you think you're weeping
1:01:33
and it just becomes that river. Of course, there are other connections to the river image in the
1:01:38
entire insolomy, which is the great river, you know, with the island is and and that that
1:01:43
relationship to water. But for me personally, it was about these are things I've been wanting to
1:01:48
say in that 20 year journey in that life that I've experienced. I find it feel like I can say them.
1:01:54
I find it feel like I can put because the scary thing for me about as I said as a performing artist,
1:01:59
you get to put things out and then they're gone. That moment is gone. We're out of the theatre,
1:02:04
you know, it's just between us and it's beautiful, but it's done. So the idea of permanence on a
1:02:10
page in a book in a body of work, I've published in, you know, many other places, but it's one poem
1:02:15
here. It's a chapter here and so on. But to have a body of work is that, you know, feeling of putting
1:02:20
and saying a stamp saying, this is me in this moment and maybe in a, and I will be in a very
1:02:24
different place, maybe five, 10 years from now. But in this moment, but then it's also permanent.
1:02:28
You don't know where a book is going to go. You don't know who's going to read. You know,
1:02:31
who's going to engage with it. You don't know who you're going to be in the future,
1:02:35
but it's taking that risk of saying, I'm going to allow permanence for what I'm feeling now,
1:02:41
for what I'm saying now, for what I'm thinking now without actually it was one of my biggest acts
1:02:47
of shunning perfectionism because I didn't want to wait to be some perfect version of myself
1:02:55
or whatever. It's it's allowing things that are not fully figured out and allowing questions
1:02:59
on the page rather than answers. You know, because again, think back to conversation patterns,
1:03:05
you have to sort of within within the Christian framework, the idea of redemption, you know,
1:03:10
other redemptive arc or kind of perfection, like it's actually an aspiration to be perfect.
1:03:15
And so to shun that and say, I'm going to put things on a page that if you ask me about five
1:03:20
years from now, I can say, I don't feel like that anymore. And that'd be okay. Instead of feeling
1:03:25
like, I have to commit to everything in here for the rest of my life. I'm going to grow. I'm going
1:03:29
to change. I'm going to, you know, expand. And so I will make, I may already, there are things here
1:03:34
that I feel differently about, or that I felt differently about 10 years ago. So if I have the
1:03:39
poems that I wrote a lot earlier, there was a lot more rage, not rage, but like there's a lot more
1:03:45
anger and pain. When you're in a model C school, for example, you're trained to desire proximity
1:03:52
to whiteness because that's what they're, that's what they're crafting there. And so even my
1:03:57
radicalization or contentization happened a lot later, you know, and I like to use this example,
1:04:03
for example, of the road statue at UCT University of Cape Town. So my, my, my youngest sister,
1:04:13
and I have a nine year age gap and we both went to the same campus. And when I was adversity,
1:04:19
we were just grateful to be there. We weren't thinking about toppling roads. When she was
1:04:24
adversity, they toppled roads. Right. So that journey is like that, that's exactly it. Right. So
1:04:31
my contentization happened later for me because I was coming from a particular generation. We were
1:04:36
just sort of happy to be on, on the grounds and that physical presence. That was the act of,
1:04:40
of revolution that we are here as black people. And therefore they may like we're not just happy
1:04:45
to be here. We wanted an outterms. We're going to bring this down. So I think even, even my own,
1:04:52
and in a lot of shame, I also actually never get a lot of shame, as you say, around the status
1:04:57
course, but I'm not as proficient as I am in English, I'm right in this course of primarily.
1:05:02
And so you'll have, there's a tweet that I will never forget, where someone said, I think
1:05:08
was December, and they said, oh, the English speaking cousins are coming. I remember the first
1:05:24
time I got like a flip phone and I was just like trying to find, trying to find connection,
1:05:29
you know, working around. And I was just like on my phone, not because there was anything,
1:05:32
but because it was strong, like there was a struggle to communicate and a kind of shining
1:05:36
because not speaking is close as proficient. So people would think, you know, that, okay, English is
1:05:41
seen as superior and so on. But then you go back to the village and it's close. It's your mother
1:05:45
tongue that's superior. So you're not being able to speak it. You are actually the one on the back
1:05:49
foot and I think as it should be in that, in that setting. So I was just like, there was a lot of
1:05:56
shame that I had never. So now I am just like, I'm not going to try and find a, there is no perfect
1:06:03
linguistic, anything really language itself is organic. It's close to the respeak. I bet about
1:06:09
ancestors when I got on the right, what is this? What is this? So I had to release the shame,
1:06:18
work through it. And now I'm proud of what I have. I'm leaning deeper into what is there.
1:06:25
And I'm just, I'm just creating this Frankenstein's monster type of thing that's just like,
1:06:30
this is it. This is it. This is what I'm working with. It's not going to be perfecting either way and
1:06:34
I'm not interested in perfection. So this weeping becomes a river. And now it's a deluge. I mean,
1:06:40
it's just like, it's just opened up something in me when I'm feeling confident. I'm feeling confident.
1:06:45
And I feel like I can create in my mother tongue. It's not going to look like someone who's
1:06:49
grown and you're going to school and knows it a lot better. But it also means I can start being
1:06:54
interested in reading more. And yeah, that's that's I think that's the in that in in
1:07:01
in melting point, there's that thing of like silence as silence is kind of ice and frozen
1:07:06
things that are frozen within us. And it's just allowing them to Thor. I think this when my dad speaks
1:07:10
of, you know, speaks about allowing the sun to bend the world of ice. And yeah, just letting
1:07:16
those things though, some of them are just, but others is long slow process. But eventually
1:07:22
something does soften in us. Yeah. I would love for you to read that poem because that was so
1:07:30
spectacular. And I love hearing you describe this Frankenstein, this reclamation and
1:07:36
ties to what you said earlier about the several homecomings you are. And that is a form of a
1:07:40
deep form of homecoming. And I love what you you said about, you know, going going.
1:07:45
The cousins, the cousins, the English speaking cousins are coming. I was like, yeah. Oh my god.
1:07:50
Yeah. It's real. Oh, wow. Okay. Yes. Thank you. Which I'm actually very keen for this book to
1:07:58
be translated into a story. Obviously, I wouldn't be the one to do it. But because I think there's
1:08:03
something else, something magical is also going to happen in that.
