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ED HERMAN:
Welcome to Poetry Lectures, featuring talks by poets, scholars, and educators, presented by poetryfoundation.org. In this program, poet Gabeba Baderoon of South Africa speaks with American poet Matthew Shenoda. Gabeba Baderoon was born in Port Elizabeth, South Africa in 1969. She received a doctorate in English from the University of Cape Town. Baderoon has published three collections of poetry and has written and lectured extensively on images of Islam in South African literature and art. She is currently an assistant professor of Women's Studies and African and African American studies at Penn State University. Matthew Shenoda is an award-winning writer who has taught and lectured in the fields of ethnic studies and creative writing. He is currently associate dean of the School of Fine and Performing Arts at Columbia College in Chicago. The conversation took place at the Poetry Foundation in Chicago in March, 2013. Gabeba Baderoon begins by describing how she discovered poetry as she was growing up in apartheid South Africa.

GABEBA BADEROON:
Well, I grew up in the height of apartheid, although of course the system started in 1948, so my mother can say she grew up in the height of apartheid. I grew up in the '70 and the '80s, which were a violent time, a brutal time in many ways, and also a time when of course a system was pretty mature. It had insinuated itself into almost every part of everybody's life. So I grew up in a segregated school, a segregated neighborhood, was born in a segregated hospital. Apartheid aimed to be a religion in many ways. I also grew up in a community that had by now established its own ways of surviving and flourishing. I grew up in a Black community and I went to a Black school, and in fact, my school, Livingston High School, was very famous for its resistance to apartheid. So within a system that tried to tell you all the time that race governed everything, and particularly that as a Black person at the bottom of the hierarchy, there were also other nodes of life that demonstrated exactly the opposite.

And for me, poetry was part of that. I remember in the 1980s, I was at Livingston as a high school student, and we had one moment, which I still remember was probably something like 25 years ago, I still remember a poet named Jeremy Cronin who had been imprisoned by the apartheid government and, shall we say, he was in between prison terms, coming to our school and giving us a poetry reading, and signaling by his words, by his body, by his presence, what it meant to be a human being that didn't govern their lives by the system, and did it with beauty and love and sternness and fierceness and a completely different vision. And the school was redolent with that throughout in the way we were taught, the friendships that we formed, which are still friendships in my life today. And it wasn't at that time that I started writing poetry, actually. I started very late. I started when I was 30. I had loved reading and loved everything to do with literature, but I certainly didn't see myself as writing literature.

And that took a sort of abrupt shift in my life, which came when I for the first time lived overseas when I was a student, when I was 30. And that abrupt, jarring shift away from everything that was familiar and necessary to me led me to experiment with all kinds of arts, and I had no idea that poetry was going to be an art that called me particularly, I did it alongside yoga and painting and things like that. There was something about poetry that in fact it called to me in a way that somebody who already reads literature and loves it finds something familiar and completely strange. So that's what I did from the age of 30, and now I'm still learning how.

MATTHEW SHENODA:
Well, one of the things you mentioned strikes me a bit, and that is the idea that the poet who came to visit your school talked about a kind of humanization through his work. And I'm reminded here of the words of Aimé Césaire, who said, "Colonization equals thingification." And I have always felt that one of poetry's roles is to dethingify, to rehumanize who we are as people through the various issues that we've faced, both historically and in our contemporary times. And I wonder if you can speak a little bit about that tradition in relation to South African poetry specifically, which especially in the era that you grew up in, the poetry was responding to the context of apartheid. What some might, I think, in certain ways falsely call a political poetry.

GABEBA BADEROON:
When I think about South African poetry and I'm a proselytizer of the poetry of the continent, I wonder at which point to start, because shall I start now in a contemporary period where we are very alert to the challenges of our time right now, and also to the fact that we're part of the world? Or shall I start during the '80s, at the height of time of repression and quite blatant unashamed violence on the part of the state, as well as a militarization of the opposition to the state which we're still living with today, the consequences of which we're living with today? Or should I start during the colonial period? Should I start with our oral history, which means the earliest human culture on Earth? So, in a way, it's a complex question because you're inviting us to think beyond the ways in which South Africa has become legible to the world, which is through our politics. And as I mentioned to you, what Jeremy Cronin and other poets were doing was always surprising and tripping against, and insisting against those lines that would describe us only in one way. So, Letters to Martha by Dennis Brutus, who is perhaps one of the most eminent poets, a lodestar of morality, of resistance, was a collection also of love poems, of tenderness, of reflecting on what it means to be human.

