AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

The Poetry Magazine Podcast: Esther Belin in Conversation with Toni Giselle Stuart

(If you notice a mistake in the transcript, please let us know by emailing [email protected])

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Toni Giselle Stuart:

(READS EXCERPT FROM “maghrib”)

“You are not in TheDaytime anymore, child.
Here, what you know      and do not know
remains for you to be seen.

Esther Belin: Welcome to the Poetry Magazine Podcast. I’m guest editor, Esther Belin, coming to you from the four corners of the United States. This week, I’m speaking with Toni Giselle Stuart, a South African poet and performer. When I first heard her poetry, I was moved by her use of sound and breath to create tension and emphasis. Stuart works against fractionating the whole person in ways that offer healing. In this conversation, we get into rhythm as an integral part of her writing practice. She shares two poems with us from a new trilogy, a speculative fiction she’s working on. So let’s get started. Here’s our conversation.

Esther Belin: You know, as I was preparing for this podcast, and thinking of Indigenous and other land-based movements, hearing all the chatter around that, and, (LAUGHS) you know, a lot of conversations really kind of bend around ideas of visibility and presence. And lately, I’ve been meditating on this idea of how sometimes the spaces, or when people intentionally make space for historically marginalized people or voices, it actually contributes to keeping them historically marginalized. Today, I really just, I want to create this space of rest, because I feel like the craziness from people in the world is just spinning. I want to acknowledge, I don’t want to follow that rhythm. I think that rhythm is harmful to land-based movements, land-based writers. And I’ve been really seeking to follow the Earth’s rhythm and just spending time outside. I think it’s perfect that we’re in this space together, because I feel like that’s really where you are. And I really want to just use this time to, you know, highlight you as an interdisciplinary artist and a teacher, with a foundation in writing. And, you know, originally from South Africa, you’re joining us from Kenya. So I’d love for you to just share with us your introduction, how you normally introduce yourself to audiences. And we’ll start from there.

Toni Giselle Stuart: What you just said, is so, I’m just so grateful for your words, because everything you’ve just said is what I’ve been feeling for such a long time. And I’m in a very intentional period of my life where I have taken a step back from social media, I’ve stopped writing my bimonthly newsletters, and I’m essentially on like a self-made sabbatical. Because, for the last six years, I felt this really strong call to go deeper into silence. And over the last six years, I’ve come to understand that that silence doesn’t mean the absence of sound, it means the absence of noise.

Esther Belin: Yeah.

Toni Giselle Stuart: And it means the kind of listening in which one can really hear your true self, and spirit and the land.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

My name is Toni Giselle Stuart. And I started using my middle name professionally a few years ago, because I feel like my two names together really are the balance of the masculine and feminine energy in me. I’ve been living from such a place of pushing and driving for so long. And I’m now in this place of, what does it mean to rest into knowing that I am held, rest into the land holding me, rest into spirit holding me, and trusting myself. And moving, like you said, at the pace of the Earth. And so I was born and raised in Cape Town, in a place called Athlone, under the kind of classification of colored under the apartheid government. And so I was quite young when ’94 happened. But still, you know, the effects of it, you feel them and you only discover how they impact you when you start unpacking things later on in life. And my work is about listening for the stories that remind us who and what we really are, like who and what we truly are. When we look at ourselves through our own eyes, not through the eyes of the colonizer, not through the eyes of the West.

Esther Belin: Yeah.

Toni Giselle Stuart: And we don’t even know that we do that. And so everything you’ve just said about this thing of rest, a big thing on my journey also was six years ago, my mom passed away. And giving myself permission to grieve on my own terms, and in my own way.

Esther Belin: Mm.

Toni Giselle Stuart: And also because I was working for myself, and because the my time was my own, I could grieve in my own way. I didn’t have to go back to the rat race, I didn’t only get three days kind of compassionate leave. And I remember my prayer throughout it was always, “Please let it soften me.”