1:08:07
When you're tired of paddling between search engines and everything you have forgotten,
1:08:17
to transform the taps outside your childhood home as open and silent as Edward Muncher's
1:08:23
scream into a meaningful image for your poetry. Text your father. He'll return your text to the
1:08:30
call. And you'll laugh because his voice is the rolling of sleeves. First question,
1:08:36
a spanner loosening your conversation with why this past? Why winter questions in summer?
1:08:44
I am writing that you will tell him manipulating memory,
1:08:48
intermetaphor, and the internet suggestions lack poetry. Note how he plums frozen pipes from
1:08:55
the past into present tense. How he does not say, I used to throw the pipes. Instead, dissolve
1:09:02
slowly with lukewarm water, or wait for the sun to bend the will of ice, coaching you through
1:09:10
instructions as if distended plastic veins are in front of you now. And he has packed
1:09:16
butchers to sustain you through any seasons which obstruct the flow in you.
1:09:21
Both laughing at the reminder, skating with your school shoes on a frosted lawn,
1:09:26
then softening frozen toad regret in front of a paraffin heater.
1:09:30
Your mind will cover other recollections from before he was your father.
1:09:36
But his memories have solidified in him and you are still learning which questions defrost them
1:09:42
as winter sun and which are scalding water unwilling to crack the copper of his silences.
1:09:50
Now imagine, these are the first two poems. So I'm sitting there like,
1:10:00
this is a genius, this is just a word Smith alchemist, this is so phenomenal.
1:10:07
Oh my word, I'm so so in awe of your writing. This is wow, you know, this poem also really,
1:10:13
really, really stuck with me. I remember the first thing, so many aspects, you're laugh because
1:10:17
his voice is the rolling of sleeves. It just there's so many things where you're like, oh my goodness,
1:10:22
not knowing which questions are. I love that that part. Your mind will cover other recollections
1:10:29
from before he was your father, but his memories have solidified in him and you are still learning
1:10:35
which questions defrost them as winter sun and which are scalding water unwilling to crack the
1:10:42
copper of his silences. Thank you. Thank you for what you do. How do you,
1:10:50
like, can I actually just make a note and I'm thinking of something as you speak? Also,
1:10:57
you know, as artists, you know, this question of the soul of poetry, I think is completely linked
1:11:05
to who the poet is. Right, the soul of the poetry is going to be the soul of the poet.
1:11:09
Hmm, just in terms of source. And just thinking about our parents and again, with the shame was a
1:11:19
kind of anger of why would you send us to these schools that would turn us, you know, that would
1:11:26
give us this experience, this pain. And in straining cloth, I say, we were Thonia's bones and Thonia
1:11:33
in the story. And I think it's Greek and Roman mythology. Erickvious, the father wanted to win
1:11:39
the war for Athens. And so he promised, I think it was Apollo or something, but one of the gods,
1:11:46
he promised that he would sacrifice whatever the first person that would, I don't know if he promised
1:11:52
all the God asked whoever would be the first person to meet him after the war, they have to sacrifice
1:11:57
to the God. And then he could get victory for Athens. And so the win, when he gets home, I think
1:12:03
it's his favorite daughter, who is only daughter. The details are escaping me right now. But he
1:12:08
ends up having to sacrifice his, the daughter in order to win the war. And it felt like that,
1:12:17
like being, being these black kids in, in model C schools, informal model C schools,
1:12:21
felt like that sacrifice that was made on behalf of democracy. Right. So the shift from
1:12:26
to education into these schools in saying, yes, you're going to lose all these things, but you're
1:12:30
also going to gain access into economy and gain access into something. So there was that feeling.
1:12:38
But you know, you mentioned your own history. I think there are things in our, in our parents,
1:12:43
these solidified memories and their own, and thinking about, you know, our parents who did
1:12:48
experience my education, why wouldn't you want the idea of a better life, of a better education
1:12:52
for your kids. And so I think it's this tension between what their intention was and what
1:12:57
the outcome was, but the intention was certainly we want our kids to have something better. And
1:13:02
there are histories that, and you know, it depends on your parents, some give access, some don't,
1:13:06
but there are histories that they hold and carry. And as artists, we often have the words, the images,
1:13:13
you know, whatever, whatever arts we might be involved in, to be able to carry, yes, our own
1:13:19
histories. But it's like there's something in that multi-generational that's happening that would
1:13:23
have led to a decision like that, besides the, the maybe economic, whatever. But it just makes me
1:13:30
think now that on one hand, I would see this experience of being sacrificed for democracy. And
1:13:38
they're on the other hand, it's thinking if a parent is looking at a child saying, I never had
1:13:42
these opportunities. I want to give them to you. You know, there are these things that they hold,
1:13:47
they don't always tell us, but it's kind of having empathy for that as well. You know,
1:13:53
yeah, thank you for saying that it's, I think as you grow older, the empathy that you grow for
1:13:58
your, it mean for me, like the compassion that in your shoes, I probably would have done the same,
1:14:03
you know, with the context of the time and what you just said, I think that's such a compassionate
1:14:08
lens to see it through and the most important lens. And it's an expression of love, you know,
1:14:14
to want your children to have an experience, as you said, that you didn't have.
1:14:19
On that, for someone who's not familiar with our context, with banter education, with model C
1:14:23
schools, can you give us a little bit of context just so they understand what you mean by these
1:14:27
different. Right. So because of about date and segregation, the economy was divided along racial
1:14:35
lines. So everything, everything was, you know, white, black, colored, Indian, Asian, I think, but
1:14:44
could kind of be subsumed under. But so even, even budgets on a kind of the government,
1:14:52
in terms of governance, they were white schools. So they were white living areas. So in the same,
1:14:56
you know, similar to the, to the US, for example, they'd be white areas, black areas, colored areas,
1:15:02
and people would be divided along those. And then if you're not sure, they'd come up with
1:15:06
certain really arbitrary tests, like the pencil test, that if they put a pencil in your hair,
1:15:11
if it stays, then you're probably black. So if you're like white presenting or color presenting,
1:15:15
you could actually be separated from your family on that basis on whether a pencil stays in your
1:15:19
hair, if it falls out, then it means you've got sort of white hair. And they could actually give
1:15:23
you to another family. And so even schools were divided along those lines. It meant like white
1:15:29
schools had a lot of higher budgets and school and black schools a lot less. And so the quality
1:15:34
of education was vastly vastly different. And the curriculum is vastly different because the guy
1:15:40
who started my education for the word said he wants, you know, black people are only good to be
1:15:45
carriers of wood and he was a word and carriers of water. So really just for manual labor. So you
1:15:52
just training black people to serve the white economy. And so what happened was in that moment,
1:15:57
then of transition, people always think, oh, Nelson Mandela, right, that moment. But in the
1:16:02
democratic moment, there was an attempt to try and like equalize education still hasn't happened.
