Phillippa Yaa de Villiers

Beyond Words was a tour that brought four SA poets together to recite new work and share ideas and inspiration with poets from the UK. Travelling across 5 cities, the tour performed in Newcastle, London, Manchester, Bristol and Birmingham. This Saturday, 12 December, Professor Keorapetse Kgositsile, National Poet Laureate (Order of Ikhamanga), Lebo Mashile, TV personality, poet and winner of the Noma Award for publishing in Africa, and writer and performer Phillippa Yaa de Villiers.

The tour, produced by Sustained Theatre and Apples and Snakes, and supported by the UK Arts Council, the British Council and the Department of Arts and Culture, brought poets together in a series of performances, master classes and workshops and also published a chapbook of new poems by Keorapetse Kgositsile, Don Mattera, Lebo Mashile and Phillippa Yaa de Villiers.

The flyer for the Birmingham performance

LONDON STOOD UP last night for us at the South Bank. A warm and wonderful audience stood up and applauded after a series of four 15 minute sets that reflected four poets! It was like being on the Springbok poetry team for me – the least exposed of the four which included our National Poet Laureate Keorapetse Kgositsile…, Don Mattera and Lebo Mashile and me! Come feel the love in our other engagements: Savile Exchange, North Shields (Saturday 7 November) Deptford Albany (Tuesday 10 November) Contact Theatre Manchester (Thursday 12 November) Old Vic Bristol (Sunday 15 November)

Monday morning and time has a babelaas as outside Jeppe Prep bodies wriggling with anxiety are throwing satchels over their shoulders and rushing to catch the morning bell. My son crosses the line of prefects like an athlete at the kiddie olympics, a smile breaks over his face, a wave of relief. In South Africa time is not indigenous because the time that we keep is always ahead of us, frowning disapprovingly as we struggle to keep up with it. Time is a white man, possibly German or Swiss. African time is an entirely different creature. African time is not human, it is elemental. It moves with the rhythm of the universe which is why all musicians have a faraway look in their eyes when they arrive half an hour late for dinner appointments. Australopithecus africanus did not have a deadline – we took time to evolve.

I have a two-faced chip on my shoulder that whispers in Ga and Zulu and Afrikaans and English.

Most people call me umlungu but when I throw stones at dogs I feel my African genes. Watching their little paws dodging the lump of stone: I always get them. I don’t even have to aim, it just happens. Not to say I have anything against dogs. Dogs are my best friends. I just show them where they fit in. As soon as they start acting too human, I let them know that they are dogs. We are all happier that way.

Growing up in the suburbs, I was bitten repeatedly. I became one of those people who is scared of dogs. A number of experiences have changed me. Owning a dog has given me confidence.

When we were given our first dog, Papalaps, I was intimidated. For a year I cooked chicken for her, only introducing her to dog food when she had six pups as a teenage mother. I was worn out and exiled her to the outside room. Until then she had slept in the house, but her habit of leaving foul-smelling little presents for me and my son to pick up was finally too much for me. Even now when she gets a bowl of superwoof dog chunks put in front of her she looks up as if to say: um… is this for me? but… it’s dogfood.

The secretary of the vet is very delicate about the words she uses about dogs in front of them. Instead of talking about human food versus dog food, she says “table food”. It’s one of those euphemisms that give me a quick bout of hives like “community” and “informal settlement”. Our sweet South African way of not saying what it is that we’re talking about, couching it in softer words. Air-freshener in a pit latrine.

We kept one of Papalaps’s six children because we wanted to break the cycle of giving children up for adoption. Jonathan is a feisty little fellow, now just a little taller than his mum. He’s quite sure that he’s a dog, even carefully lifting his leg from time to time. Then about a year later, Barney Simon, named for the legendary director of Black Dog Njenyama, moved in. A dog from a broken home, he strayed into our yard and was kept because he looked vicious and I wanted to have two barkers and a biter. He looks like a cross between an African hunting dog, a beagle and a labrador, with a fierce ridge down his back and a brief, blunt nose. He overpowers burglars with his monumental cowardice, leaping into their arms slobbering with terror.