Esther Belin: Mm.

Toni Giselle Stuart: And it has, you know, “Please let it soften me, please let it open me in ways that I didn’t think were possible.” And all of these things are related. And so to come back to your point about, you know, sometimes these spaces that are created for, you know, to give access, or create access for marginalized voices, I think that the mistake that we keep making, is that we think that we can bring about systemic change without doing the inner healing work. Because no matter where in the circle you sit, no matter what shade of skin you have, if we don’t do the inner healing work, no matter what systems we create, we’re going to perpetuate the violences, because we don’t know that they unconsciously live in all of us. And that’s not about blaming people, it’s about understanding that first, we are energy, and then we are physical matter. And part of the indoctrination and the colonization of the West has been to make us think that we are physical beings first. And so there’s this inversion, and this over emphasis on the physical at the expense of spirit. And then also, the dehumanization of that. And the thing of like, “Oh, this is airy-fairy, or these people are primitive, and they’re backward.” And these things still exist

Esther Belin: Mm-hmm.

Toni Giselle Stuart: in any place, where kind of Christianity has done its work.

Esther Belin: Yep.

Toni Giselle Stuart: And so that’s why we have people running themselves ragged trying to create new systems, and then feeling guilty when they need to stop and rest or take care of themselves.

Esther Belin: Yeah.

Toni Giselle Stuart: Or shouting down other people saying, “Oh, it’s a privilege to do this.” But actually, you know, what did Audre Lorde say, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” And so, thank you for that. Because the land is calling us to rest and the land is calling us to slow down. And none of our irate desires to bringing about a change in climate change are going to work if we go, if we move from the same place as the master.

Esther Belin: Whew! Yeah, we are, we are in the same spot. And I think a lot of that resonates with me as well. I love how you started using your full name, to balance out the masculine and the feminine, which really speaks to me, because that’s similar to how the Navajo people are. We don’t have a gender identifier in our language. We acknowledge, you know, half of our being as masculine, the other half as feminine. And it’s that balance that makes us complete. Right? And it’s in our language, it’s in how we identify land, it’s how we really create, you know, what people are calling Equity and Inclusion these days. But it’s just about the wholeness. And I do want to also highlight some of what you’re doing right now and talk a little bit about some of the intergenerational and ancestral traumas that you mentioned, you know, help us understand where that’s situated in the really complex history of South Africa.

Toni Giselle Stuart: I think as someone who was raised in a community classified as colored—for those who don’t know that African history, essentially what that is is the Creole kind of community of South Africa. So my particular ancestry is a combination of people who were enslaved from India, Southeast Asia, East Africa, West African coast, as well. Indigenous Khoisan, the Indigenous people, so the Khoisan, and then in my particular bloodline, what I know of is also German, Scottish, Dutch, Spanish, Welsh and Filipino. And so (LAUGHS) what the term “colored” did was flatten this creolization. And it also—there’s this incredible writer Patric Tariq Mellet and historian and he talks about the de-Africanisation of, that term “colored,” kind of de-Africanise the Creole people of South Africa. The Khoisan came through spiritually and through my process of initiating as a healer. So I can show you in the archive where that is, but in the dream space and in meditation in the spiritual life, they very much work with me, and they’re the ones who called me to be a healer. And I also know that that’s probably on my mother’s side, because my mother’s father is from a place in the Klein Karoo, in a mountainous region. And that’s where a lot of Khoisan people were as well. And so partly what happens in the culture, in kind of the Creole community is that, and of course, I’m generalizing, but a large, largely what happened is that there was this assimilation to whiteness. And so there was a strong focus on, “We come from white people, and so and so was, you know, so and so was Dutch, and so and so was English, and now this great grandfather was that,” but none of the Black ancestry, none of the slave ancestry, none.

Esther Belin: Mm.

