Blog
How not to be alone | Gabeba Baderoon
Thu, 07 March 2024
As we prepare to celebrate International Women’s Day this year, many South Africans are probably asking what reason they have for celebration when gender-based violence is still so prevalent in our society.
It is at this time that the AVBOB Poetry Project celebrates the lucid, deeply moving work of Gabeba Baderoon, award-winning poet and Associate Professor at PennState School of International Affairs. Her fourth collection, The History of Intimacy (Kwela Books, 2018) explores the incremental changes in the ways human beings show love, consume media, and co-create the world around them.
About the collection’s title, she says, “It was partly inspired by my great teachers – my students. I had noticed that the kind of material that touched or unsettled students in my classes in the 2000s was very different from the kind that had affected me a generation earlier. For instance, they watched very violent films without comment. But reading a novel with violent themes felt to them like an intimate invasion of their minds, and it deeply unnerved them. I found that a provocative difference. It taught me that how we read and communicate are not technical matters that remain the same across time but are, in fact, deeply bodily, emotional and historical experiences shaped by the culture of each era.”
In the collection’s title poem, a six-part compound piece she describes as “infused with insistent, alluring, troubling intimacies”, Baderoon turns to memories of her mother and then reaches across to describe her mother’s own experience of studying medicine at a time when black students were asked to leave the room during the autopsy of white bodies. The poem recalls her mother’s response to Baderoon’s writing about this earlier, “That is my story. That is not your story.” So, the question becomes how one can write about someone else’s experience at all.
“I am always learning about my mother through poetry. My mother is my great muse, but this is not always a position she is happy to occupy, as that poem makes clear. At times, it is clear that my mother is the real intellectual and gifted writer. And just as often, as she feels the pain that her generation lost the chance to write and tell their own stories, she also generously leads me into a generative musing into the past, into our mutual and different memories, our dreams and the stories that are ours and not ours to tell.”
Sometimes the conversation is between intimate strangers rather than family members. In Poetry for Beginners, Baderoon describes how she is inspired by a young woman from her beginner poetry class who wants to learn how to write to her boyfriend in prison. Although we cannot know what happened to this young woman, Baderoon’s poem about her remains as a kind of bridge, a gesture of solidarity.
She has no doubt that celebrations such as International Women’s Day can build solidarity and make a real difference to women’s lives, provided we approach them consciously.
“The tradition of festivals is a radical heritage of pleasure, subversiveness and refusal of authority. An International Women’s Day Festival can be such a transfiguring and disobedient space, if we insist on making it so. As long as we hold on to the legacy of freedom that a festival promises, we can actually enter the space of an International Women’s Day Festival and make it a liberatory one.”
In the next few days, write a poem about the way intimacy is expressed (or not expressed) in your family. How has it changed (or not changed) in your lifetime?
The AVBOB Poetry Competition will reopen its doors on 1 August 2024. Since the project’s inception, it has been committed to promoting poetry in all of South Africa’s official languages. Visit our extensive archive at www.avbobpoetry.co.za and share in our amazement at the range of experience represented there. Follow us on social media for news, announcements and opportunities.
It is at this time that the AVBOB Poetry Project celebrates the lucid, deeply moving work of Gabeba Baderoon, award-winning poet and Associate Professor at PennState School of International Affairs. Her fourth collection, The History of Intimacy (Kwela Books, 2018) explores the incremental changes in the ways human beings show love, consume media, and co-create the world around them.
About the collection’s title, she says, “It was partly inspired by my great teachers – my students. I had noticed that the kind of material that touched or unsettled students in my classes in the 2000s was very different from the kind that had affected me a generation earlier. For instance, they watched very violent films without comment. But reading a novel with violent themes felt to them like an intimate invasion of their minds, and it deeply unnerved them. I found that a provocative difference. It taught me that how we read and communicate are not technical matters that remain the same across time but are, in fact, deeply bodily, emotional and historical experiences shaped by the culture of each era.”
In the collection’s title poem, a six-part compound piece she describes as “infused with insistent, alluring, troubling intimacies”, Baderoon turns to memories of her mother and then reaches across to describe her mother’s own experience of studying medicine at a time when black students were asked to leave the room during the autopsy of white bodies. The poem recalls her mother’s response to Baderoon’s writing about this earlier, “That is my story. That is not your story.” So, the question becomes how one can write about someone else’s experience at all.
“I am always learning about my mother through poetry. My mother is my great muse, but this is not always a position she is happy to occupy, as that poem makes clear. At times, it is clear that my mother is the real intellectual and gifted writer. And just as often, as she feels the pain that her generation lost the chance to write and tell their own stories, she also generously leads me into a generative musing into the past, into our mutual and different memories, our dreams and the stories that are ours and not ours to tell.”
Sometimes the conversation is between intimate strangers rather than family members. In Poetry for Beginners, Baderoon describes how she is inspired by a young woman from her beginner poetry class who wants to learn how to write to her boyfriend in prison. Although we cannot know what happened to this young woman, Baderoon’s poem about her remains as a kind of bridge, a gesture of solidarity.
She has no doubt that celebrations such as International Women’s Day can build solidarity and make a real difference to women’s lives, provided we approach them consciously.
“The tradition of festivals is a radical heritage of pleasure, subversiveness and refusal of authority. An International Women’s Day Festival can be such a transfiguring and disobedient space, if we insist on making it so. As long as we hold on to the legacy of freedom that a festival promises, we can actually enter the space of an International Women’s Day Festival and make it a liberatory one.”
In the next few days, write a poem about the way intimacy is expressed (or not expressed) in your family. How has it changed (or not changed) in your lifetime?
The AVBOB Poetry Competition will reopen its doors on 1 August 2024. Since the project’s inception, it has been committed to promoting poetry in all of South Africa’s official languages. Visit our extensive archive at www.avbobpoetry.co.za and share in our amazement at the range of experience represented there. Follow us on social media for news, announcements and opportunities.
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