These companions join me on my jogs (which become increasingly more like brisk walks as I rediscover the pleasure of smoking) through Troyeville. Proudly pulling me forward with their leashes, they own the area between Beelaerts Street and the David Webster Park, and all the way down Nourse to the park at the top of Benbow. Barney, the sole holder of a valid pair of testicles, marks his territory as we progress: that tree is mine, and this tyre, and that gate-post… which makes me wonder, how can one dog have so much urine to dispense? It’s an unstoppable flow. If only he could turn his prodigious talent to writing we’d both be able to retire.

I think that dogs are barking at one another because they’re exchanging insults. “your woman can’t jump!” “your man has a big ass!” etc. And our dogs bark back to defend us. They boast to one another about our achievements: “My person gave me chicken scraps yesterday.” “She bought me a new bed. I hate it.”

I set out to write a much more serious piece on diversity and languages, but this is what came. Like the media tome of the same name, this little article attempts to deconstruct the power relations within the pet relationship. We used to have a cat, who owned all the dogs until he decided to move on to a different home. I miss him and his narcissism.

My boyfriend reckons I should put them to work. Teach them how to open the gate. Clean up after themselves. He’s falling into the same trap of seeing them as human: children with chores. I reckon, let dogs be dogs. When they act human, get them to dodge their paws and run. Who’s paying the bills around here, anyway?

Dogs teach us about time as they have so much less than we do, and they spend it more wisely. Lying about, eating, humping legs and other dogs, they have other priorities. They also don’t see race. “Race” in French is the word for “breed” so once in the metro a kindly old lady asked a clochard with a pack of dogs what breed the fluffy one was. The homeless lady rose and raved: “You racist! who cares what race the dog is! it’s a dog! that’s enough isn’t it! but no, you people have to put everyone into a box! shame on you!” Shame on me with my chips.

Perhaps we are dogs’ spokespeople and service providers, their PR people and their agents. What the hell am I doing writing about them anyway? They’re only dogs. The Tanzanian at the end of our street had ten gigantic puppies that have grown into massive dogs. They burst through the fragile fence and rush up to people snarling. Now I know they’re only dogs, I am not intimidated. When a dog confronts you, don’t be diplomatic. Show Bush-style aggression. They will leave you alone. They know they are only dogs, but sometimes they forget. We should not, because we own them.

When you get writers in a room discussing their work it’s always interesting to me. What is not discussed is as fascinating as what is. The panellists, Tracy Farren, Jacques Pauw, Erica Emdon and Hazel Frankel, are all fresh and friendly new novelists, just come up from being under the ocean of words that they filtered, drop by drop, finding their stories.

Writing a novel is a real achievement in my opinion. Then when it’s good! It’s remarkable.

As a survivor from a fairly vrot family myself (sorry, I had to make that lame joke, because I am who I am, you get what you get, and that’s how it is with me – sung with obligatory air guitar – Jonas Brothers) I eagerly braved the ReaVaya-choked afternoon traffic and arrived just in time for the obligatory ritual networking, which I detest. I hung about beside the table where the books were displayed, and tried to look relaxed by flipping through the four well-proportioned tomes. There was no time to really get more than a smell of the books before we were ushered into the seminar room by Professor Titlestad, the chair of the event, to listen to four brand new novelists.

After discussing the ‘fragile process’ of making books in the Johannesburg environment, the prof welcomed us to the event and invited the writers to speak. I would imagine that making books anywhere is rather delicate, because each time I have to send something to a publisher I feel as if I am skinned and my liver is ripped out without the benefit of an anaesthetic. (Makhosazana Xaba’s poem “Fear” captures this perfectly, but if you want to read more about it you’ll have to get the latest issue of Baobab because my review is in it).