Toni Giselle Stuart: So that was erased by the elders in our families, because of the internalized racism and the internalized self-hatred, the internalized oppression. It’s not about only reclaiming one thing. It’s like, how do I sit as a Creole person knowing I have all of these ancestral lines? And so how do I make peace with the fact that I also come from white people, and I’m the person who wears that on my skin? Like other people, you can’t see it on their skin that there’s white ancestry, but it’s in us. And so what does that mean, when that violence is also in the bloodline? One of the things that I was shown is that our ancestral wisdom and knowledge and gifts weren’t lost. It’s not in the archive, it doesn’t mean it’s lost. It’s buried, and where did our ancestors bury it? They buried it in our DNA, so that when the time was right and ready, we would go and unlock that. And how do we do that? We heal the trauma.

Esther Belin: Mm.

Toni Giselle Stuart: So we don’t heal the trauma and learn the trauma so it has to to sit there, and it feels like that’s often what happens is we make our trauma and our pain our identity, but it’s not our identity. The process is to move through to get to the wisdom, to get to the gifts, to stop looking at ourselves as victims, even when we think we’re not. This is like a really subtle way of writing and talking about ourselves as victims, you know, “We overcame so much.” We’re more than overcomers, actually, we’re creators. And so I feel like my kind of next focus is, what does it mean to imagine new vision? Like what—new worlds and new futures. That are not steeped in dystopia and that are not steeped in kind of annihilation, but actually in freedom, and genuinely allowing ourselves to want to be free and developing a language for it. That’s, like quite a thing to say, because a lot of people will kind of, they’ll say, yes, and they’ll nod. But actually, people don’t want to do that work. (LAUGHS)

Esther Belin: You’re right. It’s, it is freeing, you know, I think once you get there. The hard work is, is really that journey through the trauma to unpack that. And I love that analogy about, it’s just buried, it’s in there somewhere. And really drawing upon our ancestry and our ancestors to when the time is right to have it push through. That’s exactly I feel like what’s happening here in the US with Indigenous writing, is that is starting to push through. There’s also, you know, when we talk about this a lot of debris as well, (LAUGHS) that comes through there and, and I love that creation process, because they feel like, at least on this side of the world, we’re definitely using—and that’s what Indigenous people do, right? We use it all. So we use the debris to build and create something. And then we have to really salvage through, and also, going along with what you’re talking about, grieve in our own way, decide what we do need to just bury. What really does need to go back to the earth. Because I think there’s only so much our bodies can handle. There are people, probably we both see this in our communities, who we know, we see them in that struggle. And you know, we’re just trying to say, just a little bit more, just keep going, because you’re almost there. And it’s so tough because it’s such an individual journey.

Toni Giselle Stuart: Mm. Yes, I feel like for land-based cultures, there’s such a deep inner knowing of the relationship between the individual and the collective. What I love out this way of seeing life and the world is that there are no binaries. And there’s no either/or. Opposites sit alongside each other and complement each other and work in unison to create the harmony, not balance the harmony. And—because balance is static, whereas harmony is dynamic. And also because I’m a geek about,

Esther Belin: (LAUGHS)

Toni Giselle Stuart: Also as a geek, (LAUGHS) I’m, you know, studying fractal, like, harmonic expressions and fractalization for the book that I’m writing. Sound is the building block of the universe, like it’s the fabric of the universe.

Esther Belin: Mm.

Toni Giselle Stuart: And our land-based people know that, which is why their instruments mimic the sounds of the land and speak to different organs and energy centers in the body. So, yes.

Esther Belin: Yes. And, you know, for the Navajo people, a lot of our healing, a lot of our ceremonial practices are singing. It’s all night singing over people. You know, so, talk a little bit about this new project that you’re working on with sound, because I think that’s something that you embrace very well, and it really is apparent in your work.