1:16:09
But what happened was a lot of those white schools then by law had to be opened to so-called
1:16:15
non-white kids. And then that was opportunity to be able to actually attend those particular
1:16:22
schools. But the experience there was still pretty much the same because you didn't belong,
1:16:26
you weren't welcome. So you're trying to gain something because then it opens up opportunities
1:16:32
for you that your parents didn't have. But then all of the damage that's there as well.
1:16:38
Well, thank you. That was so clear and the way that that ties to that Greek myth you spoke about
1:16:42
of the sacrifice of the daughter. It's so interesting because when I read the poem, I sort of
1:16:46
trust that the poet knows something that I don't. And sometimes the mystery is actually
1:16:50
learning to me. I'm like, oh, who's got the lenses? Okay. Okay. Okay. But now hearing you describe,
1:16:56
but I'm like, I should be asking more questions. Maybe I should be because that's so fast. That's
1:17:00
such an incredible, like, poignant way of telling that sacrifice and that for your sister to have
1:17:07
been in a place where, you know, as you say, this lineage of liberation, there is a natural unfolding
1:17:13
way, the people who come first, it is the bear the hugest burden, you know, which is such a tragedy,
1:17:20
but also then unlocks for the next generation to demand even more earlier. And, you know, yeah,
1:17:26
so wow, it's what an inheritance. And then also just the way that you that so many of us can
1:17:33
tie to this with this poem with the melting point poem of not knowing
1:17:40
where your elders are willing to go with you in their truth telling and how much they carry and
1:17:48
how much some things are so too painful to put into words, especially when we were raised more
1:17:57
on words, you know, on speaking about our feelings. And then there's also gender and all these
1:18:01
dynamics. I think there's so many ways that there's so much internalized trauma that it's very
1:18:09
difficult for people to give expression to and it can be very hard breaking, especially I feel in
1:18:14
the way that I experience it with the men in my family and in the families I observe and the
1:18:21
difficulty of really expressing that. But then on a national scale, it does get expressed,
1:18:26
it's just maybe channeled in a way that is is violent or that is destructive either to the
1:18:32
self through things like addiction or alcoholism or through to gender-based violence. So we need more
1:18:37
ways to channel our pain into into art of many forms and more guidance on doing that. So
1:18:44
soon to take a moment, I'm going to have some water. This is such a gift.
1:18:58
I think what I'd absolutely love to go to next, you spoke about how
1:19:02
there was a journey you went through as an artist to be able to write this book. And as you
1:19:08
express this, you know, you're challenging the form. You are committing yourself to this vision
1:19:14
you had. You continue to. You're in the creative process. You're still making this a new. So I'm
1:19:20
so curious if you take us through sort of the journey within yourself that this work has asked
1:19:28
you to hold to hold because it's often we have these blocks fears. I'm not good enough. What
1:19:33
will my family say? You know, that's a huge thing we deal with, especially if you are from some,
1:19:38
if you are someone who deeply values your relationships with your family, it you don't want to betray
1:19:43
anyone in your family. You want to be truthful, but also like, is this my true? This is our truth.
1:19:47
So I'm just so curious in terms of some of the internal, don't call them struggles, but yeah,
1:19:51
struggles, dialogues that you've had to have in order to create a work like this. I'm really an
1:19:57
awe of what you must have sat with and listened to as you said within yourself to hold this work
1:20:03
and to usher it into being. I think there were some inevitabilities in terms of external ones,
1:20:11
in terms of my the timing of work sort of coming together and there was different work that I'd
1:20:16
done and it felt like this was a point at which I had to capture this moment in my own journey as
1:20:22
an artist, right? So with the film work, with the theatre work, so it just felt the timing felt
1:20:27
right. It was 30 years, actually when this book came out, it was the 30 years of democracy. So
1:20:33
there's also that moment in history, which felt like a time of looking back and kind of reflection.
1:20:39
So I was also in that in that reflection and felt right to release it in that in that time.
1:20:45
You know, I had, when we're in conversation about the book itself, I was also because I was like,
1:20:52
I'm not ready. You know, all right, so later, you know how as artists, we're never ready.
1:20:57
Never ready. So just having someone who's like, no, you're ready. Go for it. So once I was a
1:21:02
commitment and then you have a contract, you have someone going, all right, we're ready for a
1:21:07
manuscript that also does, does kind of expedite that process. But internally it was, as I said,
1:21:15
you know, I started dreaming about publishing a book when I was in grade 11. Wow. And you know,
1:21:22
there was, there was actually a moment that first made me lose my confidence, right? And I was
1:21:28
in first year. I'd, at the time before social media, there were forums. There was, you could kind
1:21:35
of like email-based forums. And I think I'd sent a poem that, so there's like a poetry forum,
1:21:42
but it was like, you know, professional poets. And when you've come from high school and you'd
1:21:46
had a couple of poems published, like, no, you know, I'm ready. And then you send a poem
1:21:53
into like a group chat of email, group chat of, of professional poets. And then the feedback is
1:22:01
not the feedback your English teacher was giving you. And so that moment sort of crushed me.
1:22:07
And I was also going into, you know, studying English lit. And it just, I don't know, the system
1:22:13
just kind of shifted something in me, made me lose my confidence. But then also, you know,
1:22:19
it kind of breaks you to train you. So there's kind of that particular, that framework, you know,
1:22:25
English lit at university. And so I was continuing in spoken word, but the idea of publishing
1:22:32
was lay dormant for a very long time. So I'm not interested because now it's like, you know,
1:22:36
you have to aim for some other ideal that you feel like you're not good enough. You're not ready,
1:22:42
but you're also not good enough. You won't meet that particular standard. And then I think with them
1:22:48
and the pinning of doing the other work, the exploration of doing film, theater. But all of it
1:22:53
poetry based. So it's poetry forms that I've made. Poetry, you know, poetry plays and so on
1:22:58
sort of choreo poems. And then, you know, having, I'd had a couple of of publishers actually
1:23:05
reach out to me and ask me, do you have a manuscript? I'd like to read something, which is like
1:23:10
such a rare thing to be able to do. And I think about at least about five different sort of
1:23:14
independent and other publishing houses. Like, hey, we love, you know, we're seeing your work.
