Blog
Disability transmuted through poetry with Kobus Moolman
Fri, 28 October 2022
In Disability Awareness Month, the AVBOB Poetry Project acknowledges the 5.1% of South Africans over the age of five who live with some form of disability. Most lack access to adequate health care and basic education and are at risk of economic isolation without prospects of secure employment. Against this backdrop, we celebrate the phenomenal achievement of Kobus Moolman. The winner of many illustrious awards, he is also a wise and generous mentor to many new poets.
Moolman has published eight poetry collections and two plays and serves as Professor of Creative Writing in the Department of English Studies at the University of the Western Cape and as poetry editor for KwaZulu-Natal Press. He has also edited colleagues, such as Karen Press, Mxolisi Nyezwa, Kelwyn Sole and Makhosazana Xaba, among others. The Mountain behind the House (Dryad Press, 2020) is his most recent collection.
Moolman, who has spina bifida, has written about how disability has shaped his life and work more decisively than anything else. “It defines me fundamentally. And more and more so each day.” Nowadays, he tries to write from a place very close to his body, so that readers can sense what it feels like to be embodied differently.
It can be difficult for able-bodied people to understand, or even witness, disability. So it is unsurprising that many disability myths prevail: that it makes one inherently more empathic, more resilient. Moolman says that disabled poets can help to dispel such myths and educate readers through their work.
“I wholeheartedly endorse that function of poetry,” he says. “But it goes beyond instruction. I think such poetry is more about presenting the complexity of what it means to be in a body that is different; that experiences the world differently. Poetry by disabled poets can show society how it needs to change to improve the daily lives of people living with disabilities. That’s a political act. And it’s vitally necessary.”
But how does it feel to be labelled as a disabled poet? Can such a label ever be useful, or is it more of a burden? Moolman says that such labels are functional and can be useful. In 2017, he edited a collection of poetry and prose by writers living with disabilities in South Africa. Now he is slowly putting together a collection that looks more broadly at disabled writers in Africa. “It’s an enormous and complex continent. So, I can only attempt to show one tiny aspect. But for me, it is about emphasising the importance of our own African perspective on disability. As opposed to the dominant mode imposed from elsewhere. It’s about giving space to the voices of people who experience disability in different ways.”
The Mountain behind the House is not really a book about disability. It is a book about mountains and houses and about paying attention to landscape for hours on end. But there is a poem in it that says much about Moolman’s approach to writing from a disabled body. In it, he describes a man dragging his legs to the Winelands One-Stop Wimpy Bar. Then, slowly, the poem begins to focus on things taking place inside that man, even though he still has a disabled body and is sitting in drab, ordinary surroundings. It catches the reader off balance, not allowing us a single fixed, comfortable point of view.
Moolman’s poems open up this world for us again and again. It is a world in which difficult things can be translated and transmuted until they sing, calling us to pay attention and to look again.
The AVBOB Poetry Competition encourages people with disability and their carers and family to write in any of the 11 official languages. Register online at www.avbobpoetry.co.za to read the rules and submit your poems before 30 November 2022.
Moolman has published eight poetry collections and two plays and serves as Professor of Creative Writing in the Department of English Studies at the University of the Western Cape and as poetry editor for KwaZulu-Natal Press. He has also edited colleagues, such as Karen Press, Mxolisi Nyezwa, Kelwyn Sole and Makhosazana Xaba, among others. The Mountain behind the House (Dryad Press, 2020) is his most recent collection.
Moolman, who has spina bifida, has written about how disability has shaped his life and work more decisively than anything else. “It defines me fundamentally. And more and more so each day.” Nowadays, he tries to write from a place very close to his body, so that readers can sense what it feels like to be embodied differently.
It can be difficult for able-bodied people to understand, or even witness, disability. So it is unsurprising that many disability myths prevail: that it makes one inherently more empathic, more resilient. Moolman says that disabled poets can help to dispel such myths and educate readers through their work.
“I wholeheartedly endorse that function of poetry,” he says. “But it goes beyond instruction. I think such poetry is more about presenting the complexity of what it means to be in a body that is different; that experiences the world differently. Poetry by disabled poets can show society how it needs to change to improve the daily lives of people living with disabilities. That’s a political act. And it’s vitally necessary.”
But how does it feel to be labelled as a disabled poet? Can such a label ever be useful, or is it more of a burden? Moolman says that such labels are functional and can be useful. In 2017, he edited a collection of poetry and prose by writers living with disabilities in South Africa. Now he is slowly putting together a collection that looks more broadly at disabled writers in Africa. “It’s an enormous and complex continent. So, I can only attempt to show one tiny aspect. But for me, it is about emphasising the importance of our own African perspective on disability. As opposed to the dominant mode imposed from elsewhere. It’s about giving space to the voices of people who experience disability in different ways.”
The Mountain behind the House is not really a book about disability. It is a book about mountains and houses and about paying attention to landscape for hours on end. But there is a poem in it that says much about Moolman’s approach to writing from a disabled body. In it, he describes a man dragging his legs to the Winelands One-Stop Wimpy Bar. Then, slowly, the poem begins to focus on things taking place inside that man, even though he still has a disabled body and is sitting in drab, ordinary surroundings. It catches the reader off balance, not allowing us a single fixed, comfortable point of view.
Moolman’s poems open up this world for us again and again. It is a world in which difficult things can be translated and transmuted until they sing, calling us to pay attention and to look again.
The AVBOB Poetry Competition encourages people with disability and their carers and family to write in any of the 11 official languages. Register online at www.avbobpoetry.co.za to read the rules and submit your poems before 30 November 2022.