Toni Giselle Stuart: So I’m currently working on (LAUGHS) a speculative fiction trilogy, in poetic verse. It’s called The Somnambulism Trilogy. And it’s, how do I—(LAUGHS) I’m just thinking about how to say this in a really succinct way, without giving out too much. Like just in a way that I can keep people with me.

Esther Belin: When you’re talking about the speculative fiction is that, I don’t know, is that roots also in like the Afrofuturism ideas?

Toni Giselle Stuart: I don’t know, what it is is, I found that speculative fiction gave me space to explore the kind of questions around identity in a way that was less suffocating. And so, The Somnambulism Trilogy is the story of a girl who is on the brink of the ritual of first blood. So on the brink of a first menstruation. Her mother’s just died. And in this world, Rhythm is everything. Rhythm has a capital R. And the healers are musicians.

Esther Belin: Mm.

Toni Giselle Stuart: Everything runs on rhythm. And there are four worlds. And these worlds each have their own rhythm. And they move in an interlocking rhythmic pattern, the four worlds. And so one of the things I’m trying to do is, I found or listened, finally received the rhythms for each of the worlds. And now I’m trying to create poetic structures based on that rhythm for each world.

Esther Belin: Wow.

Toni Giselle Stuart: (LAUGHS) Yeah, I know.

Esther Belin: (LAUGHS)

Toni Giselle Stuart: (LAUGHING) I finally embraced that I’m a geek, it’s so liberating.

Esther Belin: I love the challenge. That’s huge.

Toni Giselle Stuart: Yes.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Toni Giselle Stuart: So the book starts where the girl’s mother dies. And in this series of poems, this girl receives the call, while dreaming, to go and find the mother in the world called the Desert. And the reason the mother is in TheDesert is because she was desolate when she died. So desolation in this world is a state worse than death. Because to be desolate is to be without rhythm. Your body will no longer hold rhythm. Because I’m such a word geek, when I looked up the definition of “desolation” it said, “bleakly empty and thoroughly alone.” So your body won’t hold rhythm anymore. And the mother was desolate from the minute that the girl was born. And so, because that happened, the mother didn’t tell her the stories. And so stories create the songs, song feeds the rhythm, they sing certain songs to the land, so the plants will grow. And so, this girl is about to make first blood but she doesn’t have any other ancestral stories because her mother didn’t teach them to her, because the mother was desolate. And so if she doesn’t have these stories before first blood she will die.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

(READS EXCERPT FROM “maghrib”)

on the shore
the girl stands with her feet
in the water

the Imam waits

the bilal begins         the girl gasps      holds
her BassLine. her Script hums slowly at first.
the azaan grows louder. the girl’s Script tears
into an ache. the girl holds her BassLine.

           “Exhale,” the Imam says.
“Your instinct is to brace against it      to fight.
“This is not the way          you must empty out
and let Rhythm                    fill you.”

“but it hurts,”     the girl says.
her BassLine sticks
in her chest. her diaphragm tense.

                “I know,”      the Imam says.
“It hurts because        you do not trust it
not because it is painful.
It hurts because you do not know     what it is
not because it seeks to do you harm.
Say the prayer,”     the Imam says.

“i don’t know the prayer.”

“You are not in TheDaytime anymore, child.
Here, what you know      and do not know
remains for you to be seen.

Close your eyes        say the prayer.”

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Toni Giselle Stuart: All women have families, have something called the script or the filigree on their left arm. So as you learn your ancestral stories, this complete kind of pattern just grows on your arm. And each family’s pattern is in the shape of the tree that you are born from. So there are four different kinds of trees. And only the women of the family can read that script. But this girl who doesn’t have rhythm, who, from whom song, song won’t sing from her, can read all the scripts. And that is completely unheard of. So she has to make this journey through these different worlds. But in order to get there, she first has to learn how to kind of work with rhythm in her own body. And lastly, listening, I believe that listening is the highest form of love. And I say that because, when we listen, we draw our ears closely, and when our ears are close, we are more intimate than when we are looking. Because when I’m looking, I can still create distance between you and me. But when I’m listening to you, it’s, there’s something about the sense of listening that goes straight to the heart that affects us, the body immediately responds.

