by Kholeka Shange
Ninety six years ago, imbongikazi of the Chizama clan, Nontsizi Mgqwetho wrote a poem aptly titled Ukutula! Ukwakukuvuma! In The Nation’s Bounty: The Xhosa Poetry of Nontsizi Mgqwetho, Jeff Opland claims that this isiXhosa expression and exclamation is the equivalent of the English phrase “Silence implies consent”. In this poem, published in the newspaper Umteteli wa Bantu (Mouthpiece of the People) in June 1924, Mgqwetho cautioned against the collective act of “…[U]kutula umhlab’ ubolile”—interpreted by scholar Athambile Masola as “…Keep[ing] quiet while the world is in shambles”. Mgqwetho’s haunting words continue to resonate in our present South African literary landscape, through the written and the (un)spoken word.
Forging indlela
Mgqwetho’s heeding call is deeply felt in Our Words, Our Worlds: Writing on Black South African Women Poets, 2000-2018, an anthology edited by poet, essayist, short-story writer and biographer Makhosazana Xaba. In this critical text, Xaba acknowledges the role that Mgqwetho as imbongikazi played in being uvulandlela for South African Blackwomen [1] poets. While the term imbongikazi is commonly understood to mean poetess, the sociolinguist Pamela Maseko proposes that the suffix ‘-kazi’ (which is usually added to nouns in Nguni languages) does not solely signify gender. Maseko notes that ‘-kazi’ “adds a kind of superlative, a degree of greatness and awesomeness...”. In other words, the morpheme ‘mbongikazi’ may also be interpreted as an expression that refers to a great poet. In addition, Xaba’s framing of Mgqwetho as uvulandlela, which Sibusiso Nyembezi defines as “Umuntu ohamba phambili ekuvuleni amathuba abekade engekho” (isiZulu for “A person who leads in creating opportunities where there were none”) is particularly important because the practice of being imbongi—a [praise] poet, and particularly being a royal bard—was and continues to be male dominated.
Centering oneself
According to poet and academic Gabeba Baderoon’s introduction in Xaba’s Our Words, the world of South African poetry has been one wherein Blackwomen have existed on the margins. In her profound words, Baderoon observes that this critical anthology functions as “An account of a profound transformation in national culture that emerged because Black women were exiled from the official worlds of poetry in academia and the dominant publishing world and even from places that they expected to be inclusive, such as post-apartheid writing conferences and workshops”. In this regard, Blackwomen writers/poets have worked tirelessly to centre their voices in dominant spaces that have treated them as second class and perhaps even third class citizens.
As Baderoon’s poem I Cannot Myself poignantly states:
To come to this country,
my body must assemble itself
into photographs and signatures.
Among them they will search for me.
I must leave behind all uncertainties.
I cannot myself be a question.
In reading Baderoon’s evocative words which have been strategically included in the afterword of Our Words by Xaba, one gets a sense that it is the Blackwoman writer/poet that is dismembered through literary exile. It is the Blackwoman that must assert themselves as an exclamation instead of a walking question mark.
Our Words is a powerful collection of academic essays, personal essays and interviews in which multiple Blackwomen - from feminist literary scholars, poets and mothers to activists, teachers, filmmakers, performers, writers, playwrights, cultural workers and more - disrupt the shattering silence that threatens to erase their many dynamic lived experiences.
This book is thematically structured into three parts. The first section explores Blackwomen writers/poets’ critical contributions to feminist discourse/s in the literary world; while the second section centres around the crucial role that personal narratives play in the daily lives of Blackwomen writers/poets; and the last section focuses on the vital place of the conversational mode of producing knowledge (which breaks away from the academic and the inaccessible) in unearthing the meaning of poetry, writing and performance in the lives of Blackwomen.
Resisting erasure| Moving toward ukuzibungaza
These explorations are unearthed in the words of contributors that include V. M. Sisi Magaqi, Barbara Boswell, Duduzile Zamantungwa Mabaso, Myesha Jenkins, Sedica Davis, Tereska Muishond, Toni Stuart, Makgano Mamabolo, Maganthrie Pillay, Phillippa Yaa de Villiers, Lebogang Mashile, Diana Ferrus, Makhosazana Xaba, Napo Masheane, Natalia Molebatsi, Vangi Gantsho…just to name a few. Although the contributors of this mixed-genre anthology are diverse, what holds them together is a desire to “guard against erasure” as Xaba notes. It is in this beautiful text that Blackwomen writers/poets “celebrate [their] creative voices and selves”.
In the moving words of Xaba (who reimagines Baderoon’s I Cannot Myself), Blackwomen as a community “Come to this land of literature” wherein “[their] ideas must assemble themselves into poems: on paper and on stage”. And it is within these multiple creative forms that the world (as we know it) will search for Blackwomen.
In this groundbreaking anthology, Blackwomen writers/poets not only create their own worlds through their words, but they do so with the idea that they can “hold the sun entwined in their arms” as seen in Napo Masheane’s poem Fat Love.
[1] Following Pumla Dineo Gqola in Ufanele Uqavile: Blackwomen, Feminisms and Postcoloniality in Africa (2001), I combine the words ‘Black’ and ‘women’ in order to highlight how race and gender cannot be treated as mutually exclusive for Blackwomen.
UKholeka Shange ungumfundi nombhali othanda izinto ezikhulula umphefumulo.