1:23:19
But that thing that had been broken in me or shifted when I was in first year was just they
1:23:25
like going, no, you know, and then so I wouldn't send. And then sometimes I'd say, and then
1:23:30
they're like, okay, if you're if we can work on this and then I just every time, they're like
1:23:34
really, really close with another publisher. And then I just like, I'm not ready. I'm not ready.
1:23:39
I'm not ready. So the sense of not being ready. And then of course, the depth of what would my
1:23:43
family say, because there's a few of permanence that as much as we as artists, we have this,
1:23:49
this, this, this strange relationship of knowing that with every, with every work that we put out,
1:23:55
there's something that's that's there's a little piece of, whether it's a piece of our soul or
1:23:58
piece of our self that's just that will actually outlive us. And yet it was so scary for me that
1:24:04
idea was so scary because it's like, now I have to account. I have to actually answer questions
1:24:08
about what it is that I've said. And I didn't feel ready. So I think that the the the turn probably
1:24:15
started in 2017 with the Brunei Brown encounter because it was the first time I really thought of
1:24:22
vulnerability as a strength and not a weakness, which is what she speaks to. And so that particular
1:24:28
journey, everything that started unraveling from that moment, this house of cards of perfectionism
1:24:33
because you know, you raised to just work to do things. And then you say, that's not attractive
1:24:41
to me anymore. You know, so I need to recover the recovering, still the recovering perfectionist
1:24:46
definitely. And then COVID happened. COVID was so important because COVID was when he started
1:24:54
saying, okay, no, no, this is this is no longer, this is no longer one I'm interested in, this is
1:24:59
no longer, you know, whatever, there are a number of things. So you're just like, once you've
1:25:04
faced a global and excellent global scale, the idea of even the career, right? Because now we
1:25:10
don't have audiences. So what do you do as an artist? You started to ask questions of yourself
1:25:15
that you've never asked before. I'd never doubted the journey until that moment when I realized
1:25:20
I can't make rent, I can't make any balls. The audience everyone is home. So what am I offering?
1:25:27
Who am I? And so those moments, those created the kind of fertile ground for that moment in 2023.
1:25:35
And then I also went in a writing retreat. We had these conversations. I really had in-depth
1:25:39
conversations with other poets about what I was feeling about the fear of putting out. So I thought
1:25:45
I'd leave, I'd go to the writing retreat, come back with some poems because I was struggling,
1:25:49
I had a bit of writers block. But what I left was a sense of, left with was a sense of it's okay.
1:25:55
You have to do it anyway. And my belief is strongly that everyone must create. If you have that impulse,
1:26:02
if you have that desire, there are always going to be ears or eyes, whatever, of people that are
1:26:06
ready and waiting to receive your work. So that's all recognition. So I think that's what I
1:26:12
wanted to say was when you feel something, whatever it is that I put out, when you feel that
1:26:17
recognition comes in your history, your stories that were ready to receive whatever those words on
1:26:22
the page, whatever the music is, whatever the fashion is, whatever it is that you create.
1:26:27
So then the last piece of it I think in the process was feeling like, here's what is acceptable
1:26:35
in my industry. Here's what's celebrated in my industry. This is the form that everyone is
1:26:40
come, most people are comfortable. This is what people do. So what would what would be that possible
1:26:46
impact of doing something different of going with this form that isn't the one that most people
1:26:52
do. So I had to kind of contain with that that even it might not be well received even within my
1:26:56
own, within my own space. And then, you know, family, but then being at a point again, this is a
1:27:03
post COVID kind of attitude where, hey, I got to tell my story my way, but I will respect other
1:27:08
people's histories and other people's truths as much as possible because they don't actually
1:27:13
belong to me. And I think that's the whole point of not cracking the couple of people's
1:27:16
silences is they don't those stories don't belong to me, but the impact their impact on my story
1:27:23
does that that belongs to me. And so it's also finding that comfort of balancing your love and
1:27:29
respect with your truth, which is an ongoing tightrope of trying to balance. And then, yeah,
1:27:39
and I think you know, always feelings of is this good enough? Am I good enough? You know, fighting,
1:27:44
fighting that perfectionism. And then just having someone to hold your hand as an editor,
1:27:49
this is like the place of an editor, a producer, you know, if you're a fine artist, the gallery on
1:27:55
whoever is there to say, okay, you can let go now. The trusted person we say, this is this is
1:28:02
this is really. And then one the wonderful thing about writing a book, which is perhaps different
1:28:07
to performing a poem that you've written on stage, is you have a team of people. So it passes through
1:28:12
the editors. It passes through the proof reader. It passes through a number of eyes in hand. So
1:28:16
you become also less precious about the work like you've done the internal work. It's out there now.
1:28:21
You've done your crafting, but then you have people. It's so important for me. That's what I've found
1:28:26
to be one of the greatest gifts that I've gained is having other people say, I know you think that's
1:28:31
what you're saying, but as the reader, this is what I'm receiving. So and to have that happened
1:28:36
before it goes out, rather than once it's gone out, right? I mean, there's there's other things
1:28:40
like conversation people may have, but when you have someone going, is this what you mean?
1:28:44
I'll send those questions. It allows you to actually have distance. And so the emotional,
1:28:48
the emotional kind of turmoil of it also subsides because you have five people going, I've noticed this,
1:28:54
let's check this. Did everyone and once that that whole product there, that's when it becomes
1:28:59
that final book probably moved from manuscript to book and then product actually that people can
1:29:03
actually get in a bookstore. And that was actually quite liberating scary. Because there's nothing
1:29:09
like sending an email and thinking, Oh, now I remember. Now, now, now the mistake comes to you
1:29:17
because, but the emails are already gone. And then just being comfortable with imperfection,
1:29:21
when you have a group of people, look at your work while it's raw. It's painful and beautiful.
1:29:27
Yeah. Yeah. So it was not just the moment of sitting and working. It was because there were also
1:29:35
all the poems that we've taken. And so I really reworked very heavily. And so seeing that
1:29:40
self from like 2016, for example, and thinking about how far I've traveled on my own journey. So
1:29:45
even containing with with those quote points. And then the scariest part was actually in
1:29:50
the earliest days of having the book out. I didn't like talking about it. Really? Yeah. It felt raw.
1:29:58
And it's the first book, you know, and it felt it felt very raw. But also I felt like saying,
1:30:05
it's all in the book. Everything you're asking me is in the book. Don't ask me curious. But people
1:30:11
do, you know, people sometimes actually end up getting it because they've heard your conversation.
