The project BORN::FREE Next Steps was conceptualized as a poetry exchange involving artists based in South Africa and the UK. This three-part series of events and workshops explores themes including gender, race and spirituality, among others. The most powerful impact of the project has been the forging of relationships between South African and British live literature practitioners – specifically womxn of colour working in and outside of the diaspora.
BORN::FREE, a poetry night co-founded by writer and educator Belinda Zhawi, began as a community project in the UK with the aim of creating a space where emerging writers and well-established writers could inspire one another and share their work with one another. With the first part of the project taking place in the UK, Johannesburg and Cape Town will see Belinda travel to deliver her poetry and share her literary passion together with South African poets.
The first of the two South African poetry sessions took place at Johannesburg’s African Flavours Books store on the 5th of January. As I walked into the venue, the chatter of the attendees hummed the tune of excitement that comes with a new year, and a new experience. Although the audience was mainly made up of Joburgers, there were a few British visitors woven between those seated. Belinda began the evening by reciting poems that share experiences from her childhood in Zimbabwe as well as poems that express a mix of lessons she has learnt about life and herself. South African poets, writers, social commentators and academics Katleho Kano Shoro and Lebohang Masango shared their poems, and information about their latest published works. Katleho has recently published her debut collection of poetry,’Serebulele‘. Lebohang has recently published a children’s book titled ‘Mpumi’s Magic Beads’. Both of these are available at African Flavours Books.
BORN::FREE will then travel to Cape Town on the 11th of January and will be hosted by Ahem Art Collective. In addition to Belinda’s performance, South African poet, performer & spoken word educator Toni Stuart as well as London-based poet and drummer Remi Graves.
Check out the Facebook event for more info about the Cape Town event
Poetry offers an avenue for being heard, for travelling through space and time as well as allowing one to construct an understanding of self. I interviewed Rachel Long, the leader of the UK-based poetry collective Octavia, about what poetry and Octavia mean for her.
Share with our readers more about yourself and how you fell in love with writing and poetry? When did you feel as though you wanted to become a poet?
I have always loved reading and writing. I was that strange child always in her bedroom only surfacing for snacks. I loved the fact that inside of a book I could be someone else, I could travel, time-travel, be of a different world. I think I started to write my own stories because I loved what they could do. I’d fill up exercise book after exercise book then stick them all together to make ‘a novel’. I wrote these bad novels for years, all the way up to university. It wasn’t until after holding my degree in Creative Writing that I realized I wasn’t great at the form. My stories had no end – they just keep going. Around that time, struggling post-degree to find a job, I had more time to read non-course texts again. I began reading more plays and poetry. I began to go to poetry readings and it was then that I discovered that though shorter than novels, poems could keep going. I could be good at them because they didn’t need to have endings. I believe a good poem should continue, in the mind of the reader in a haunting way, long after the last line on the page.
Can you remember the first time that you performed one of your poems?
Yes, I can remember the first time that I performed one of poems. It was on a huge stage at the Rich Mix, a large Arts venue in Shoreditch, London. I was petrified. I’m not a performer. Like I said, I was a bedroom kid but I knew that I had to do it, that if I didn’t do it then I never would or I’d always be afraid of it. And nothing terrible happened. I didn’t trip up in front of people, I didn’t headbutt the mic, I didn’t go blank. It was ok. What I learnt was that even if these things had happened, it still would’ve been ok – in the grand scheme of things. Coming off stage, I remember thinking: ‘You’ve done that now, good. Now how are you going to get better at it?’. Performing/reading aloud my poems is simply this, just trying to get better at connecting and communicating them better than each time before.
Rachel Long photographed by Amaal Said
What are some of the themes you enjoy exploring through your poetry?
I’m not sure if I always enjoy exploring them but I do still explore them though they can be hard: Girlhood, the body, sex, love, loneliness, shame, shame undoing, my mother, home.
Who is your favourite writer or poet and why?
Ooh, this is always difficult. It’s constantly in flux and there are too many to love. Today I’m going to say poet Patricia Smith for Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah – which changed my understanding of poetic autobiography, for Incendiary Art – her new collection, which explores grief by moving with it rather than through it, and overall for her generosity, her emotional and poetic intelligence.
How has your relationship with poetry evolved? How does your position as a woman of colour play into how this relationship has evolved?
Through Octavia, my relationship with poetry has evolved through consistent learning and discovery anew about the power of positive community, what a difference a space like the one we have created can make, the incredible reach and impact it can have – so much more than any individual. Octavia has taught me that poetry can change not only the self and others but also it’s potential to change social and political climates.
Being women of colour poets is essential to this. Our very coming together is political. Our writing our own stories is political. It defies the white supremacist patriarchal society we still live in. It has the ability to redefine what poetry is to us and to so many other people.
Tania Nwachukwu photographed by Amaal Said
You are also a facilitator and curator. Would you like to share more about these roles and how this ties into your role as a poet?
