Kwasukasukela (Once upon a Time)
My homes are separated by an ocean.
This means that home is a seesaw,
you can never touch both sides of the ground at once.
Ginqi! Gonqo!
I was raised by the culture of storytelling in South Africa, inganekwane (isiZulu) and intsomi (isiXhosa). Each story begins with a call and response, an invitation from a generous world-maker and a willing audience, agreeing to build the world together. A collaborative nature of recognising the respons(ability) of bearing active witness and accompanying one another into the unknown. This has felt akin to nurturing home and community across distance, in a call and response between my German and South African families. The constant need to be attentive to the moment and be ready to invite one another into the building and repairing of bridges across oceans, to hold the homes I belong to. My moving to London was a leap into a place unmoored from the lands that taught me all I knew about these delicate acts of intimacy and connection. The slippery fear that I was tearing myself from my family, languages and cultures called me to an intentional practice, something to hold on to. I turned to Call & Response as an artistic practice of attentiveness and conversation with the self, body, histories we carry as well as those we encounter in others and in the spaces we move through.
Ukuzimamela (Listen to the self)
To respond, I first had to turn inward in search of an inheritance of anchors. Holding Ground emerged from a desire to make tangible the invisible work of stitching together home and family across distance. In trying to hold the many tears that can’t be wiped in person, the joys bursting at the edges of tiny screens and all the seasons that pass quietly in between – I wondered what it looks like to handle the materiality of longing and care. I landed on the lap of the women in my family, in their hands re-membering our lineage in the fabric of my being, stories relived on their tongues.
Gogo lives there too,
on the tongues of my cousins
who learnt to sew from her.
I met my Gogo (grandmother) this way, in Mama and my cousins’ stories of her nimble hands at the sewing machine. In the percussion of falling bobbins to accompany her favourite song, perhaps softening her raw edges - the ones that did not hug with her arms but chose clothing and quilts to do so instead. With only one black & white photograph of the proud figure, she began to take shape in pattern, colour and texture. This, in contrast to the countless photo albums my Oma (grandmother), stores safely in bureaus for my visits, the keeper of our ancestors. At her fingertips, they take form, as she turns the pages of lives that all lead to me - Papa chiming in between the dips her vast memory sometimes valleys into. In these practices of making and remaking time together, the collaborative act of holding home between continents, languages and cultures became a way of stitching intimacy across oceans and beyond the grave.
Chosi (We are ready to listen)
This deep blue is the blue of ibis bird wings. It says, “I wish I had wings to fly to you!” Try it next to white - it means you have hope things will change…
An audience responds with “chosi” before the storyteller can begin, declaring a willingness to accept the journey’s invitation. I began to recognise chosi as a willingness to continue by transforming our family storytelling into phonecalls, Whatsapp messages, voice notes and photographs filling the gaps between affording the plane tickets to see one another. I collected and printed screenshots of these, in a world where physical letters have become digital and ephemeral. Laid out alongside one another I was reminded of quilting and bead making, awakening a curiosity around the material heritages of Zulu beaded love letters (ithemba) and German Blaudruck, which entangle in their complex colonial history. Varied combinations of symbols, colours and patterns would signify different messages in relation to one another. We also tell stories in this way, choosing what to omit or to tell in relation to something else. Sewing and beadmaking were also traditionally considered women’s work, much like the labour of homemaking. The work of gathering, telling stories and singing songs to pass on knowledge and keep momentum going mirrored my reaching to memories of maternal figures in my own family. Quilting my printed love letters together in performance, was a way of archiving and acknowledging the emotional and physical labour of this upkeep and maintenance. The ongoing caring work of keeping them from tearing and unravelling.
Chosi as Echolocation
This one reminds me of preparing for the storm.
How do you prepare for one?
You remind your breath not to leave you.
The countless stories I was tasked with safeguarding, then also become about keeping memory tightly fastened to every fibre of my reality, intricately maintaining the stitching together of my home and family archive to live on. And so, tongues become their own needle of sorts – choosing which bead sits beside which, what contexts to tell which story in and what to leave out so the love letter appears as intended. If this analogy is to be honest, it cannot shy away from the needle and tongue as weapon, as much as agent of repair. The needle breaks through the thing It puts together first, it cannot enter without a hole, a rupture. Chosi is a way of listening and navigating, to not only the willingness but how it is said – how it lands and ripples in the space. At times the wrong this said, the attempt at carrying of the elephant in the room, the effort and error it takes to do the work is made palpable in each hole that is made in the bead or fabric for the needle to pass through. In this way, the nostalgia of memory that cradles us is interrupted, punctured by all the times connection was led to rupture and fray. When the labour became too heavy, tips the fine balance of the see saw over and someone must now put it back because the story does not stop here.
Ukukhapha (Accompany)
Home is somewhere in the air, the lifting point.
There is enough space to carry us all there,
to lay out the stories and stitch bridges into the sky.
A world of story is made in communion with others; to borrow from the musicality of my family, it is made with accompanists who navigate the unknown with you. Here, I offer a hopeful criticism of the expectation resting on the glorified “strong woman” and gently invite the audience into the act of holding fragments of this home ground being stitched together. By asking them to hold quilt pieces and stitch the world together through gesture, I admit that this is heavy work, and I cannot do it alone, much like the making of the piece itself. We return to chosi, to the practice of ukukhapha that says we do not have to walk into the unknown alone and will wayfind through the tears and ruptures when they come.
Holding Ground will perform on Weds 20 to Sat 23 May at 7pm (3pm on Sat)
Click here to book
