PAPER
with commisioned writings by:
TOMKE BRAUN
NOLAN OSWALD DENNIS
ZARA JULIUS
ZAYAAN KHAN
MAHRET IFEOMA KUPKA
LINDIWE MNGXITAMA *
MAGNUS ELIAS ROSENGARTEN
KATHY-ANN TAN
Speaking in sedimented tongues and untranslatable lexicons: on geographies of loss, rememory and hauntedness
Like the dead-seeming cold rocks, I have memories within that came out of the material that went to make me. Time and place have had their say.
Zora Neale Hurston, “Dust Tracks on a Road”*
Like the dead-seeming rocks and like Hurston, we all have memories within that came out of the material that went to make us. We are radioactive and filled to the brim with these memories (and histories) that both stitch us together and pull us apart. Some inheritances are not those of wealth but rather, they are legacies of loss returned to us in figures of ghosts stuck in purgatory, that attempt to make haunted houses out of people or out of places. Like the millions of separate particles that come together to make soil, this is a (re)imagining and reckoning – in words, in thought, and in critical creation – that seeks to unfold in the space of multiplicity. Moving through “residence time” – in the quivering tension of the in between – unstitching to restitch questions on conditions of land dispossession.
…this is a history that chokes…
What shifts when we begin to think of land dispossession in a language of loss, rememory and hauntedness, in the manner of a looping staccato song that refuses linearity, cohesion, and containment? Perhaps what shifts are the boundaries that demarcate what can be called Into question, what can be turned towards to be looked at, and therefore what can be known. In TSA Contemporary Art Magazine’s Collector’s Series: Artists & Cities (2022)**, speaking to Zayaan Khan in a piece titled “on delicious joy and dancing around the spectrum of time, space and place”, I speak about one such possibility, engaging with what can be known when we begin to think about land dispossession, and its lingering legacies in a language of loss, rememory and hauntedness. I write: What land, water, seed and air give us as People of the Global Majority who have been made marginal by white capitalist supremacy, is a cosmology and sites/sights of remembrance and connection that far transcend the material facts of these commons. These are not only places we turn to for nourishment and sustenance – in a relationship of mutual reciprocity – but it is also to land and water we go, to commune with our ancestors, to remember Things lost and disappeared and to return to ourselves. Continuing to unpack these considerations in an activation and collaboration between musician Sibusile Xaba, Berlin-based curator, writer, and researcher Kathy-Ann Tan and I, that took place at the Johannesburg Art Gallery in September 2023 called Sifting Through Soil: On Memory, Resistance and Repair. Through a discursive journey and audio interventions we addressed soil as a memory vessel and archive, medium and a site/sight of resistance and repair, as well as its violent encounters considering the relationship(s) between the body and soil. I found myself wanting to engage more with haunted places rather than with haunted bodies, although a separation of the two is not always possible, nor is it always constructive. In Landwalks Across Palestine and South Africa (2023)***, Writer and Professor Tshepo Madlingozi speaks of what he calls “worldlessness”, as the consequence of land dispossession and how it severed indigenous people from a spiritual and material conduit – the land – and therefore their connection with the human collective, non-human beings, the living and the yet-to-be-born. Prof Madlingozi writes: Land dispossession must be understood as a position, or leading to a status of worldlessness – that is being without a world. An important consequence if landlessness and worldlessness is pariahdom; the idea that people who have been dispossessed of their land become pariahs in the land of their birth… I therefore propose to move away from the idea of land dispossession as the idea of losing a material good. Without land there is no identity, no belonging, no culture, and no ontology. Land dispossession presaged the shattering of the socio-cultural world of indigenous people – ‘ilizwe lifile!’. Keeping the concepts of “worldlessness” and “residence time” close, I think that to live in the afterbirth of Apartheid, and its lingering material, cosmic and ontological legacies of land dispossession, is to be a time-traveller like the character of Dana from Octavia E Butler’s Kindred****. There is no way of ignoring the fact that soil holds memory.
Here, soil is not just a portal that collapses and transcends the space of a-haunting-past, the present and a future-in-suspension, however, it also becomes animated as a living witness through the invocation of memory. An ever breathing, eroding and sedimenting witness and archive. During her keynote titled Black. Still. Life given at the 2019 Performances of No-thingness symposium , writer, academic and professor Christina Sharpe speaks of “residence time” in relation to soil and an untranslatable lexicon of blackness saying that: Human blood is salty and sodium has a residence time of 260 million years, and what happens to that energy that’s produced in the water? It continues cycling like atoms in residence time. We black people exist in the residence time of the wake, a time in which everything is happening now, it is all now.