To me, facilitating is integral to my writing. They are entwined. Being a poet is to constantly listen, learn, be aware, to teach or to facilitate the poetic journey of others for me is encouraging others to do the same. Or better yet to do it together so that you can listen even more sensitively, to learn as a community, to be aware of things that you might not have ever have been apparent to you alone.
You are the leader of the Octavia Poetry Collective. When was the collective formed? How did the idea for the collective come together? Would you like to share a little bit about each member?
Octavia was formed in September 2015. It came together out of an aching necessity to create a space where women of colour could come together to read beyond the canon, write without fear of condemnation or exoticization, share openly without censorship, and support each other not only as fellow writers but as sisters.
There are 15 members of Octavia. We are poets but also educators, filmmakers, photographers, dancers, astrophysicists and astrologists, which makes our collective voice wonderfully nuanced. I’d love to share a little about each incredible woman, but for brevity I’ll simply list them here and readers can discover each woman and all the amazing things each of them do. Octavia are: Anjali Barot, Amaal Said, Sunayana Bhargava, Amina Jama, Belinda Zhawi, Zahrah Sheikh, Hibaq Osman, Ankita Saxena, Josette Joseph, Raheela Suleman, Rhonda Rhiannon, Tania Nwachukwu, Theresa Lola, Victoria-Anne Bulley, Sarah Lasoye and Virginia Joseph.
Sunayana Bhargava photographed by Amaal Said
What are some of the recent projects that Octavia has been part?
This year alone, Octavia have featured on BBC’s World Service and in The Guardian, The Huffington Post, ASOS and Hotdog magazines. They’ve run workshops at University of Oxford and for the Serpentine Galleries. Octavia closed this year’s Women of the World festival with their poetic response to Margaret Atwood’s seminal feminist novel, ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’. I am so very proud of all we have achieved thus far and I’m excited about where we can go and continue to grow.
What are you working on at the moment? Do you have any projects in the pipeline that you would like to share with our readers?
I’m working on my first collection at the moment. I seem to always be working on it. It is ready and then it is not ready and then it is ready and then it is not ready. I want it to be something that I will never regret putting out too soon into the world.
What is Octavia working on a the moment? Do you have any projects in the pipeline that you would like to share with our readers?
Octavia have plans for a large-scale cross-arts show that can showcase poetry in relation to all of the other things we do and are interested in: for example, what poetry and astrology can create, what dance and poetry can create, what happens when astrology and poetry collide. Plans are all still in infant stage but I’m excited about the multiple collisions and the unending artistic redefinitions something like this could create.
Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.
This quote by poet and author Rita Dove encapsulates the feelings that Belinda Zhawi has towards writing poetry and writing. She has been writing for several years, mainly doing poetry, but has done prose too. She has performed at festivals and literary events all over the UK, and about two years ago she joined forces with her friend through words and through life, Chima Nsoedo, to start a poetry night called BORN::FREE.
Reflecting more on her relationship with writing, Belinda explained that, “Writing for me was mostly just to do with having been reading for a long time, was a vicious reader as a child.” Having grown up in Zimbabwe she would read book written in Shona by African writers. When she moved to London as a teenager she discovered a section of classics library mostly written by African American writers. “I was amazed at how I felt reading that work, reading characters that felt like me or looked like me even if they weren’t like me. And after that I was like ‘I want to write stuff too’.” She began writing for friends and family, and writing became a way of documenting memories and experiences so that she would not forget her home. I was also a way of trying to forge a different kind of identity. “So I think writing for me is very much about that relationship with myself with regards to ideas of home, memory and ancestry,” Belinda explained.
BORN::FREE started out as a community project with the aim of creating a space where emerging writers and well-established writers could inspire one another and share understandings about the way in which they mold words into stories or expressions of feelings. “From there it just became a thing that people respond to and has been growing…It has been a great learning journey and great community space for writers.”
The project BORN::FREE Next Steps was conceptualized as a poetry exchange involving artists based in South Africa and the UK. For the UK part of the project South African poets Nova Masango and Katleho Shoro were invited to be part of a workshop relating to writing and performance, which culminated in a one night only performance at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. Belinda expressed how she has been admiring Nova’s work online for a while and was delighted to finally work with her in person. Belinda heard about Katleho through a recommendation as was also mesmerized by her work online and her presence on stage. The UK-based poets included founder of the poetry collective Octavia, Rachel Long. Long-time poet, writer and musician Zena Edwards also performed on the night. The aim for the project was to put together a “diverse group of women who are doing interesting things with literature” and to “provide a wide range of voices.”
The second half of the project will be taking place in South Africa towards the end of July. Belinda will be coming over and spending some time in Cape Town with the hopes of working with young writers and performers through workshops. The final stop for the South African leg will be in Johannesburg, where she is hoping to mirror the UK experience.
