““a woman alone creating is not a beautiful spectacle”
”
There is the kind of poetry that peels the flesh off of your bones and presses against your skeleton. The kind that gives language to the sort of pain that ages you and corrodes what good there is left. There is the kind of poetry that clothes you, that gives cosmic significance to daffodils and miscellaneous things. Then there is the kind that is barely written - a rehearsed despair that wants to make a country out of a continent, or to coil my hair in locks of mud, or to dig the graves of my forebears and polish my floors with cow dung. It isn't so much a poem but an overcoat. The kind you wore when you first moved abroad which kept you from the cold but made you indistinguishable in the winter. And when they looked at you and the things you made they saw a host of hands. They pictured a community of women seated on straw mats in round houses moulding clay, or weaving together the leaves of a palm, or the remains of a telephone wire. But not without a chant, not without the gathering of voices: a choir, a chorus, an incantation, the murmurings of indigenous songs. And like all things gathered, your individual expression was drowned in the sea of voices where your efforts were scarcely told apart. But someone dug the earth for fresh clay, someone dyed the leaves of illala, someone repurposed the wires of a broken telephone and made use of the morning; of the soil; and the grass.
I began researching traditional crafters as a way to locate myself. First to the earth, and then to my country. Or into my body that has become a hybrid of sorts - split by the insufficient use of my language or by the mastery of someone else's. Or by the steel of my voice and the resentment it provokes, or the overall uncertainty of liminal spaces. Then there is that fear you feel encountering the urban masses. You try not to put on the mimicking accents of foreign nationals addressing the cashiers at Spar. Instead, you do something slightly more egregious, you speak to them as though they ought to know on which aisle to look for grounded flaxseed. “We don't have that?” they always say, not because they don't, but because it means something that they don't know. And it means that much more because you’ve been caught feigning a feeling of equality. You begin to smile that hybrid smile, you begin packing your own groceries and thanking the grocery clerk who hasn't greeted and barely served you. But most startling of all is that stare, that look you feel at the back of your head as you walk away. It will follow you into your home, and into your room, and hold a gun over your head, and summon the chronic pain in your mother’s shoulder.
***
Makhosi Ntuli lives alone with her granddaughter and they sleep with the doors unlocked. They live in a roundhouse with an open fire, and outside a cow's hide is stretched open on the lawn fresh from last night's slaughter. On a given day, maNtuli walks roughly seven kilometers to dig for clay. She ploughs a trench and shovels heaps of dark soil out from beneath its surface, until, out of the hollowed earth the soft red clay emerges. She gathers heaps of clay into large durable sacks and carries them over her head down to a communal grounding hut. And as she grinds the pieces of broken ceramic material fractured from a previous firing, I picture myself crushed under the weight of stone - sifted and poured into the fresh clay to mitigate its risk of cracking. I often think of myself that way, scorched by the dry heat of the sub-Saharan sun. Like something that wouldn’t quite survive the fire, but that could from its shattered pieces, add to the prospect of something else.
***
Mrs. Khanyile makes wire baskets from her home in an informal settlement adjacent to Kwamashu. She uses an annealed steel core wire to weave together baskets, commercial placeholders, earrings, bangles, and necklaces. She supplements her work by selling chickens - fourteen of which have died caught in the torrential rains of the festive season. She’s posted them, lined up on the stoop on her WhatsApp status, along with her chicks shivering around the gas heater radiating from her hen house. I arrived relieved after navigating through endless shacks and narrow roads with no street signs. Only to find her downcast, dressed up in swank traditional clothes. She had lost R2800 rands worth of chickens.
I drove by my grandmother's house on my way to see her. I parked there for a while and stared at what looked like a stranger's house. I was struck by the absence of my despair. I could no longer picture her seated in the front yard planting dahlias, or pulling out the weeds stemming through the pavement. I couldn’t picture my cousins who grew up together with my brother and I, playing cricket in her backyard or inciting us to eat porridge by lacing it with butter, sugar, and lemon juice. My brother and I lived the first six years of our lives in our grandmother's house. And her passing was my first real experience of absurdity. I laughed and I hid my face to make it look as though I was crying. Then six weeks later during a strange oriental performance, I lay face down on the floor and drenched my sleeves, shaking to make it look as though I was laughing. She promised many times to take me to the Japanese Garden. She was reclusive but never idle, and I secretly aspired toward that mysterious combination. She had a tendency towards extremity and rigorous prayer. The kind of prayer you use to shield the sound of other voices.
When I saw Mrs. Khanyile's chickens lined up with their feet tied together on her stoop. I thought of my mother, my brother, and I, with our faces to the floor, with our feet and arms roped behind our backs. I thought of all the times we watched our grandmother slaughter a chicken and what she had foreseen when she asked that we bathe in its blood. Just five minutes from Mrs. Khanyile's house, at section C Kwamashu, my relatives are mourning the death of a minor. A cousin is found dead in a field with her eyes gouged out, and deep cuts on the sides of her neck. “She was tiny,” they say, “ she probably didn’t even put up a fight”. They have trouble deducing whether it’s a crime of passion or a ritual murder. They wail and stomp their feet and sing and dance for days until evening. There is a kind of weeping, a grief, drawn from the nectar of their being. On my way home I drill into myself, what if we’d just agreed to let the blood pour over us? What if we didn’t scream when the chicken ran headless around the house? I’ve come to section C many times, and always, there is a death, always an offering of scones and tea. But I’m beginning to understand the severity of my grandmother's prayers and all the children of her nieces and nephews living in her house. Perhaps she thought if she could just get them out of there, get them to go to school, just maybe…
I gifted my relatives a bright orange placeholder I bought from Mrs. Khanyile’s house.
