The Poetry Africa Festival, presented by the Centre for Creative Arts at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, has started.
The programme is packed with poetry from established poets, young talents and spoken-word artists from South Africa and abroad.
For the first time in its 26 years, the festival was presented in three locations: in Johannesburg, in collaboration with the University of Johannesburg. This part of the programme wrapped up at the weekend. In Durban the programe runs until October 16; the online programme runs until October 15.
This year’s theme is “Poetic (In)Justice: Voices that Breathe, Move and Transform”.
Pralini Naidoo, a poet and storyteller, will participate in an online poetry reading titled “The Dialects of Justice”.
Naidoo, who was born and raised in Pietermaritzburg, said she always had a poet’s heart.
She said her inspirations in the art were varied.
Naidoo has just published her first collection of poetry called “Wild has Roots”. She is a PhD candidate in the Department of Women and Gender Studies at the University of the Western Cape.
Her research is focused on the relationship between women and seed within the context of indenture. It aims to recover and discover hidden narratives of erased histories.
She said she was driven to highlight the issues affecting women and their histories.
“Firstly, I am a woman, a black woman, a descendent of the indentured. I have not found women like me or my mother or my grandmother in the many, many books that I have read throughout my life. Women, especially black women, are written into history and fiction as peripheral to other heroic projects – a support system to the centrality of men and the patriarchal system benefiting them…
“Even in the most complimentary scenarios, women are merely portrayed as mothers and wives, domestic goddesses or resilient rocks who take it all for the team, or victims… all in relation to men. In South Africa, women who are not white are written about in relation to whiteness. The racial stereotypes abound.
“Whether it is over sexualising, exoticising or negating, there are seldom stories of women who look like me that reveal their complexity, creativity, innovativeness, rich inner lives, their agency, their traumas and the ways they dealt with them, and their relationships with pleasure (sexual, spiritual, relational). These are rarely written about.”
She added: “This silence haunts me. It wants to negate my grandmothers and by extension me and my daughters. I have spent too many years in the letters, the stories, the gardens, the kitchens, and the lives of these mothers and grandmothers to know that the two-dimensional figures portrayed in history, or even the popular imagination, are myths.
“Our histories, or herstories as some call them, are dynamic. We can rewrite them. It is an ongoing project to fill in the gaps, to weave new herstories. History has its clues but we have to be aware of who wrote that history and why. When I think of my great-great-grandmother I am aware that she was a nobody in the eyes of the coloniser. She was 9 years old when she arrived on that ship.
“What use could she possibly serve in the colony besides providing cheap labour? She may have been seen as a nuisance, one more mouth to feed. She was married at 14 to her maternal uncle. I do not know more than that.
“I do know that my own grandmother was brought up under her care. This grandmother, my ava, was instrumental in passing down to me, her joy for growing, planting and being in the right relationship with the earth. We have to be able to use our imaginations, our stories and whatever material clues we have inherited to rewrite these stories. It is an archive that keeps growing and changing.”
Naidoo said to fully acknowledge our own stories, we need to search for a sense of what our ancestors may have experienced.
“For so many marginalised communities there is not enough documentation to link us to our complex ancestors. We are losing the ones who tell the stories. And women’s stories are seldom acknowledged as knowledge. We trust textbooks and Google more than the stories of the women in our lineage who have gained insights from the very act of living.
“An awareness of alternate and fuller her/histories can ground us and hopefully free us to become everything we can be. The title of my book ‘Wild has Roots’ came to me in a dream, but it really anchors my philosophy and work.
“The ongoing piecing together of the various stories, dreams and trajectories of my ancestors’ lives and deaths in relation to the mechanisms that have silenced and oppressed them, has rooted me in my own life.
“Ironically, it also frees me to be wild. I mean wild as a birthright, like the ocean. I am not interested in the labels that keeps trying to regiment me based on race, religion or ethnicity. I am more, everything and nothing. If I can come to that freedom, perhaps it will be able to free my mother, grandmothers and daughters. We are all in this together.”
Poetry Africa 2022 also marks Naidoo’s debut at the festival. She will feature on Friday at 5pm in an online poetry reading.
More information about the festival here.
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