1:30:16
So once I started getting into the rhythm of that, then I was like, okay, all right, let's do it.
1:30:22
Let's do it. Oh, thank you for the courage it's taken to walk this path from that 16, 17 year old
1:30:31
who knew she wanted to be a published author to receiving this criticism, this sense of rejection.
1:30:38
And almost, you know, hiding from the stream, even as people were saying, we want to publish,
1:30:42
you want to work with you and being in a place now where you are, I love how you said, you
1:30:47
know, it's your first book and you said that you'll be telling these stories with the rest of your
1:30:51
days. And I just also celebrate that it sounds like you have real support around you. And I think
1:30:57
that is what, you know, like black visionaries, that's what we need is people around us who are
1:31:03
supportive who when it is criticism, it's coming from a very, it's not even criticism. They're
1:31:08
adding to the work. They're trying to, they're on your side. They're on your team. And it sounds
1:31:13
like, you know, you haven't had more of the story that's more common for a lot of black artists when
1:31:18
we seek gate-kipped industries. You know, I mean, this is like a penguin random house. It's the
1:31:22
publisher. We're told that's very, you know, in the predominant case, it's like they're fighting
1:31:28
yet every turn. They don't want me to tell the story in the way that I want to tell. So I just,
1:31:32
I feel so like happy in my spirit that you had editors, people around you who were really on
1:31:38
your side. So it could be all about this work and what it could be. And also you as an artist
1:31:43
being poured into also this writer's retreat and how it affected you and how it helped put you
1:31:48
back together. And then also the spirit of COVID is in the room in every room really what we went
1:31:53
through and what it evoked and asked of us to question and reconfigure no longer be willing to
1:32:00
settle for and truths we could no longer, you know, tongues that needed to be spoken and not
1:32:06
yes. So I must say, also sisterhood, I mean, it was so important because there's two friends
1:32:12
of mine, Tandeewanganda and Zizi Popam, who had published before me, it's self-published actually,
1:32:18
and they helped my hand. They're younger than me, but I remember I was like, listen, okay,
1:32:22
this is happening. I'm freaking out. Let's talk. So we would have meetings. We sort of just
1:32:27
go out for lunch or dinner and they will talk me through the process really. And so they are things.
1:32:31
Yeah. And so now I try and offer that to other people as well. So they will talk me through the
1:32:35
process and and just things that you can't Google experiences. Exactly. Experiences and then say
1:32:43
you should expect this at the stage and even after that, okay, the book is here now I'm freaking out
1:32:46
what's, you know, what's the story? What what's happened? What were you feeling at this? And
1:32:51
someone who's already two or three years down the line since their book and so on. And so that is
1:32:55
ongoing. I mean, that really just was such a beautiful thing that we built and trying to other
1:33:00
people. I remember there's another friend, more colleague who's getting ready and so I was like,
1:33:05
hey, whatever you need, reach out to me. Let's talk. Let's talk about the process because that
1:33:08
emotional journey is not something that people, you know, will write a sub stack or some blog about
1:33:13
to say, hey, this is what you think about when you're publishing. It's like exactly as you say,
1:33:17
you know, as a black woman publisher, what are the things that I'm going to encounter? What are
1:33:22
the things I'm going to feel? So sometimes that perfectionism and those questions of, am I good
1:33:26
enough? Have nothing to do with the craft itself with the art? But it's like, am I good enough
1:33:31
in this body in the world? How will I be received when I'm audacious enough to say, this is my voice,
1:33:38
this is who I am. Yeah. So, so, so friendships is the hood highly, highly recommend.
1:33:44
Yeah. I cherish that you had that, that you are that, that that lineage of support, you know,
1:33:52
that every artist we admire has been supported, has been held by someone, by some people, and then
1:33:58
now is able to offer that support. That's so wonderful that you're a part of that. And I also just
1:34:04
the sisterhood point that you mentioned that you've been supported the ungoogleable questions
1:34:09
and it's taken me back to that poem around what Google couldn't answer. It's just divine. And I
1:34:17
I think it's so important to hear. I always read the acknowledgement sections of books because I'm
1:34:21
like, this took, this is one name, but this took a village truly. And it's, it's always wonderful
1:34:26
to see, you know, like who someone is is interacting with and thanking. And it's obviously just a tiny
1:34:31
piece of their journey. So I love hearing that, hearing you say that. And then there's something else
1:34:36
that you shared that I'm now forgetting. And I'm sure it will come back to me. Oh, you spoke
1:34:41
about the soul resonance, the soul recognition. And I feel so seen by that because that's a topic
1:34:45
that I love to express. And it's actually so it gives me chills, hearing you say that. So there's
1:34:50
something very soul recognized in this coming together because I love how you said the way that we
1:34:57
meet art, you know, it is something is ready within us to receive it. And I deeply appreciate that
1:35:03
view. So that is something else that I wanted to comment on. I do want to go to that moment where
1:35:08
you received this feeling, this rejection, this criticism. What do you wish had happened next?
1:35:14
You know, if what do you wish someone had said to you, wait after that forum happened and you know
1:35:20
questioning your worth, even more so, you know, because we all have doubt. And but I love how you
1:35:25
mentioned in your high school years, you was pouring out from your heart, then the sort of
1:35:30
hyper into like hyper conditioned environment, the colonial environment of this is what it means
1:35:35
to write. This is good art. This is bad art. What do you wish you had in that era of your life?
1:35:41
First, your university as coming into yourself as someone, you know, as a writer, as a theater
1:35:47
person, as all these artistic English literature things, what do you wish someone had said or what
1:35:51
support structure do you wish you had had? Actually, wish the first thing. I'm not 100% sure,
1:35:58
but I wish I told somebody and not just retreated because that's what happened. I didn't
1:36:08
because they didn't say anything bad. It was just, it was just, it was proper feedback,
1:36:12
but I was 18 and I just come from high school and you know, it was this forum of professionals,
1:36:21
for example, and coming from a very small town, coming into a city, and now this is a mix of
1:36:27
different poets around the country. So already it was the small fish, big pond kind of thing that
1:36:33
happened. I do wish that I had someone to tell about how I felt in that moment that would have
1:36:44
been able to hold that for me and encourage me to say that's not the final authority on your work
1:36:51
because I think it was then it created a sense of wanting to prove myself to that kind of
1:36:58
writer that, you know, I am good enough in essence because it was a sort of middle-aged white man
1:37:05
who was not going to understand the feelings of an 18-year-old black girl from the Eastern Cape.
