Poetry
Cycle
We eat and drink the land. The land eats and drinks we.
feeding on the carcass of our souls, we trickle through the cavities of the subterranean
aiding in the growth of new energy.
energy consumed by we.
Intimate Touch
Where land meets ocean.
Where end meets beginning,
known touching the unknown.
Waves teasing you with small, intimate touch.
There's tension between the forbidden.
The salty water undressing the sand intruding your folds.
Water breaths, rise and fall of its chest in harmony with the sky.
There's tension between us and its dangers.
Something alluring about its vast emptiness.
There is power in its peace
And poetry in its patterns.
Home
The solution to my hurt
is the loser, being who draws first blood.
I have been bleeding out
Slowly,
Discretely,
through every conversation.
Leaving your shadow smeared against my glow.
You drag me across the harsh rubble to the place of conflict,
skin ripping.
Body erodes.
Arriving at your choosing,
you are limp, empty
and I am already bleeding.
you won before time began.
Embryo
Beaded drops of rage seep from every weak spot.
You feed off my wounds.
That language of weakness, only you can translate.
Words become the code of harsh pins.
You gather them in your worn, thin skin.
Even a slither of my voice can gush poison.
I journey stained.
Her red acid
it stalks and hunts.
Long Form Poetry
Our Rotting Fluidity
The uterus breaks down the boundary of skin and our bodies vibrate. spacious singing flesh. The murmur of femininity permeates material. I pour its fluid into my cupped fingers and watch it slip through the cracks of thought, seeping into discourse. Stumbling through my vacuum, do my eyes ever adjust? The indefinable becomes the non-existent. can thought only contain words? femininity sits between language. In the forgotten fissures of our conscious waiting for us to come looking. Undomesticated. Regurgitate it onto the minds platform. watch it unravel. Learn from the unknowable, The simultaneous juxtapositions of fire and ice. fluidity and solitude. Sit inside each other’s liminal space. The threat of erasure dissolves under the weight of she, the weight of its emptiness. if it does not exist, it cannot be controlled. There is no shadow without light, No absence without presence, attraction without abjection, love without hate, masculine without feminine. We implode. our shells fold in on themselves and its ancient stone crumbles. a tunnel forms and penetrates the earth below filling that tunnel is the absence of us. we overflow with nothingness it gurgles and screams beneath our skin. Men in plastic bone masks march towards us. They erode our skin leaving our void vulnerable and raw. There is so much absence for them to fill with their fantasies. The female created in a man's thoughts does not exist. The projections they force upon us are fragments of a false reality. We become a prop on the stage of a man's imaginary play. Our hands pierced, moving to the rhythm of the capitalist machine none of it is real, none of it is human. I beg of you stop splitting me into two. I am not oil and water. I am a solution of matter and mind. you're manipulating hands cannot mould the ever-escaping fluid of my womanhood. I sit behind the mirror you so meticulously polish.
Annica
Her presence is heavier here. Her soul breathes, and the trees exhale with her. Her eyes adjust and converse with the wind's song. Her movements speak to the place she moves through. and it responds with sensual divets and aqueous cascades. Here, space can't be claimed. Her body can't be mapped. Her voice can't be isolated. Corporeality becomes inter-relational. She sees herself in the eroded rock. Thousands of memory holders that freeze life's movement. moulded by the wind and sea. layers of the temporary present come together to meet her. She is held by the island's outline, where land and ocean fall into one another. To hold its boundary would be to hold the fissure between beginnings. This instability is what she sees as home Where the oceans' unpredictable flow dances into excess. rebelling through motion filled with friction, resistance, and irregularity. free from control and significance. No entities exist in this world, but only ever-changing processes. The psyches' perversions of a static reality disintegrate. Here, her ego backs down, and her truth can sing She was nowhere, and now she is everywhere. Her name is Anicca. The three basic facts of existence question our agency. 'Have you power over yourself? Can you make your body larger or smaller, or let it be this or that as you desire? If it is not governed by your power but by its own laws and processes, then it is not yours. If we cannot call body our own, how much less so is this true of feelings?' Here, society walks down the golden middle path squeezed between two extremes. Between freedom and non-freedom, between ego and egolessness, sensual pleasure and self-torture, detachment and liberation, death and rebirth. Through disconnection, they transcend themselves through transcendence, they take root. But she has been uprooted. Through constant company, she is taken outside of herself into a territory of vulnerability. Her Mother Earth is isolated and lost in a location unknown to her, full of crowds she no longer recognises. stranger and stranger. Annica swirls like the sand does in secrecy under the blanket of vast water Her home has revealed wounds. severed from masculinity, Freedom becomes entrapment By gaining eternal agency, the choice is paralysing. She should have known.
Essays
Our Rotting Fluidity
Abstract: This article examines Nandipha Mntambo's pieces, 'Umfanekiso wesibuko' (Mirror image) and 'Titfunti emkhatsini wetfu' (The shadows between us) in particular, and her use of cowhide through Bhabha's concept of Third Space Thinking. I also use Salomé's understanding of femininity to form a deeper understanding of the female corporeal figures present in her work. Bhabha's Third Space Thinking is a space where binaries dissolve and expand into new perceptions and draws parallels between Salomé's description of the fluid, limitless and ineffable nature of femininity. I investigate societal beliefs surrounding female body hair through Kristeva's understanding of abjection, being the discomfort that arises from the instability of the boundary between the internal and external. Mntambo's work combines human/animal, masculine/feminine, self/other, and attraction/repulsion. and therefore, sits in 'The beyond' that Bhabha defines as the liminal space between binaries. The sculptures create a sensory and conceptual space that destabilises Western binary logic and creates a third space where the human, animal and feminine converge. This invites the viewer to engage in the transformative experience of third space thinking that could reshape how we perceive our surroundings and ourselves.
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