…this is a history that haunts…
When thinking about worldlessness and land dispossession in the syntax of dominant discourse, we are often limited to a space that engages with these conditions in relation to people who have been violently separated from, or have had to leave, their land of origin. This limitation suffocates and dries out the possibilities of being able to think through – with resistance and refusal – the brutal imagination of white supremacy and the still oozing wounds inflicted by it on Black and Indigenous people who have been made worldless, and continue to exist as such, on their soil of origin. Where time for example Apartheid and place, let’s say South Africa have had their say. Where their memories have seeped into the materials of our making, like soil that is a collection of matter, grief and promise. Writing about land, loss and love in Things That Can & Cannot Be Said (2016)*****, author Arundhati Roy holds this very condition of being made worldless and pariah in your very land of birth by the legacies of white supremacy’s brutal imagination accountable. Roy writes:
What sort of love is this love that we have for countries? What sort of country is it that will ever live up to our dreams? What sort of dreams were these that have been broken? Isn’t the greatness of great nations directly proportionate to their ability to be ruthless, genocidal? Doesn’t the height of a country’s ‘success’ usually also mark the depths of its moral failures? And what about our failure? Writers, artists, radicals and malcontents – what of the failure of our imaginations? What of our failure to replace the idea of flags and countries with a less lethal Object of Love? Human beings seem unable to live without war, but they are also unable to live without love. So the question is, what shall we love?
She continues:
Writing this at a time when refugees are flooding into Europe – the result of decades of US and European foreign policy in the ‘Middle East’ – makes me wonder: Who is a refugee? The refugees fleeing from wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria to Europe are refugees of the Lifestyle Wars. But the thousands of people in countries like India who are being jailed and killed by those same Lifestyle Wars, the millions who are driven off their lands and farms, exiled from everything they have ever known – their language, their history, the landscape that formed them – are not. As long as their misery is contained within the arbitrarily drawn borders of their ‘own’ country, they are not considered refugees. But they are refugees. And certainly, in terms of numbers, such people are the great majority in the world today. Unfortunately in imaginations locked into a grid of countries and borders, in minds that are shrink wrapped in flags, they don’t make the cut.
…this is a history of “Black peoples in the wake with no state or nation to protect us”******.
Thinking about South Africa as entangled with its history of Apartheid, and as a product of Apartheid, means thinking about and with a history that chokes. It is to know and feel through daily confrontation like daily bread – especially as a Black person still living within the borders of Apartheid’s Afterbirth – that one cannot question matters of land and soil without thinking about states and conditions of haunting, without ghosts stuck in purgatory pushing their way through an filling up the space between you and this land. I feel this Knowing so Deep bubbling beneath my skin as I watch an audio visual excerpt from MADEYOULOOK’s piece Menagano (2023). The piece is an: exploratory study on what might constitute a black landscape aesthetic… ‘Menagano’ considers how knowing the land intimately and from within informs aesthetic imaginations of land that disrupt colonial understandings of the landscape tradition and touches on modes of visual language-making that represent the multiplicities of relationships with the land and its inherited memory, trauma, and possibilities.
The excerpt from Menagano is 5 minutes and 18 seconds long, and is made up of visuals and shots of various landscapes. “An old-growth forest, a mountain range, or a river valley is more important and certainly more lovable than any country will ever be. I could weep for a river valley, and I have. But for a country? Oh man, I don’t know…” (Roy, 2016). The piece is made up mostly of silence, except for the sound coming from the landscapes being documented. This silence reminds me of absence and how it has a presence and a history. I think of the violence, material and immaterial, that has taken root in the space left by the conditions of absence ushered in by land dispossession. By being made worldless. This haunting that is simultaneously visible and invisible; a haunting made visible by South Africa’s contemporary topography that reaches out and touches its historical making, and a haunting that is invisible in relation to the cultural, spiritual and ontological assault that comes from being dispossessed of your land. As I continue to watch Menagano, I also begin to think of its omnipresent silence and thus of its echoes of absence coming from the wake, as speaking in an untranslatable lexicon of blackness, of speaking to us in sedimented tongues.