1:37:12
But yeah, I think that if I wish I'd had, yeah, I wish I'd had, I think it's easy now with
1:37:20
social media because you can drop, you can DM someone, you can have a community, but it was literally
1:37:25
just, it was the first of that kind of community that I was exposed to because poetry and writing
1:37:31
wasn't such a big thing in our school. It became one after we left, we established a writing club
1:37:37
in our school when I was in grade 11 and metric, so a couple of us that were into it like, okay,
1:37:41
we actually need to leave something here to the point where you could actually get half-colors and
1:37:44
colors for creative writing. So we were trying to be that for those who didn't have, since we didn't
1:37:51
have it, you know, so I think if I'd had someone, that could say this is how this made me feel,
1:38:00
but I felt very tender also because our art is so close. So you feel so sensitive and you take
1:38:05
it so personally, it also obviously did something for me, I think in the in the in the long run,
1:38:11
because it also gave me a sense of not rushing art, which is a thing, I've because I felt pressure
1:38:19
sometimes like, when's your book coming out, when is the, you know, people, people wanted, and I
1:38:23
remember one of the readers of the book of the manuscript said this feels like a fully cooked
1:38:31
meal that has had time. And so I think as painful as that was, it meant that I didn't rush,
1:38:41
so for me not art is something that I'm comfortable with taking my time, that people will get
1:38:46
it when they get it. I mean, there are questions about the second book, like I don't know, I don't
1:38:50
know when it's coming, when it does it will. Yes, oh, when it does it will. Yes, oh, I love that
1:38:57
they said that it was fully cooked on the way here, I was thinking about, you know, when something is
1:39:01
so marinated, like hours of marinated, so it's the flavors are so complex. And you're like,
1:39:06
oh, like, what's this? What's this? I had that metaphor moving through me because it feels exactly
1:39:13
like that. I mean, and now I'm sure it's even either it's that manuscript or it's,
1:39:19
anyways, I agree completely with that framing. It is, it feels like there's so much attention and
1:39:26
care that went into every single line, every word choice, every, every aspect of it. And I,
1:39:32
I think that is just especially in a culture that is teaching you to rush or to push things out
1:39:37
of content or, you know, post this post that like to be in that power as an artist and say, no,
1:39:42
it's it will come when it's ready and that I'm not a conveyor belt. This is my work. And also,
1:39:47
I would love for you to talk about this sort of and very inventive creative imagining of this
1:39:55
book's multiple forms, multiple expressions. Can you talk us through your plans for this book?
1:40:00
Yes. So as you've mentioned, there's an audio book and the audio book had to happen.
1:40:05
I'm like, this is in soul. You have to hear it. You have to hear and you can hear the difference
1:40:09
when I'm reading the story and when I'm reading the poetry, right? There's this, it's a story time.
1:40:13
I wonder, my thing has been like adults deserve story time too, okay? So to be able to just be immersed
1:40:18
and transported and then come on on the other end, you know, with something having shifted.
1:40:23
So at this point, maybe who knows when when someone encounters this this episode, I may be in a
1:40:30
different place. The book may be out, but I'm working on the children's adaptation. So I've adapted
1:40:37
the insolomy into a children's book and am adapting and it's a chapter book. Actually, if it all
1:40:47
goes well, it will be a series, right? So it'll be multiple books, a chapter book for age sort of
1:40:53
nine to twelve and it's sort of adaptation inspired by so more characters, more events, you know,
1:41:02
it's an adventure series. It's a coming of coming of being story. So now if you really want to
1:41:09
get to know Olinda Gutiwa, that's the book where it's going to happen. And it's actually to, again,
1:41:19
the focus is on insolomy and the love of insolomy, right? And her whole journey is about the recovery
1:41:26
of this tradition of storytelling. But her own journey, but it's like that's her mission.
1:41:33
And my hope is that for that age group. So I'm targeting, I have like plans for all different
1:41:37
age groups. So I'm targeting that age group when I'll early readers who are new readers,
1:41:43
right? To actually find out what are insolomy and some reach some of the books will also be
1:41:49
retelling of those traditional stories and hoping that they'll develop love for this for this
1:41:56
form. So it is challenging in two ways. One, which is I've never written children's books before.
1:42:03
So working with with genre. And then it is realizing that it's also for nine-year-old me
1:42:11
who went to boarding school at nine English schools. So a lot of that rupture for me in identity
1:42:19
happened at nine. Wow. Because I went to an English school. I was not an English speaker. I'd
1:42:26
attended an African school. So I went to an English professor school. Pre-school.
1:42:32
So first grade, grade one was, we called it sub-a. And then I think I became, I went to an
1:42:38
African school actually first when they said, okay, black kids can go to formal model C schools.
1:42:43
So with school way, there was 65 kids. I was one of the first black kids at that school. Wow.
1:42:50
I learned Afrikaans. My mom organized play dates with my dad's colleagues, their kids.
1:42:56
So I learned Afrikaans to play. Wow. And then, but I was an English student in the Afrikaans class.
1:43:01
It was very complicated. So we were taught English at the same time as everyone else,
1:43:05
but we were taught in English during the Afrikaans class. It was quite something.
1:43:10
And then going to an English school, I had to be taken back here because I was now learning
1:43:15
this new medium of instruction. Totally. And at nine, and I went to boarding school.
1:43:22
All of that. So that moment is now actually quite a lot for me to write for her for that version of
1:43:31
me and from that. So everything that all it goes through is deepened. You know, it's those questions,
1:43:40
but obviously for that age group. So I'm confronting some things now on a deeper level,
1:43:46
because some of these are, you know, a lot of us is reflective. It's me now thinking about those
1:43:51
things, but now I have to feel through what the experience of being completely fish out of water
1:44:01
in order to access all these motivations as a character in the story. So it's deepened for me.
1:44:09
Now that's where I actually am within Swami. Now I'm like, it's if I've written a lot of these
1:44:14
poems from the perspective of having been impacted, now I'm back in those shoes of like what it is
1:44:21
to move through the world with this. So yeah, but you know, thankfully for for an age nine to 12,
1:44:30
so it's not it's not maybe as as emotionally harrowing, definitely not for the reading,
1:44:36
but for me, for me to access that in order to understand this young girl, because, you know, we speak
1:44:42
in in in the story, she's on the island, all these things are underrated, but now it's in in
1:44:49
yes, it's in third person, but there's dialogue. So now she gets to talk about what she's feeling
1:44:54
in this experience of being on the island of the vultures. And what that actually feels like for
1:44:58
this young girl to encounter prospero. Here it's one of two lines in the book. Now it's like
1:45:06
the feeling we're kind of accessing her. Yeah, so it's very exciting. It's very exciting.