Esther Belin: This is a really lovely project to hear, because it embraces exactly what we’re talking about, especially that idea of, you know, how we recover, not in our pure form, but in the true form, as how we were supposed to be as people, before colonization, right? Where, you know, here’s this young woman who has inherited this desolation yet she’s, you know, almost like a phoenix coming out of that. And that’s the struggle, right? I love that, that sense of hope. You know, my kids right now, my oldest daughter is really into science fiction and Afrofuturism books and, you know, really, I think there’s definitely a growing movement for people of color to use this platform to really recreate and heal from it. So I, I’m just thrilled to hear about this.

Toni Giselle Stuart: Thank you! (LAUGHS)

(READS EXCERPT FROM “maghrib”)

the sun closer. the girl inhales. her BassLine floods
through her sternum. reaches her left wrist.
her Script singes. their words sing in her head.
“I am the child of         and         .” it is the mother’s voice.
“The thing you are most afraid of
is the thing you must walk towards,” the mother says.
grief punches her sternum. shoots her eyes open.

“Close your eyes say the prayer,” the Imam repeats gently.

the girl wants to run. the Song of Grief fights to flood her sternum.
the bilal’s voice is stronger. the azaan bristles her Script. their words
sing in her head. the mother’s voice. the girl searches inside herself
for the prayer. inhale. exhale. the girl sees the mother. the mother is
kneeling. at a fire. under TheCanopy. the mother’s hands are flat
on the soil. the mother speaks, “And what emptiness must fill me /
before I am suitable enough to be a home for music?”
Rhythm floods the mother. song falls from her throat.

Esther Belin: You know, we’ve been talking about ways how we as writers and artists, creators, have been really nurtured and, you know, received so much from the land. And it’s part of our story, it’s part of our memory. And so how does, how would you explain that idea, that concept of us listening? And where we get that creative energy from?

Toni Giselle Stuart: So through my own journey of healing and ancestral reclamation, and then very directly, through my initiation as a healer in the water medicine tradition of my Khoisan ancestors, I’ve come to learn more and more about what some people call Indigenous cultures. And I call them land-based cultures, because I think the word Indigenous means different things in different places. And what I mean by land-based cultures is, people who still live intimately with the land. So for example, in Kenya, the Maasai, you know, Native American communities in the US, the San people in Botswana and Angola. And then for those of us who aren’t raised in that way, because of the history that we come from, what does it mean to take that understanding and that knowing and bring it into the kind of more urban life that I lead.

Esther Belin: Mm-hmm.

Toni Giselle Stuart: And for me, land-based means that I’m learning how to—that the land is a living entity, that she’s not only there for my service. She gives me everything I need to live, clothing, a place to stay, everything that we consume in our lives. At some point, something comes from the land. The minerals in the devices we are using to record this interview, the fabric that I’m wearing, you know, the building that I’m sitting in. And what’s been broken is the reciprocity, the understanding, that in order to maintain the cycle as hole, we give as much as we receive. And it’s not take. Receive and take are two very different things. We give as much as we receive. And then, so that’s one aspect. The second aspect, in my personal understanding, I can’t speak for a community of people because I’m pulling threads from different places, because of this kind of Creole history, is what does it mean to live in harmony with the cycles of the seasons? So, do I slow down in winter? Am I in harmony with my own menstrual cycle? Because at different points of the month, my energy is different. And this is another, this is a big question for me. What does it mean to plant for the good of the land? Not just plant, because, now we want to be organic, and now we want to, like, eat from— it’s like, what does it mean to plant for the good of the land? Does the land need you to plant tomatoes today? Have you asked it? You haven’t because you don’t think that that’s a possibility, because even in your return to the land, you still don’t see it as a living being, as a living entity. You still see it as something to take from.