Jacques Pauw said: “we write about dysfunctional families because they’re more interesting.” Schadenfreude rippled around the room, as we all remembered the relish with which we read of the worst of human motives in the newspapers each day. The particular cruelty of Ferdi Barnard, with whom Jacques Pauw shares a strange kind of friendship, was the inspiration for The Ice-Cream Boy, his brand new novel.

Erica Emdon’s Jelly Dog Days was inspired by the resilience of a young girl who survived multiple abuses, and ended up writing a novel after her passion for writing a non-fiction book dealing with child sexual abuse went cold. I could relate to this: in some way, fiction releases readers and writers into a wider realm where the line between good and bad is not prescribed, and we deal with the unpredictable ingredient of humanity. In this context, who you are is of secondary importance to the story. Once you take up your pen to create a new world, populated by people of your imagination, we, the readers are also invited to enter a limbic space where we engage with the characters and are moved, asserting and affirming our individual histories. This where we truly draw the moral line.

Whiplash, the oldest of the four and already distinguished by a nomination for the prestigious Sunday Times Prize, came to Tracey Farren because she is “fascinated by people who see themselves as worthless.” In the novel, the main character discovers that she has redeeming qualities and so in a sense the novel becomes a journey into being, a woman becoming whole, coming out of a degraded world, she finds dignity.

The panel told us firmly that they were firmly not writing their own lives, although Hazel Frankl said that there were many nuances and atmospheres that she fished from her own life ocean. The artist and poet and author of the poetry volume Drawing from Memory, said that she wouldn’t feel right about writing about something that she hadn’t experienced, although the portrayal of the dysfunctional family in Counting Sleeping Beauties was a work of fiction. Jacques Pauw felt uncomfortable about identifying with his violent and sadistic protagonist, and Tracey Farren is not a prostitute and has never been one.

All the writers are well versed in psychology and engaged in our society: Jacques is the most high-profile of all with his brilliant work exposing the underbelly of our society through television and his non-fiction writing, but Erica Emdon is a lawyer whose sphere of interest is children and domestic violence, Tracy Farren is a journalist too. Their professional and personal identities had a lot to the writing of their books, firstly in the choice of their subject matter and secondly in the way they went about melding this passion into the stories that they created.

Whether or not the story is autobiographical or researched, the novelist has to choose the journey that their characters go on; with love and patience they have to paint the world in which the character lives, and allow them to breathe and speak in their own voices. The particular challenge of writing a first person narrative was evoked during the discussion, and Pauw spoke about characters living in his head for months, literally taking over his life.

Well, they’re out now, nicely packaged in their books so that we can peruse their motivations and measure them against our own. There is no right and wrong, there is only the space for us to discover this, as we discover ourselves and the many lives and choices in the books that we read. Viva the conversation.

http://literaturwerkstatt.org/index.php?id=688&L=1

Poetry is sometimes like an endless round of parties. I’m going to the Poesiefestival Berlin, where I’ll see Chiwoniso and Keamogetsi Molapong again after 2 years, where we first met at Poetry Africa. Not wanting to name drop … but what the hell? Our National Poet Laureate Keorapetse Kgositsile will also be there. Another strange and interesting experience of going to Europe to meet Africans. But I’m really looking forward to sleeping at the Berlin Ritz Carlton for four nights. And being immersed in poetry up to the tips of my hair.

One of the greatest joys of attending poetry festivals is the exposure that one receives to the lives and works of poets, and if you are also a poet, the bartering of books. Having just finished Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje I am hungry again. I like to nibble on poetry, keeping the plates next to my bed. Looking forward to Uche Nduka, who’s like a meatball with a spicy sauce on the side and the little angel cakes spiked with Cape winds and tinsel of Loftus Marais. The warm velvet of Cinnamon and Winter Skin of Seni Seneviratne and finally the midnight snack, edged in black of Megan Hall’s Fourth Child. In my Morning Break in the Elevator, I snuck a snack of Lemn Sissay’s rich vanilla and black chocolate surprises, and I anticipate the spanspek downhomeness of Malika Ndlovu’s Womb to World: a Labour of Love.