So that's what I would like to recall about South African poetry, that it was always more than what it was most famous for. And it's a deeply complex arena of thinking of writing a performance. It's flawed also. But if there were a part of my bookshelf where I would linger, it would definitely be with the kind of writers such as Tatamkhula Afrika, Rustum Kozain, Makhosazana Xaba, Phillippa Yaa de Villiers. These names that ring and with writing that calls to me in its complexity, not because it's about politics, and not because it's not about politics.

MATTHEW SHENODA:
I wonder then, because of both its political origin and its non-political origin, there are many links with South Africa as a nation and I think the poetry of South Africa to the larger continent and the larger world. I wonder if you can speak a bit about this larger sense of Pan-Africanism and how language kind of crosses borders in various ways, how this human thing that you're speaking about connects Africans across the continent and perhaps into diaspora as well.

GABEBA BADEROON:
Indeed. You'll know, of course, that from the 19th century, a Black modernity was signaled to us in South Africa by the Atlantic, the people of the Atlantic, and particularly African-Americans. So there are very, very longstanding for us, ancient connections with the diaspora. And one of the ways in which we, in South Africa, signaled our resistance to apartheid was in resisting what apartheid thought about the continent, right? It was this outpost of white civilization against the failing continent, was the apartheid vision. Whereas both the people who stayed behind and the people who went into exile were always finding hospitable spaces, whether they were intellectual spaces, whether there were actually spaces of refuge, spaces of political help and cooperation, but also spaces where we went to learn, some of our great intellectuals and writers, Njabulo Ndeble, were in neighboring countries, Keorapetse Kgositsile, were establishing the ANC Cultural Desk in neighboring countries. In our very practice, those who were both activists and writers were there in the continent.

In our thinking, we were resisting this idea of the continent as the falling place of the world, and we were finding resonance and were finding inspiration for our ideas there. And one can see that in the way Helon Habila, for instance, is publishing in South Africa, Tanure Ojaide and I share a publisher in South Africa. The African Poetry Book Fund has a Senegalese publisher. We're working on an existing history of creativity and hospitality and receptiveness. That has been operating throughout. It might not be as visible as some of the publications in the North, but these are stands we've invented because we needed them. And I think that increasingly, for instance, Chika Unigwe has used her magnificent recent Nigerian Literary Award to establish a writers village. And we're establishing writers residencies on the continent, workshops on the continent that are creating spaces for us as writers to circulate among our countries and then not use Europe or the North as some kind of linking ground for us on the continent. This does not mean, of course, that those connections have not been productive with places elsewhere.

I think, though, I would like to reorient them so that Africa's not the margin, that we become one of set of centers and therefore a place of origin of ideas and thinking about writing and not just the raw material for it.

MATTHEW SHENODA:
In relation to that, one of the things that strikes me about the most recent generation of poets in South Africa and other parts of the continent, their relationship with the spoken word movement in the United States, and that there's actually been quite a bit of movement between these spaces of youth from both places going back and forth, and really engaging in a very interesting transatlantic conversation. And I wonder if you're connected with that at all, if it's something that you engage with.

GABEBA BADEROON:
Absolutely. If you are in any city in South Africa and you have your ear to the ground, you're going to find the places where performance is taking place. And fortunately, they're not only places on the margins anymore either. These spoken word places, for instance, the one that Phillippa Yaa de Villiers runs in Johannesburg, along with members of the former Fearless Sisters collective, (UNKNOWN) and others. These are spaces where, again, you're going to find incredibly nuanced, exciting, vivid writing performance that is creating connections between what one assumes has been separate. And these same performers are also part of official poetry festivals, writing festivals that have international participants. So I do indeed participate in these whenever I'm, say in Durban or in Johannesburg or in Cape Town. But more than that, I benefit from it. It's running counter to this assumption that poetry doesn't make money. Poetry doesn't have an audience. Every time you see a weekday audience, a weekend audience that is burgeoning with hundreds of eager young members who are supporting one another, you know you're seeing a vibrant culture and a live culture.