Esther Belin: Mm.

Toni Giselle Stuart: And so this is, to me, what it means to be land-based. And I don’t have all the answers, I’m on a journey like everyone else. And these are things that our Indigenous ancestors knew. They knew all of it. This is what’s buried in us, not erased, not lost. This is what’s buried in us.

Esther Belin: Mm-hmm.

Toni Giselle Stuart: And you know what? This, what we need will not—the answers will not come in a YouTube video. The answers will come and we take our butts to the tree and we sit with our backs against it. And that thing that we call imagination, and that thing that we call daydreaming that we think has no merit is a valid form of knowledge production. It’s how the land and spirit and ancestors speak to us. And so that’s what the listening is. Like, what does it mean to really listen? And then what does it mean to trust what you think you hear? And what does it mean to heal enough, to be empty enough to hear, not project your own ideas?

Esther Belin: You know, when you say these things, it also makes me think of vulnerability, which is, you know, something our culture moves away from. And it really is, it’s the opening up, because you’re not able to listen, you’re not able to build that intimacy with your surroundings without being vulnerable. And it’s not something you can have someone do for you. Like kind of what you said, it’s such a individual journey. You can’t have someone to go out into your garden to say, “Is this the right time to plant?” Or is this, you know, what you will receive is the seeds. The earth also decides what will grow and what won’t grow. (LAUGHS)

Toni Giselle Stuart: (LAUGHS) Exactly.

Esther Belin: It decides the natural patterns of rain or seasons of drought or scarcity. You know, land-based cultures understand that rhythm. You know, as tribal people out here in the Colorado Plateau, which is a mountain desert region, you know, when people talk about drought, it doesn’t create a fear like I feel it does with other communities. It’s just another season. And we know that it happens. We know how to prepare for it. And we understand you know, for whatever reason, we’re not able to harvest as much this year. So how does that affect how we then adjust? That’s the rhythm. So some years, we get, you know, a huge harvest from our garden, some years less. And, you know, last year, we got a lot of grasshoppers visited us. And so, you know, we fed, I felt like we were feeding them. And so it was interesting. I was like, okay, so what do they need, that they need to store up? Like what’s going on in their community, that they’re so hungry right now? You know, it just creates those questions of what’s happening in that insect community. And insects are part of our creation stories. And so, to pay attention to that, like, what’s happening in their community, you know, what can we learn?

Toni Giselle Stuart: Exactly, that’s so—I love that so much. It’s so beautiful to hear. And that’s making me think of in 2016, 2017, 2018, we had drought in Cape Town. And I remember the year that it happened, I remember just instinctively in my body just being like, “Oh, we’re gonna have a dry winter.” And then the next winter just being like, “Oh, we’re gonna have a dry winter.” And then the year that it changed, I remember just feeling like, “Oh, no, it’s gonna change.” And I—and it wasn’t conscious, it was these feelings. Because the, you know, the city officials and people were panicking and all kinds of different ways. And I remember just thinking, like, “What is the land asking us to do?” This land is livid and raging. Because Cape Town is the site, I call Cape Town the site of original violence, because that’s where kind of, the settlers first arrived in South Africa. But what is she asking us to do that we’re not hearing, and now we’re freaking out about where we’re going to get water, and they were thinking about desalination plants. And I’m just like, but you are not stopping to ask the land what it is that she’s asking us to do.

Esther Belin: Mm-hmm.

Toni Giselle Stuart: You know. And even, often I think spiritually, first. Spiritually, where are we dry?

Esther Belin: Hmm.

Toni Giselle Stuart: How are we dry? How are we blocking rain? How, what actions have we taken in our lives that meant that the rain will not come? How have we disrupted the water cycle?

