poets-from-south-africa

"I always tell them [youth] that take whatever you do and your life serious. I tell them that success does not go hand in hand with drugs. Stealing or going to jail in order to be successful is wrong. I give them this information so that when they decide to take a decision they take an informed one."

"People always expect you to be happy, they think just because you on TV your life is better, but truth is we all go through the same life issues."

"I don’t take advantage that I am a star."

"I know what heals me when I am troubled, I learn to calm myself, I have my own ways of keeping myself together, if I need to cry I will."

"I spend most of my time happy, I struggle to be an angry person, I think it’s because I know that when I feel upset I close myself indoors to be alone."

"These activities are important for young people because if they are doing nothing they will get involved in drugs and crime."

"My message in my art is crime does not pay. I like roles that emphasise the gospel that prison is not paradise and crime does not pay."

"I think there is a need for people in the public eye to take a stand against crime, violence, gangsterism and other sensitive issues that affect us as black people, especially the youth."

"I draw a line between acting and real life."

"I grew up in court. I knew the justice system. Boys will be boys was the judgement and I knew the judgement before it was even given."

"During those days, we survived on the principles of ubuntu. Money was not as important as it is today."

"I’m an actor with a purpose. My intention is to open the eyes of young boys who want to travel down the road of gangsterism."

"Being arrested was a blessing in disguise."

"I wasn't five years old yet and she drowned in the Vaal River at the age of eight, on the same day that King Edward VII died, because I still remember well how all the flags were hanging half-mast when we went to fetch the little coffin in town the following day with the hooded cart – the day my late father came to wake us at four o'clock to see Halley's Comet that was clearly visible in the sky. We all felt so awful, because my late sister's little body was still lying in the house."

"I would stand to one side of her pulpit in front of the Coloured community, and Ouma and I and the entire congregation would end up in tears as hymn after heart-stirring hymn was sung."

"I was six then. Ouma recited them to the Coloured community that lived on the outskirts of the Strand, where she used to go and teach them Bible lessons after Sunday school. I still remember how hard it was for me to walk down that long dirt road, holding Ouma's hand, her jokes along the way and the glimmer in her deep green eyes when she looked down at me. She could not have been more than five feet tall herself."

"Those days the Strand was little more than a fishing village. Now I had to go to church and to Sunday school. It didn't take me long to learn the nicest hymns by heart. For me these songs contained the structure, rhythm, and mystery of poetry. Inspired by this and by my grandmother's loving care, I started writing verses. My first 'poetry' appeared in the school magazine."

"The Cape Town-born poet and fiction writer, Finuala Dowling, published her New and Selected Poems, Pretend You Don’t Know Me, with Bloodaxe last year. Her work, already highly acclaimed in South Africa, has proved a rewarding new discovery for British readers."

"As a mixed-race African and adoptee I feel, paradoxically, oppressed and completely free....My adult life has been largely devoted to healing this rift. The freedom of my paradoxical position, is in fact that I don't have the constraints of a traditional role and I have access to the world."

"Her technique may appear effortless, and suggest the audience-friendly colloquialism of spoken word poetry, but there is crafted precision in her writing. Her monologues avoid the performance poet’s frequent over-reliance on cliches and catchphrases, and there’s always an edge of sharp self-awareness to the humour."

"Because I wasn't told that I was adopted until I was twenty, I lacked a vocabulary to describe who I am and where I come from, so performing and writing became ways to make myself up."

""I started writing poetry when I was a child, my first published poem was when I was 11. I was brought up in a home that loved poetry and literature, especially the English language. But it was only when I was older that I realised that writing is so much more than words playing on a page."

"With the demise of apartheid, it not only became possible for writers of all races to express themselves freely for the first time, there were also many stories by talented authors waiting to be told."

"Life cannot be scooped up like a fish."

"I became Phillippa Yaa when I found my biological father, who told me that if he had been there when I was born, the first name I'd have been given would be a day name like all Ghanaian babies, and all Thursday girls are Yaa, Yawo, or Yaya. So by changing my name I intended to inscribe a feeling of belonging and also one of pride on my African side."

"After growing up black in white South Africa, internalising so many negative 'truths' of what black people are like, I needed to reclaim my humanity and myself from the toxic dance of objectification."

"Writing contains the writer, their concerns, their social context and their history. My own history became a block to my creativity as I started to explore my identity as a black woman adopted by a white family in apartheid South Africa."