And that's what spoken word is part of. And I think, as well, in addition to the Atlantic and the Transatlantic and the global connection, there are also very interesting Francophone connections, the Tunisian hiphop artists who come through the French connections in South Africa. So all of these are, I think, signaling ways that we are influencing one another. Again, not via the North only. It also connects with our own oral history tradition. It's not only, obviously the hip hop connection is also connected to that oral history tradition. So I think there's a huge source of energy, and again, connecting both to publishing, to writing, to official festival scenes, to literary award scenes, and all raising the energy level for poetry generally.

MATTHEW SHENODA:
I want to switch gears and speak for a moment about your own work. One of the things that strikes me about your own poetry is the almost haunting quietude of it. There's something very subtle and very powerful about the work of yours that I've encountered. And I wonder if you could speak a bit about the power of your work, what you see it doing in the world, and also how gender and spirituality both intersect, which are very much alive in your own poetry. And I think really important conversations, not just for South Africans or Africans as a whole, but really for the larger poetry world.

GABEBA BADEROON:
Thank you very much, first of all, for that sensitive response, and I deeply appreciate what you've said. As I mentioned, I started late and because I was not schooled to think of myself as a writer while I was discovering the writers we were talking about, I think my own initiation into writing was quite peculiar. And I didn't have to encourage myself to be more recognizable, because I really didn't initially think of myself as offering my work to a broader audience. I was offering my work to my teachers, to my fellow writers in the groups I was part of. And perhaps that protection from this idea that I would have to fit into a school allowed me to at least nurture the peculiarity, if not understand it and value it at first. Of course, as with all of us writers you have to find the places in you that need to come forth, and one of the topics that I felt very profoundly was not being addressed was the quality of quietness, tenderness, vulnerability with both men and women, and that I was deeply familiar with living in an almost all Black space.

And this is true even today. Many cities like Johannesburg are in fact very, very mixed, but there are places in our cities that are still largely Black. I now teach in the US, but when I'm back in South Africa, I continue to live in one of those places, so my reality is very much shaped by that complexity, and I wanted to convey that in my writing. So many of my poems failed, didn't make it into those spaces, but some of them did. And one of the poems that is deeply precious to me is, for instance, being able to write about my father who was a Muslim man in South Africa, and a quiet man, and a fragile man as we all are. And how to make space to convey that vision of masculinity from Africa was perhaps one of the things I wanted to do, and poetry allowed me that. You're right as well, that the question of gender is deeply important for me, partly because my day job, so to speak, is as an academic in gender studies and African feminism particularly. So, of course, one of the realities that we as people who care about issues of gender and the continent and worldwide is to think of ways to make what we care about legible to others, particularly because certain kinds of injustice flourish because they're invisible. So for me, one of the challenges has been to write about these matters without writing a manifesto.

So again, I failed more often than I have succeeded in this, but I want to write a space that allows me to be honest about those things too. Poetry has offered that for me, and sometimes the manifesto has offered that. We don't stop being other kinds of writers or other kinds of practitioners because we are poets.

MATTHEW SHENODA:
And how does your current position, both living in diaspora and as a professor of gender studies, engaging then both through scholarship and through pedagogy in a larger global conversation, and also living back and forth, how has that informed the conversation for you?

GABEBA BADEROON:
I find that my position at the moment was the outcome of many happy accidents. I wasn't smart enough to foresee the path that eventually I would take. I always thought I would be teaching and living on the continent, and I've ended up in the diaspora. And one of the benefits of that outcome has been to bring me into much closer contact with some of the strands of thinking and inspiration that I drew on when I was back in South Africa. So writing, for instance, about slavery from the continent, which I was doing, drew very strongly on work that had already been done on the Caribbean, in Black Britain, in African American thinking and writing. So it's brought me closer and it's allowed me to have very real and deep friendships with people who are working in this area here. It's also allowed me to think in very deep ways about what it means to move between spaces. When I first came to the United States, I was living in a community of other international visitors. They were from India, China, Nigeria, and a number of countries.