Esther Belin: Oh, yeah. Yeah, that’s really apparent out here. There are quite a number of dams, projects to hold the water. You know, when people come to our land, our reservation and just see it, they almost view it as a wasteland. And, you know, and it’s harmful to hear that, you know, and I had to, you know, make peace with that. But part of that story I like to tell is also that, upstream from us, there’s at least five or six dams that have been built. So what’s happened is, it used to be like a floodplain. You know, it happened on a cycle. But that flooding of that plateau was enough to keep it sustained. You know, when they look at it, and they see the scarcity, I always have to, you know, speak up and say, “We created that.”

Toni Giselle Stuart: I’ve got chills.

Esther Belin: And now the people have to adjust to that. And we have to adjust to how our water is being diverted to major urban centers, you know, for golf courses or for other, you know, landscaping projects.

Toni Giselle Stuart: I resonate with the golf courses. They never get—golf courses are never dry in Cape Town. Never dry. (LAUGHS) Humans, we’re special aren’t we?

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Esther Belin: So I think it’s a great time to hear some of your writing that really incorporates the sound and the rhythm that we’ve been talking about. So I’d love if you could read your poem, “midnight.”

Toni Giselle Stuart: So “midnight” is in Book I of the trilogy. And that book is called Sleepwalker. And this takes place in a world called The Dreamtime. So the four worlds, TheDaytime, The Dreamtime, Ancestors Rest, and The Desert. And in the dream time, it’s a liminal space. It’s not a space that the people of the daytime know about. And so, she finds it by accident. And there she finds her first teacher who’s the Imam. And so the Imam is teaching her how to work with rhythm in her body. And this poem comes after quite an intense lesson that she’s just add with the Imam. So if you imagine this is, you know, those dreams you have where you processing the whole day in kind of a repetitive form. So this is “midnight.”

(READS “midnight”)

one-and-a two-and-a-one-and-a two-and-a one-and-a two-and-a-one-
and-a two-and-a one-and-a two-and-a one-and-a two-and-a one-and
-a-two-and-a one-and-a two-andwhatemptinessmustfillme/beforeIam
suitableenoughtobeahomeformusic? two-and-a one-and-a two-and-a
-one-and-a two-and-a one-and-a two-and-a one-and-a two-and-a one-
and-a two-and-a one-and-a thethingyouaremostafraidofisthethingyou
mustwalktowards and-a one-and-a two-and-a one-and-a two-and-a-
one-and-a two-and-a one-and-a two-and-a one-and-a two-and-a one
-and-a-two-and-a songfallsfromthemother’sthroat saytheprayerchild
two-and-a one-and-a two-and-a one-and-a two-and-a one-and-a two-
and-a-one-and-a two-and-a one-themothershandsareflatonthesoil-and
-a-one-and-a two-and-a one-and-a two-and you are soft         like water
              like silence        like breath and-a two-and-a one-and-a two-and
-a one-and-a two-and-a one-and-a two-and-a one-and-a two-and-a-
one-and-a two-and-a one-and-a two-and-a one-and-a two-and-a-one-
and-a two-and-a one-and-a two-and-a one-and-a two-and-a one-and-a
-two-and-a-one-and-a whoareyouchild?

Esther Belin: That is so powerful. I just, I mean, I, you know, just taking it in and feeling that. And thanks for giving us the image on how to receive it. I think that’s really helpful to understand the importance of hearing you and your energy, and then, knowing that it’s okay to take it in. You know, I feel like that’s also part of the colonization, too, is how we’ve really misused language to harm and to take power. And this one I felt was just like, I, even if I didn’t have permission to take it in, I was like, “Oh my gosh, I need this. I need this rhythm right now.” So oh, I love that. Thank you.

Toni Giselle Stuart: You’re welcome. Thank you.

Esther Belin: There has been a lot of movement here in the US and in tribal communities around literary sovereignty and reclaiming language, even English as a tribal language, adding our own meter and rhythm. I would love for you to share some of what’s going on in South Africa as far as that community and how that process is unfolding.