"I felt like the colonised and the coloniser were fighting each other inside my brain. Writing continued to be important to me but I was convinced that it was simply a therapeutic process, of no value to anyone else."

"They say God laughs when we make plans: He's watched me trace my path away from war-scarred foreign lands, Where AIDS cases and unmarked graves are common as grains of desert sand, Where solemn bargains for slaves are made each day by neighbouring clans; Where I grew up. Soon as I left the womb, I was running; There was always something to escape, be it Ebola Or just that drunkard driving that Range Rover, Racing over potholes, ten shots from being sober... That was me; ever escaping, Hoping, praying and close-shaving, Evading nature's worst and Mankind at its most perverse; No helping hand to rescue me, I was the perfect refugee - See, Ive been arrested, beaten, Seized by police for no reason, Always fleeing by my teeth's skin, Till leaving, Coming to Heathrow, And finding work, and peace, and love With running no longer in my blood."

"I enjoy the reading and thinking as well as the discussion and exchange that an academic life involves. I love the smell of old books and newspapers in libraries and archives, and the possibility of original ideas that emerge from long hours in a quiet place."

"I hope we will have developed partnerships and cooperative relations with scholars in other parts of the world, especially in the Global South. For me, such pooling of intellectual and material resources will generate new and necessary ways of engaging with the world's challenges."

"In August 1996, while I was a Research Fellow at the University of Cape Town, I was struck by a series of news stories in South African newspapers in which the visual and verbal imagery seemed to me highly distinctive. I kept a collection of clippings and eventually these became the basis for my PhD on images of Islam. In the course of my studies, I conducted archival research into colonial-era paintings, newspapers and popular cultures in South Africa, and read these in juxtaposition with contemporary literary representations of Islam. This trajectory of images across two centuries became the material for a theory about representations of slavery and Islam in South Africa."

"I love the creativity that emerges from a university community. Working at Penn State with my colleagues and students feels like being exposed to a constant series of illuminating ideas and opportunities for creative collaborations."

"I love reading and visiting museums and galleries, which is also part of my work. Talking with friends over a home-cooked meal is my favorite way to spend an evening."

"To have lost even the why or the what for - to dream and to wake with the weight of even the mechanical why even the mechanical wherefore -"

"As coming upon a puff-adder coiled on the carpet under the desk"

"I was still in the queue at the bookshop when I read the contents page, and I began to smile, because Tongues of their Mothers—my second poetry collection—is also divided into four sections using the names of seasons. In your book, there are eleven poems in Winter, fifteen in Summer, three in Spring and thirteen in Autumn."

"I first encountered your 2019 debut collection Agringada: Like a Gringa, Like a Foreigner (Modjaji Books) at the Rosebank branch of Exclusive Books. I spent so much time trying to read the two words on the cover, the ones in a small black font. After numerous failed attempts I decided I would use my magnifying glass when I got back home. It was in that moment that I realised: Oh, they are using the very cover to give me the visceral experience of what I am about to read! Then I thought: Effective! Smart! I love it! I am buying this book!"

"These hands have Moulded monuments, created crafts, healed hearts."

"It is a summer of songs composed in blood, tuned with guns and arranged in conversations. It is a summer of songs I sing in swelling volumes."

"I write poetry from my personal space, in my personal voice. I say “I am here”. I address women in the world."

"I like to define myself not according to what I have suffered but according to how much I have overcome, and I am very grateful to my mother for instilling that in both me and my sister… I never see a glass half empty but I see it half full."

"I had to believe one day we would be free. The struggle became my motivation – that’s all I could hang on to."

"After our liberation she became an icon of the task we began of transforming our society and stepping into spaces and opportunities that had been denied to generations of South Africans."

"She carved her own path in life, and did things on her own terms."

"Dear Apartheid Apologists, your time is over. You will not rule again. We do not fear you. Finally #TheLandIsOurs”."

"From a very early age I learnt to internalise, to project a very confident persona and be strong."

"What she did, the sacrifices, the hardships she went through, the difficult life she led, we will forever be grateful because it was done so our people can be free."

"I do not not own life, you often said when you tried to laugh your difficulties away."

"You have watched God and Devil, gods and Ancestors, wondering whether *they* owned it, this thing called life. As far as you could see no one seemed to own it, judging by the way they too cast their eyes in the directions of our Hillbrow, Alexandra, and Tiragalong, clicking their tongues in deep sadness or grim amusement as people devoured one another. You were right there with them, still on your way to finding out whether any of them owned life."