And I noticed the difference between myself and my friends from these other countries. Of course, I try not to generalize too much, but what I felt about myself is a difficulty in letting go of South Africa, which my friends from Nigeria and from China and India, and of course these are self-selected, having been international scholars, but they had a much more mobile sense of self and the ability to return, draw on spaces and strengths and be mobile in a way that I couldn't. And I started to think about that. What was it about me and what was it about South Africanness at that point, just at the turn of the millennium? And I think it's because of this belatedness to the South African entry into what for others were the post-colonial future, the independent future, and for us it's their post-apartheid future. So that particular nuance of where I came from and the space I was going into, it's been a very rich time for me, for my own development as a writer and as a thinker. And to learn more about what is necessary to hold onto and not to shift and not to give up, and what needs to be given up and needs to be embraced in a new way.

I would never have learned those things without that shift.

MATTHEW SHENODA:
In that, both your work as a scholar and as a poet, very beautifully complicate the conversation. You spoke earlier about this idea of thinking of your father and how to engage that kind of masculinity, which we know is very real in poetry and in spaces where we don't see these kinds of representations. And I wonder if you would speak a bit about being Muslim in South Africa and what that might mean for you personally? And I think in order to educate people on the diversity of religious thought and belief across the continent. 'Cause as you've said, people don't necessarily think about various kinds of diversities of community that exist in these spaces. We know South Africa from the diaspora in very singular ways, which of course anyone who's human knows that's not true. Yet it's the narrative that's often perpetuated.

GABEBA BADEROON:
Yes, you're right. Part of my academic work actually, my dissertation was on images of Islam in South Africa. And the reason I said I drew on African American theories and literature about slavery is because the way Islam arrived in South Africa was through slavery. Enslaved people were brought from East Africa, and India, and Southeast Asia, and this is a very old history in South Africa and not known very much beyond the borders of South Africa. And perhaps, not even thought about very much within South Africa because of course we have a very urgent recent history of a apartheid. So part of my intellectual work is to think about that very complex history and why, for instance, I identify as Black and other people who look at me might say, that's interesting. Why is she calling herself Black? Partly it's because of a resistant history to apartheid, which divided us into so many small subgroups that there was a special category and new birth certificate to identify which particular subgroup of which particular category of identity you had been placed in by the state. So of course, we created something that was resistant and capacious, but that resistant identity also reaches back to much longer before apartheid.

And for me, that is where Islam belongs in the foundations of what we think of as being human in South Africa, because the history of enslavement and genocide is unfortunately part of our founding narrative in the country. And if we don't pay attention to that, we'll miss part of the reason for our continued agonies today around gender, around race. Being Muslim in South Africa is as ordinary as breathing the air. You'll hear the sound of the call for prayer in the major cities. It's simply normality. There's nothing spectacular or exceptional about being Muslim, and that's the most precious thing in the world as we know. In the major supermarket that is founded and owned by a Jewish man, I every day during Ramadan go in and see Happy Ramadan signs in the supermarket. It didn't strike me until I went overseas, how ordinary it was to be Muslim. And that ordinariness is something that has been very precious to me, and I take it with me elsewhere in the world. Again, one of those things I say, it is important to hold onto and even as one encounters new situations where perhaps one does a little bit more explaining, as I find in the U.S. often.

MATTHEW SHENODA:
I wonder if you can read some poems for us.

GABEBA BADEROON:
I would be very honored. Thank you. Since you invite me to reflect on these very complex issues of gender and spirituality, I'll read you a poem called Play, Or, Watching a Film About Muslim Boys. Even when they do not move, there is a different stillness to bodies when they are together. The writer tells us about the boys he spoke to wrote about who abseiled from him in every conversation. But the boys in his film are thin. If you turn off the sound, you see their arms flail in unison. I want to slow them down. I am not looking for one face or one human voice. I want to stand close to their sameness. Listen for the turns in their words. Learn what voluminous anguish they have putted their certainty against. I want to look at their forearms when they are not raised and stare at the skin that escapes their white robes. Does it give at the touch? Prayer is a ligament on which their skin hangs, yet strung totally between two posts, every chord, despite itself, has a curve of play. The writer flinches from his pale, intimate crowd, makes a home for love in the sweet agility of sex.

I know such love. It makes you grab one hand from the crowd and run. I watch the writer talk in a curve of fabric at his wrist. His skin as silken as a boy's.

MATTHEW SHENODA:
Thank you.

