Reflecting Rogue
Inside the mind of a feminist
Pumla Dineo Gqola
ALSO BY PUMLA DINEO GQOLA
What is Slavery to Me? Postcolonial/Slave Memory in Post-apartheid South Africa
A Renegade Called Simphiwe
Rape: A South African Nightmare
For
Bongi Mntambo
Neo Mntambo
Warona Ammar Nkosi
Kora Yakhisizwe Jennings
Reflecting rogue
Writing is something I am almost always either doing or thinking about immersing myself in. It is here that I sit with myself and my thoughts, working them over, changing my mind, shifting how I feel about myself, a problem and the world. It is the place I am most often able to change my mind.
Yet, unlike many of my friends, I do not journal regularly, although I have diaries from when I was younger. Occasionally, the person whose thoughts I read about startles me. Sometimes it is that she is so young and different in how she sees the world to the person I have become. But I also always recognise a consistent core to those entries.
I remember the first day I knew I was a writer. The year was 1981. I was eight years old. My sisters and I had just changed out of the clothes we had worn to Mass and into clothes we could play in. But I could not immediately join Lebo and Vuyo, nor was I allowed to play with my baby brother Sizwe. Instead, I sat down to do the thing I hated most in the world, the thing I had been trying to perfect since before the short Easter break, the thing I was worst at but still had to do: memorising the recitation I would be required to perform in front of my Standard Two classmates the week schools reopened.
The teachers would only pick one of us, but we never knew which one. I battled to focus, even with the fear of humiliation and caning for memory loss hanging over my head. So, I escaped, first, by translating the poem into another language, and later, carried away, I wrote a new poem. Because I was already a lover of words, this escape was joyful. Joyful escape is a kind of freedom.
I was already a reader, and it would seem a writer. Because words on a page have this effect on me, and even though I was supposed to be memorising the poem, the excitement drove me to share my distraction with my parents.
But it was my parents’ reactions that transformed me from a mere escapist to a writer. Like many eight-year-olds, I was a show off who worshipped her parents. They treated those few lines like something spectacular, called me a poet. Of course, they had to explain that this new special word, “poet”, was a writer of recitations. Although I would be much older before I realised that people could be jailed, killed or disappear for being much better writers, I had a taste that Sunday of the dance writing always has with power.
As I grew older, I realised that recognising the relationship between words and power was a complicated dance. Words wound and slay. Words raise and kiss. Words can be cage or springboard. In my life, they are both of these things so much of the day.
Today, writing is at the very centre of my life. It is where I love myself better. In my home, I have kept those journals from my teen years and thousands of other people’s books, alongside the ones I write. Other people’s books invited me into worlds and ways of being that would have been closed off to a little Blackgirl growing up in apartheid South Africa. They gave me better, freer ways to feel in my own skin, a community strange in the same ways I am, a bigger world to belong to.
My own writing is a compulsion. I write because it is the only way to fully be me.
Yet, writing is not always easy. Sometimes, it takes months to get an article or a short story or an essay just right. On other days, I am consumed and transported, staying in the zone until the sun sets and rises again. Knowing what I want to say and how I want to feel upon completion is not always helpful, and my relationship with deadlines is a rocky love-hate one. Once I never missed a deadline, and then, about a decade ago, this capacity slipped away.
Like my previous book, this offering has taken some turns away from what I planned when I embarked on this journey. It is my most personal book yet, but writing is always a risk. It is a lesson in letting go. What a paradox for writers, who are control freaks in so many ways. I pore over every sentence until I am either happy or defeated. Both are signs I need to let go and allow the writing to have its own life in the world.
Most of the chapters are new, even if they appeared in a much shorter version elsewhere. There are only two chapters that are unchanged, save for a different referencing style. The first was initially offered as the Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe 8th Annual Lecture. The second previously appeared in a collection on the experiences of Black South African women in the academy. I republish these here in an attempt to make them easier to find. They are the pieces of writing that I am most frequently asked to provide. Until now, it seems, they have been quite hard to find.
On 7 January 1997, I boarded a flight from Cape Town to Bloemfontein to take up my first full-time, adult job. That was twenty years ago, and as I hand over this collection, I am both very much still that determined young woman at heart, and softer, stronger and better. Many of the lives I set out to create for myself have been realised – through Grace, hard work, sacrifice, fire and love. Twenty years seems like a good time to bring together these essays in this form, but this is not a “best of”.
These are reflections on country, self, family, community, pleasure, violence. It is a book nothing like my previous three. It is not on a subject – slavery, an artist, on rape. These are reflections of and on living, loving and thinking as feminist. One feminist.
CHAPTER 1
Growing into my body
I write and unwrite this chapter. Different versions of it lie on my floor with variously coloured handwritten notes in the margins. They are all fragments of how I think I want to talk about “my body”, and, after writing and completing another piece, I realise that my resistance to writing this essay is linked to my desire to make it seamless, whole and smooth, to enable it to veil my anxieties about re-examining cuts and bruises. I am not sure how much of myself I want to expose and render vulnerable, and so, instead, I play games with myself. I want to mask the meeting points of purple and blue on skin that could either be tattooing or some other mark. It strikes me that embodied memories of pleasure are as far apart or as close together as we allow them to be. And it becomes clearer that this distance determines how we live the moments in between. So I offer no polished, stockinged or tweezed body of knowledge here. Rather, I wander through slides that offer fragments through which I read the landmarks of life’s maze.
slide one: body language
To remember something is an experience.
– MARITA STURKEN
I am seven years old, sitting in a class in what has come to be called a typical black school. I do not know what’s typical about anything really. There are seventy-six of us little people in desks that stand in rows from the front to the back, or from the door side to the window side, depending on how you choose to look at it. It is Religious Instruction period. Our teacher is a Blackman who told us last week, and the week before, and will tell us several more times, about how God likes fair-skinned people. This teacher will tell us about how fair-skinned is better, smarter, morally more developed. I am what he means by fair-skinned, as is he. Instead of feeling valued, I feel aggrieved for the people I love who would not be named fair-skinned.
I look back at this as an adult and I wonder what exactly it is that this teacher is telling us.
Is he telling us that he is all these things?
Is