1:45:11
Also for a second book to not be another poetry book, for it to be a children's book has also
1:45:16
taken a lot of pressure off of me, because that they speak about the sophomore thing of like
1:45:21
second album or whatever, and the pressure of like, okay, this book was really well received,
1:45:25
and now what now I'm like, I don't have to worry about that because I'm gone into completing
1:45:29
genre. And people ask me, what are you reading right now? The book on my site table right now is
1:45:38
Fab Farm. It's about a girl who wants to start her own farm. Her classmates all give her
1:45:46
different pets. And she has to hide it from her parents because they're scared of animals.
1:45:49
So she's sneaking in the animals at home and she turns her whole backyard into first
1:45:54
a bedroom and then her backyard into a kind of painting zoo type and painting zoo farm thing.
1:46:01
And then the other one is Spring Bookeroo. This is a little spring book that loves to read and has
1:46:06
to convince his friends. He wants to read. And then the lion tears up his books. So that's all I'm
1:46:11
reading. That's your world now. That's my world right now. And it's so different. But in
1:46:15
lightning and really quite liberating challenging, because you have to be clear. And simple,
1:46:20
if I thought I was clear with poetry, this is another level, but I love it. So that's the aim.
1:46:27
I'm going to write a couple of those books. I don't know when and how. And then also Yangka,
1:46:31
I do want to do some picture books. I'm not sure, though, if it will be in the universe,
1:46:36
some creating a multiverse of sorts. In the universe of weeping. I've done a stage production
1:46:43
with a stage performance of Insomni and open book festival in 2025. I'd like to tour that
1:46:51
actually, which is just the stage version of of telling it of telling Insomni. Just the whole
1:46:57
the whole story without the poetry. Well, partially actually some poems, but the the telling is of
1:47:02
that. And then definitely a form. And if everything goes well, I'd love to do I actually believe
1:47:10
it well. Let me let me change my language around that. So one of the plans is also to then do an
1:47:15
animated series of of Oli, because I think, you know, I'm not going to have to compete with
1:47:19
Coca-Cola melon and Bluey and all of these things. We've got to create African work and
1:47:24
continue. It's we have to take it to where the the cultural war is happening. And I'm
1:47:30
war in inverted commas. But I mean, I think the war is for attention. Right. So if if if my nephew
1:47:36
who's almost six is, you know, his his references are poor patrol and all of these things,
1:47:41
I need his references to start also including Oli and Ogutia and Insomni and all of these things.
1:47:46
So it's it's we've got to make it available. It's I don't think it's about fighting,
1:47:50
whether or not they should be there. It's like we have to make it available. Yeah. So those are
1:47:55
the next couple of years. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for your courage, for your devotion to
1:48:01
this work and for the bravery it takes to be willing and the integrity of purpose to be willing
1:48:09
to want to tell the story so truthfully that you insist on feeling it first so that you can tell
1:48:15
it in a way that is truthful. But also, of course, as you said, you feel it first and then you
1:48:20
usher it into this medium, which is this nine to twelve age group. The care that you are bringing
1:48:24
to this and like the the patience as well, like you're not rushing yourself. And I'm just so
1:48:30
like it's beautiful to know that you are very held and supported that as you face these
1:48:34
that feeling of connecting with your nine-year-old self. I mean, wow. And what she went through and
1:48:39
that just sounds so isolating and so like traumatizing and now that's why therapy. Oh yes, therapy.
1:48:46
Yes. And I'm yes. Yes. So I'm just without it. Yes. We need it. Yes. It's part of the support. Yeah.
1:48:53
Exactly. You need to be held. I'm so I'm so happy that that's the case.
1:48:57
It's such a gift. I have so many questions and things pinging within me, but I'm so excited to
1:49:01
read and be part of these different expressions of this work. And I also just feel so grateful.
1:49:07
You know, there's many ways to be a mother. And I think we've always understood that. And I think
1:49:12
there's that what you're doing and the the care you are bringing to like the consciousness of
1:49:17
these children who you do not, you know, who you are feeling into is such a divine like mothering
1:49:23
like gift to the world, you know, in the sense of caring so much that you care about the nutrients
1:49:30
that someone is receiving, the nourishment they're receiving, the stories they're being told. You're
1:49:34
taking care, you know, you're taking care. And I think as someone who yeah, I just I just I hope to
1:49:42
have biological children someday. I hope to have children someday. It just gives me this piece
1:49:47
of of hard to know there are people who are really trying to make the world a more nourishing place
1:49:52
for children. And there's so many ways to do that. They can be parenting. They can be
1:49:56
aren't being an auntie. There's so many ways. So I just love and celebrate that. I hope that
1:50:00
came across in the right way. Thank you so much. Yes. Thank you. Before we move on to our closing
1:50:05
questions, our closing ritual on the Salsalan, I'd love to ask you if there's anything you wish I'd
1:50:09
asked or anything that you feel like you want to just clear or follow up on before we move to our
1:50:15
final closing segment. Yeah. We've covered, we've covered everything. But my question for you
1:50:23
would be as someone who has received this work, what would you say if you were encouraging someone
1:50:32
else to also receive to sort of receive it to say, hey, come join us by the river. Yeah.
1:50:38
What, I mean, what would you say to kind of encourage them to do that? And I asked this because
1:50:45
sometimes we do need people to invite other people into our art. If that makes sense, you know,
1:50:53
that poetry is scary. So if someone who's scared of poetry, for example, what would your
1:50:59
invitation be to them having gone through the journey of the book yourself? Oh, thank you.