And this calorie will not count for me. make me rich and lean with inspiration, leaning to the left to the right, up and down leaning into the wind and away with the mountains leaning into the rotten garbage the skeletal hopes the abandoned and the forgotten what we left behind anyway i better stop writing so i can read!

It has been said that the opening night of a play is equal in stress to a multi-vehicle car accident, with injuries.

Original Skin opens at the Festival of Fame at the National Arts School (formerly Johannesburg Arts School) tomorrow at 6pm.

Ambulances have been notified and CPR-empowered Vanessa Cooke is ready, she’s been holding my hand for the past two weeks.

Of course this isn’t our first opening night, so the wounds are superficial, flesh wounds. But hey! the show has sharpened after seven months incubation, and we have made some changes. It has been directed with the intention of performing in schools, so it’s super portable and makes use of simple props to create the scene. If you are in Johannesburg, please come
Wednesday 13 May 6pm
Thursday 14 May 7pm
Friday 15 May 7pm
(take the Melle Street entrance, coming up from Empire, and enter the field)

This is a coming of age story that pulls no punches. Adopted children, teenagers, people of all types and inclinations will hopefully relate to Alexandra as she finds a place for that mixed blessing, that massive yet only skin deep gift, that can of worms called RACIAL IDENTITY

Powerful … moving … plenty of humour .” Bruce Dennill, The Citizen
“De Villiers … moves from poetry to song to dramatic monologues … keeping the audience with her every step of the way.” Gail Smith, City Press
“Exquisitely written and beautifully performed. ” Cue Magazine

directed by Vanessa Cooke
written and performed by Phillippa Yaa de Villiers
script development by Robert Colman

Wednesday, Thursday, Friday 13-15 May
National School of the Arts
Venue: Space (!!! don’t I wish – me and Mr Spock)

I am a subscriber to the UCT Poetry Web, and so I am privy to the thoughts of great poets and writers. We’ve been talking about Australia’s Stolen Generation, where aboriginal children who had European genes were taken away from their parents (I’m sure you remember the film Rabbit Proof Fence).

Ken Barris included some commentary on Sarah Gertrude Millins’s God’s Stepchildren: “Her premise is that the more white blood is diluted, the less the strain of intellectual inferiority becomes evident. However, the narrative asserts that despite this promising development,someone of mixed blood can never really overcome their inferiority. The only solution is to refrain from breeding, so that your inferiority can die out with you.”

Ms Millins’ comment was just like she had just chucked her cigarette stompie into my petrol tank. This rant poured out of me under the title: The Stolen Generation: Taking Back One’s Life. Liesl Jobson and some other members suggested that I post it on Book.co.za, so here it is (lightly edited):

After being chased out of cinemas and buses as a child in the 70s, I grew into political awareness in the 80s and started attending anti-apartheid events. After my very unimportant arrest, my father decided to tell me: I was adopted, and my biological mother was Australian. There was a strong suggestion that my father was not white. I immediately imagined that he was an aboriginal.

As a teenager I had read Walkabout and had enthusiastically entered the dreamtime of Aboriginal thought. I read more: Sally Morgan’s My Place, and tried to teach myself how to play the didgeridoo. Deep in my DNA, I believed that I was a wanderer, as well as a much taller, slimmer, darker of myself.
But this could be blamed on my mixed genes. My mother was obviously small and fat, which explained my lack of height. Either way, I was curiously affirmed by thinking that I was not white, aboriginal. I was able to see myself within a social context that made sense to me: we were experiencing the same things.

I identified strongly with the stolen generation for all my twenties, which probably saved me from insanity. In their stories I found courage and desire, tragedy and creativity.