GABEBA BADEROON:
Thank you. And I'll read you one about my mother. I always love entering a room with my mother who's about one and a half meters tall, which is really short, four foot nine or something. And she wears a hijab. And I always loved it when she and my father, who sadly now is deceased, who'd enter the room because he's much taller than she is, and would be introduced as Dr Jardine and spouse and people would go up to my father and say, "Dr Jardine, such a pleasure to meet you." And my mother would step from around him, almost always said, "Actually, I'm Dr Jardine." And she went to the University of Cape Town in the 1950s when apartheid was instituting itself in the most brutal ways. And she would tell me stories, both about what they had lost and what they were entering into. And because I myself was already part of this system, and everyday witnessed and expected those overt forms of discrimination and dehumanization, it didn't strike me for a long time what she meant when she was telling me these stories.

So this is a poem I wrote in honor of my mother and what she went through in those days, and the ways in which apartheid tried to make difference ordinary, and then the way that we resisted it. So this is a poem for my mother. It's called, I Forget to Look. The photograph of my mother at her desk in the '50s has been in my purse for 20 years. Its paper faded, browning. The scalloped edge bent, then straightened. The color of her dress folds discreetly. The angle of her neck looks as though someone has called her from far away. She was the first in her family to take the bus from Claremont up the hill to the university. At one point, during the lectures at medical school, black students had to pack their notes, get up, and walk past the ascending rows of desks out of the theater. Behind the closed door, in an autopsy, Black students were not meant to see, the uncovering and cutting of white skin. Under the knife, the skin, the mystery of sameness. In a world that defined how Black and white could look at each other, touch each other, my mother looks back, her poise unmarred.

Every time I open my purse, she's there, so familiar, I forget to look at her.

MATTHEW SHENODA:
I'm reminded there of what Langston Hughes called the beautiful and the ugly too. To me, one of the most powerful things about your work and poetry in general is that ability to bring the whole self, to bring the entire narrative into the work, and not shy away from the difficult pieces.

GABEBA BADEROON:
Thank you so much. May I read you the poem about my father?

MATTHEW SHENODA:
Please.

GABEBA BADEROON:
Give. Before dawn, low voices, briefly loud, my father and his friend, the ambulance driver, his days off always in the middle of the week, drive away from the house with fixed sandwiches and a flask of tea, and my father's green and white fishing rod whipping the wind behind the '76 Corolla. Camping by the sea, we'd see him take his rod further down the beach, walk waist-deep into the water, plant himself with legs apart in the breakers, reach back, cast the line, baited with chokka and pull, giving then tightening the line, nudging its weighted stream of gut to the fish. But in this place on the West Coast, they never disclosed, they stand unwatched, out of reach of each other's lines, and at their backs, a fire on the beach not stemming the dark, but deepening it. Often it would come to nothing, they're planting and pulling, but sometimes the leather cups holding the ends of their fishing rods strained as they bent back against the high howl of the reels being run to the limit, and holding. Bowing forward and giving, and leaning back and pulling, their bodies make a slow dance nobody sees.

And at home, the scraping of scales from galjoen and yellowtail, and slitting the silver slick of skin to make thick steaks for supper, setting aside the cater for breakfast, the head for soup and the gills and fat for the cats while they tell us how they landed them. I wonder about the empty days more frequent. The solitary standing in the dark at the edge of something vast, sea and sky, throwing a thin line into the give of it and waiting. Silent and waiting until something pulls against your weight.

ED HERMAN:
That was Gabeba Baderoon reading a poem about her father entitled Give. She was speaking with Matthew Shenoda. This program was recorded at the Poetry Foundation in Chicago on March 4, 2013, as part of International Poets in Conversation and was sponsored by the Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute. Gabeba Baderoon is the author of three poetry collections, A hundred Silences, which was a finalist for the University of Johannesburg Prize, The Dream in the Next Body, and Silence Before Speaking. Her work also appears in several anthologies. Matthew Shenoda's first collection of poems, Somewhere Else, was published in 2005 and was named a Debut Book of the Year by Poets & Writers magazine. His most recent book is Seasons of Lotus, Seasons of Bone. You can learn more about Gabeba Baderoon and Matthew Shenoda and read some of their poetry by visiting poetryfoundation.org, where you'll also find articles by and about poets, an online archive of more than 10,000 poems, the Harriet Blog about poetry, the complete back issues of Poetry Magazine and other audio programs to download. I'm Ed Hermann.

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