Toni Giselle Stuart: I’m gonna speak for the poetry community, because that’s the one I know and I know that things are different in different kinds of literary spaces. You know, over the last, I’d say 10 years, it’s been such a strong emergence and movement of ancestral reclamation. And also, really, a movement of people writing in their mother tongues. So even though we have 11 official languages, the infrastructures are not in place for—the kind of industry publishing, printing infrastructures are there for English and Afrikaans, but not so much for Isizulu, and all of the other official languages. And so, so many poets writing in their mother tongues, publishing in their mother tongues, performing in their mother tongues.

Esther Belin: Mm.

Toni Giselle Stuart: And then also just unapologetically writing in multilingual ways, because I think that’s the other thing, right? It’s very colonial to think that people have one language.

Esther Belin: Yeah.

Toni Giselle Stuart: And also what you said about reclaiming English, there is something about understanding that we are many different Englishes. Many different Englishes.

Esther Belin: Mm-hmm.

Toni Giselle Stuart: And you can hear a particular land’s sounds on the English spoken in that country, right?

Esther Belin: Yes.

Toni Giselle Stuart: And particularly, I’d like to say there is quite a strong spiritual movement in poetry. It’s particularly poets of color in South Africa. And also, people also using poetry to really go deep and to really question. And I’m thinking of poets like vangile gantsho and her work red cotton. There’s a way in which South African artists I find are really unapologetically themselves and really unapologetically reclaiming, saying what needs to be said, like, we don’t mince our words in South Africa. You know, we don’t, (LAUGHING) we’re not afraid to call things out, you know?

Esther Belin: (LAUGHS)

Toni Giselle Stuart: And that’s so alive. And then there’s also just so much variation. You know, there’s so much diversity. There’s so much dynamism. We don’t have the same kind of state funding and grant funding for writers that you do in the UK and Europe and the US. And so, this happens through people making stuff happen on their own and poets forging careers and starting publishing houses. And that feels really important to name because I think sometimes people don’t understand that context. And so, that in itself feels like a real, something to really celebrate.

Esther Belin: It’s really good to hear that, because I think that is sometimes in the space we need to be. Right? Where it’s the community coming together to make it happen, without the external resources. It’s an interesting movement in the US where people are always looking for funding to fund their movement. And I feel like the best collaborative efforts have been the ones that have just come out of the energy of the group. And then people are more willing to emotionally invest in those efforts, knowing that, yeah, this started just truly from that commitment, that passion to create the art or the writing or the performance.

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And I think that’s a great note to end on, to really let folks know that it is the spirit. It’s the collective spirit. It’s the ancestral spirit that gives us that ability to create. It’s the land that we’re on, the land that we need to really just humbly find a quiet space to listen, to really just be uncomfortable in all of our own ways. And I say uncomfortable because I feel like we’ve created such a culture of comfort, in that I need to have a comfortable chair or a pair of shoes or clothing that fits the way I want it to fit. And when we’re out in the lands, we need to adjust to the land’s presence. And so I think once we, we yield in that sense, things will start to open up, things will start to move. And you’re right, it is an exciting time.

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Esther Belin: A big thanks to Toni Giselle Stuart. Stuart is a South African poet, performer, and facilitator. She holds a master’s from Goldsmiths, University of London. You can hear and read two poems by Stuart and the July/August 2022 issue of Poetry, in print and online. And if you’re not yet a subscriber of Poetry magazine, there’s a special rate for podcast listeners. For a limited time, you can get a full year of the magazine for $20. That’s 11 book-length issues for just $20. Visit poetry magazine.org/podcastoffer to subscribe. That’s poetrymagazine.org/podcastoffer. This show is produced by Rachel James. The music in this episode came from Resavoir, Alabaster DePlume, John McCowen, Rob Mazurek, and Irreversible Entanglements. Okay, that’s it. Until next time, be well, stay safe, and thanks for listening.

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