1:51:06
That's such a beautiful question. Also to this work and to move something in me, I love it so
1:51:13
much. So what I would say to someone who to invite them into this work is I think there's a person
1:51:21
in each of us, a child in each of us and adult in each of us who loves being told a really great
1:51:27
story, a powerful story, a memorable story, a moving story. And that is universal across cultures,
1:51:34
across humanity that there's something within us that craves and is nourished by and is fed by
1:51:40
stories. But there's also a specific telling of a story that is so ancient, you know, and it is
1:51:47
often it comes through these fables where there's a moral lesson being taught through a through
1:51:54
characters, you know, through animals, through people, through a child, you know, and that is in
1:51:58
our cultures. And I also think that is something that if you look at children's stories, there's
1:52:02
that element. And I think this will speak to the child in you and the adult in you who loves being
1:52:08
told beautiful, powerful, alive stories in a way that is also weaving in things that you never
1:52:18
thought could be woven into that story. And whether you love poetry or don't, I honest, even if
1:52:26
you don't claim this within yourself, there are sentences that you love. There are sentences you
1:52:30
hear and you say you say them again, again, or you feel them. So if you sort of distill it down,
1:52:36
there are words, there are lines, there's a particular metaphor that just moves something in you.
1:52:41
And so there's a part of you that loves language and that part of you will feel so nourished by
1:52:47
this book and will feel awakened and will also feel like you are being introduced to an aspect of
1:52:56
a culture that you wouldn't have had another entry point into, you know, and that this will be a door
1:53:03
that will unlock something and invite something within you that I don't think you would have
1:53:08
entered from another place. Now, Deprens, who there's so many different people listening to this,
1:53:12
but I think that this is a form of storytelling that is so needed in the world and needed in the
1:53:19
spirit. Like it's so it feels, it's just it's something deep in the in the body. And I also think
1:53:26
that a lot of people, you know, we once we want to connect to people who can take us beyond
1:53:35
the world we've been given. And I feel you are one of those people. So I think that even just
1:53:40
following your consciousness and following how the world occurs to you and what you've moved
1:53:44
through will awaken something in someone. And I also think even though you are inviting us to
1:53:53
meet you, you know, there's you say that you apologize, but I think the beauty of it is that
1:54:00
also you can trust that it is deep and it is also short. Like in the in the sense that it's like,
1:54:06
you know, you know, some books, I look at them like that's so amazing, but it's like 500 pages.
1:54:10
I just it door to me in a way that it scares me. And so it is definitely asking of you to co-create
1:54:16
with it to to meet it to, you know, go to the glossary if you don't speak closer or you want to
1:54:20
know everything, or you want to try no things, it will ask of you, you'll be jumping around,
1:54:25
but you'll love the jumping. And luckily, you don't have to then jump for 7,000 pages. Like, you know,
1:54:31
it's it's powerful, it's potent. As I walked into this room, I felt like I was in another world
1:54:36
having just been interacting with it. And so I could say so many things. I truly also recommend that
1:54:42
if you can listen to it. And if possible, also read it, I would recommend both, but if only one is
1:54:47
accessible, that obviously also really makes sense. It's one of those books. I'm not even
1:54:50
to tell people my life to like, go get it. I'm going to get it for them. I'm going to have multiple
1:54:55
copies and be like, read this. You've never read anything like it. And I also think if you are someone
1:55:00
who has who connects with loss of culture, you know, who's connect with something being robbed
1:55:07
from you linguistically or something you are returning to linguistically, it's really going to
1:55:12
speak to you in that way. And so I'm going to be giving it to my cousins who speak English.
1:55:18
Love it. Love it. Thank you so much. You're so welcome. Thank you so much.
1:55:24
Wonderful. So I'm going to ask you the final five questions.
1:55:26
All right. Closing ritual. And it's just 102 sentences that come to you. And oh, yes. Okay, so
1:55:34
so. Okay, this is the Solsalan closing ritual. One illusion that I am letting go of is
1:55:46
that I don't have a say in my life.
1:55:51
The most sacred aspect of my life right now is love. I feel most loved when
1:56:08
I'm seen. We could heal the planet by
1:56:18
being willing to be wrong. I wish more people knew that they are worthy.
1:56:38
And finally, if my younger self walked through that door, I would tell her
1:56:46
great job.
1:56:50
So, Boazzi, it's been so wonderful to be in conversation with you. I'm so grateful. I feel really
1:56:56
honored. I feel changed. I feel what you described. How you hope that your art moves something in
1:57:03
someone allows them to feel differently. I really feel that today. Thank you for your work.
1:57:07
Thank you for your words. I feel honored to be part of this beautiful unfolding one and a half
1:57:13
years later and made continue to flow. I just uh, from the title to the words I'm so so in
1:57:21
love with your work. And it's been such a gift when when the mirror of the magic that I received
1:57:27
from from both from both of you. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you so so much. Thank you for
1:57:32
the space. May your voice be part of that healing work that the world needs so much and many,
1:57:38
many blessings to you. And thank you for your soul truly truly. Just from walking in, it was just
1:57:47
a deep breath. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for seeing me. Thank you for those words. And
1:57:53
may this not be the last time and sending so much love. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
1:57:58
Wow. Thank you so much for listening, for watching, for traveling with us. We are so grateful.
1:58:03
Thank you for stepping into the soul salon and we will see you soon. Please do follow. Where can
1:58:08
people stay in touch with you? Socials. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Guys are generous. As well as the
1:58:13
underscore J. Yeah. All over the socials. Perfect. We will link to everything below and we'll also
1:58:18
link directly to be able to receive this book wherever you feel cold and we're so excited to
1:58:25
have this wisdom be in your hands and the story be in your heart. It's really going to move you
1:58:29
if it hasn't already. So thank you so much everyone. Thank you. I'll see you next time.
1:58:33
Ah, thank you. My darling, my love, my soul sibling. Thank you for stepping into the soul salon.
1:58:40
If you are still hearing or watching this, we are soul siblings. We are resonating on the same
1:58:45
frequency and so something you may struggle with that I struggle with is the fear of being seen.
1:58:51
You know that visibility is involved in you living your creative purpose and being in your power,
1:58:56
serving the collective through your gifts, through your magic, through your medicine. In order to do
1:59:02
that, you know you need to be more seen than you are allowing yourself to be right now. I have a
1:59:08
gift just for you, heart made for us on this frequency and it is a free ebook called The Soulful
1:59:15
Visibility Guide. That is soulful visibility. Like we don't just want to be seen. We want to be
1:59:21
felt. We want to be heard. We want to move and be moved. So I do have a free gift for you and all
1:59:27
you need to do is go to my website. I understood.com and there you will be able to input your email
1:59:34
address and receive this directly to your inbox. This is such a juicy and delicious guide and I
1:59:40
change the free offering every few months. So you know get it while you can. All the links are
1:59:45
in the show notes. So thank you so much. I love you and I will see you on the next sole session.
1:59:50
Okay. I love you. Bye.