When I finally met my biological families, my sister-in-law, an Aboriginal from Adelaide, told me that she had never imagined marrying a white man because she had never met a white person who understood her and where she came from. She was always sure that she would marry a black man, but she was afraid of black Australians.

She told me that it was because she could never be sure who she was related to. There were so many children in her family stolen, her aunts and uncles were all pulled apart in some way or another.

So she was happy to marry my brother, who is Ghanaian-Australian.

We are breeding happily. Coming from a background with an inordinate number of suicides, alcoholism and the self-destructive ills of a people in absolute trauma, our children are hope and the future. We only see the shadow when the sun hits a certain way. But we live in the day: all the time we are walking, breathing, talking through our lives.

Every day we deal with the ghosts of reason, which tell us that we’re not supposed to exist, or to have any thoughts about our existence at all.
Either way, our thoughts are of no interest to reason or rationality. Our methods of dealing with these troublesome dybbuks vary depending on our mood and what is available. Since they inhabit our own minds, we have to take responsibility for them and limit their thrall. The voice of Reason still demands responses to a reality, that for me, doesn’t exist.

The more people I meet, the more I like dogs. The more dogs I have, the more I prefer trees. Always returning to the jungle, the forest, the sacred spaces where we are simply human in a wondrous universe. I renew myself in the certainty that I am not a mistake.

Overcoming inferiority is just an item on the to-do list of a black woman.

This is a really bad poem that I wrote a few years ago. It’s one of those that you have to write to put things in their place. I can’t imagine it would be of any use to anyone else. But in case it is, here goes:

Schadenfreude

Across the road lived a blue-eyed boy
whose pursed disgust hurled names like
Rubberlips!
Kaffirtackies!
That’s what’s on your face,
kaffirs.
Me and Ntomb’futhi, with Judy balanced on her
five-year old hip shouted back:
“Ke tla donsa wena! Ke tla donsa and shaya wena!”
Our words flew out like sparrows,
dodged between his stones
and scattered into the air.

At night, in front of the mirror I
turned my plump, soft, lips into
thin lines folded back against my gums,
pressed my flaring nostrils flat. All this to be beautiful
like white people are.

Now I thank that boy
for slicing my childhood confidence
for teaching me pain
for throwing me down
so I could work out how to
get up again;
for tearing off my frail mask
for giving me a new name
his joyful murder of our innocence
exiled me from white suburbia
and gave me an epic journey,
a return:
I came back wreathed in poems
striding like a hero with
a hundred foreign cities under my feet.

Him? He’s got a boep and is divorced. Shame.

The Internet has made everyone an expert on pretty much anything they want to declaim about. After a wine-soaked evening last year Nadine Hutton and I discovered the art of gistology – the gist of things. Gistologists are talented folk who can then extrapolate, and take that fragment as far as it can go. It makes a lot of sense these days: some people say “You’re too deep, man”, yet others cheer “make them think!” So I guess the invention of Gistology has been my way of making peace with shallow thinking.

Wikipedia is the tool of Gistologists – why read anything when you can cut and paste the salient facts on millions of topics without leaving your desk? at the same time keeping a window open to a facebook conversation, a work-for-money document, and book.co.za? you can legitimately growl at intruders: “I’m working!” and pursue those snippets of knowledge that, like lint, when balled up, make a substantial bundle of something not very substantial at all.

In a world where carefully crafted profiles tell the world who we are, we can fiercely defend opinions about things that we know little about. We can absolve ourselves of any hard decisions, hard facts, as we merrily hit “publish” and there we are: published!

I humbly submit a new word to the world dictionary: gistology, n: the art of capturing the gist of any field of knowledge. In the future, there will be degree courses in gistology, where students will learn the art of fluffy thinking. A PhD in Gistology will be the liberal arts’ answer to the MBA, as this qualification will get you a job as a commissioning editor, presidential speech writer, or an academic. The Wikipedia University is now open for registration: come forward and be counted as a gistologist!