***
I wonder if it is prayer or the pressing together of our hands that touches God. I wonder if we draw closer to sanctity when we exhaust ourselves in manual labor. Angeline Masuku uses most of her property for making basketry. She stores the palm leaves in her main house, weaves in her late grandmother's rondavel and uses the yard for dying, drying, and firing illala. UmNqandane berries are mashed and boiled together with the palm to achieve a light purple colour. The bright-coloured roots of the aloe produce a coral dye. The alloys of a rusted tin are boiled together with the leaves changing the palm fronds into a golden brown. And the grey and black strains are attained using the roots and leaves from the river banks.
You’d notice by the sudden shift from lush greens to the slight aridity and regal aisles of fever trees that you’ve arrived at Hlabisa - home to a community of traditional palm weavers. Angeline has painted her face in red clay to protect her skin from the harsh UV rays. She is completing a commission of baskets which also function as stoles. The colours on her baskets, though true to their traditional palette, are uniquely vibrant. There is an element of saturation and unconventional sequencing to her completed crafts which make them appear simultaneously modern and authentic.
I suppose I’m taken by the fact that she has found a way to make use of everything, from a rusted can to an empty steel barrel, to the shrubbery and succulent roots on the river banks, to the sun-dried reeds of the trees. In the small portion of land at the entrance of her home, there is a large crop of corn (ground for maize meal or boiled or eaten raw). Sometimes the grounded corn is used to layer the inner walls of the basket. There is the sense that one could subsist off the land or that nature might just contain everything one needs to live happily. And I’m beginning to wonder whether art isn’t a way to make use of abandonment.
***
My martial arts instructor jokes, bracing my head in a choke, that people often confuse being buried and being planted. He’s trying to convince me there is a way out of his grip and that there is some transformative lesson lying at the other end of the soil pouring over my head. I want to tell him that clay and dirt are two very different things. Clay is a finely levigated mineral material that is mixed in different proportions by nature and can be used to make pottery and a variety of other things. Dirt, soil, or earth, is decomposed vegetable material that is useful for growing crops and burying things you wish to be forgotten. Clay can include a wide variety of minerals and each of these mixes produces a different kind of pottery from white porcelain to low-fired red earthenware, and if you dig deep inside a person there too is something malleable. Something willing to be made into something else.
You wallow over these things in your days of abandonment. How he used to speak like you, how his scent was once indistinguishable from yours. How you were gentle but firm in molding him into your ways, your subtleties. Ma Nthuli does the same, rolling the clay into small cylinders and wedging each strip around, gently, pressing down with her fingertips until the rough beginnings of a large decorative jar take shape. She shaves down the outer layer and carves a textured pattern at the base of its neck. She glazes. Then she fires her pots under sticks and straws. She doesn’t know what will survive the fire or what shape it will take. The best things can break. The worst transform into something beautiful. And I can picture him now, abroad, softened by a life less demanding. I can see him, an image of respectability, towering over me - burnt and broken. I’m wondering if I'd loved someone cruel, or if it is loving me that reshapes them. Before he left me, he took screenshots of every vicious thing I’d said then shared them with everyone we knew and everyone I’d hoped to know. Then I pictured my grandmother pulling the weeds out from their roots, throwing them into the wastepaper bin to make sure nothing grew from them again. And I held him in my arms and asked “Why? Why? “But he said nothing, then slipped his hands under my shirt, and I did nothing. Let myself sink below the level of dirt and fossilize into something useful to anyone willing to kiss the earth, or to go beneath the surface.
***
There is a pain so deep it doesn't cry but holds itself in the tugging and weaving together of a basket made to cup water. In it, nothing seeps through. A tradition passed down through centuries, from woman to woman, grandmother to grandchild. How to stitch together something so tight it could store the rain. The patterns in each watertight basket are imbued with meaning: The triangle symbolising masculinity; the diamond, the feminine; the zig-zag representing the spear of a warrior and the string of diamonds, his shield. The baskets are woven from the bottom up, each stitch gradually adjusted to produce its curve. When the rural masses were pushed into infertile lands and industrial spaces, Zulu craftsmen, now mine workers and security guards on graveyard shifts, discovered offcuts of brightly coloured telephone wires. The recycled material was strong and flexible, ideal for passing the hours by winding the myriad of wires around their nightsticks. The wire baskets are inversely woven from the top down and patterned without meaning. The brightly coloured telephone wires deviate from traditional colour schemes. These baskets don't hold water, but small menial household objects. They’re merely ornamental, a hybrid of sorts, existing for their own sake, a kind of modern art, a commissioned portrait.
***
I used to live alone in an apartment on the 4th floor of a dilapidated building. Across the street was a laundromat and a community garden, and my window framed a sea of Silver rooftops with cemented chimneys, solar panels, and satellite dishes. My studio had wooden floors and a tiny desk set up where I could write. Where I could fantasize about a life alone in the mountains - close to my maker, making dark earthenware with my poems engraved at their base. I imagined that life was very far from me so I grasped onto things too tightly, to the kind of men I believed could spare me from being crushed, sifted, and poured into something new. But I find, nestled between the verdant hills of eMthunzini and the lush reserve of the Ngoyes forest, where Ma Nthuli takes me through a day in her life as Umbumbi, to her home isolated at the height of a small mountain surrounded by forest, a view of the ridge, and fresh green pastures. I find that it is possible, right where I am, to glimpse a life that is aspirational. To live a beautiful life.