…this is a reckoning with history that knows the personal is political and the political personal…
My paternal grandfather was a farm worker, he was also a healer, I met him once before his passing. In thinking about him I am led to a piece written by Andile Mngxitama, his son, in 2014 for the Chimurenga Chronic titled Not Only Our Land But also Our Souls. Seeking to think about land theft beyond the material, to dig deeper and excavate in thought the story of loss that is the Black experience he writes:
When one loses a lover, it’s not so much the loss of this beloved person, but a loss of one's capacity to love without fear again in the future. One grieves for not only the past, but also a future that is linked with the present in ways that already are too damaging. A charred future without? Without understanding the dialectical relationship between history and the future we end up being unconscious agents of a history we wish to obliterate. We have to plumb the heart and soul of history, crack open the narratives and data that organise our contemporary agonies and desires. When I reported these thoughts, a friend pointed out that I had, by accident, put my finger on three things that haven’t been sufficiently reflected upon: namely love, loss and land! My friend indicated that a loss to death is traumatic, but nevertheless a loss fully accounted for and for which closure, of sorts, can be attained. Loss of land is altogether more devastating because we are condemned to encounter it every day – in passing koppies, smiling mountains and angry rivers – as a loss that exists as a gain for the other. The loss of land dramatises the loss of too much for the African who became the Black – a void and a great menacing silence. This loss is the most complete.
Perhaps then it makes sense for melancholy to be weaved into the pieces that shattered and became the Black condition. Blackness as an experience of worldlessness is congregated in a Song of Mo(u)rning and muffled gags of choking, like those one hears when watching Lerato Shadi’s piece Motlhaba wa re ke Namile, (2016). In the video work and performance piece – captured on location in Shadi’s home village of Lotlhakane in Mahikeng in the Northwest Province of South Africa – we see a 7 minutes and 35 seconds long close-up shot of Shadi, ingesting and choking on red soil. As Shadi continues to eat the soil and suffocate on it, as one continues to hear the buzzing fly, Motlhaba wa re ke Namile mutates from a video performance piece into a reckoning or confrontation, one that becomes increasingly difficult to bear witness to. It is as if you yourself are choking as Shadi struggles to swallow the soil symbolising these histories of rot and worldlessness. However, there is another story being told by Shadi’s work, that of refusal and epistemic silence in its exploration on how the act of consuming soil to commit suicide, sometimes practiced by enslaved people, has been overlooked as an act of resistance.
Holding all three close – thought, feeling and excavation – I make my way towards the end of my (re)imagining of and reckoning with soil. As I listen to them speak to each other in sedimented tongues and untranslatable lexicons of geographies of loss, rememory and hauntedness, it is clear that thinking about and through land dispossession in the logic of material dispossession, and therefore, in the logic of land restitution or redistribution will never be enough in accounting for and returning what was lost and continues to be lost by Black people because of land stolen. To think from Black and its untranslatable lexicon, which is to say to think from soil, requires us to dive deep into “the heart and soul of history”*******. It needs us to listen to the silence and muffled echoes, and to meet there in the place of resistance. It is to know, as Bryan Stevenson says, “There are tears in this soil from all those who laboured under the indignation and humiliation of segregation. But in this soil there’s also opportunity for new life. A chance to grow something hopeful and healing for the future.”
*Hurston, N. Z. 1942. Dust Tracks on a Road. United States: J. B. Lippincott Company.
**Oyebode, B. 2022. TSA Collectors Series: Artists and Cities. Nigeria: The Sole Adventurer Art Media Limited.
***Berlanda, T., Ho-Tong, M., Khalifeh, M., & Laïdi-Hanieh, A. 2022. Landwalks Across Palestine and South Africa. South Africa: University of Cape Town and The Palestinian Museum Birzeit.
****Octavia E. Butler, Kindred; London: Headline Book Publishing, 2018.
*****Cusack, J & Roy, A. 2016. Things That Can and Cannot Be Said. Great Britain: Penguin Books.
******Sharpe, C. 2016. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
*******Mngxitama, A. 2014. ‘Not Only Our Land but Also Our Souls,’ Chimurenga Chronic. Available at:
https://chimurengachronic.co.za/not-only-our-land-but-also-our-souls/chr
*Lindiwe (Lindi) Mngxitama currently lives and works in Johannesburg, their first Love. They are an African Literature — postgraduate cum laude — alumni from the University of the Witwatersrand, was Editor of Bubblegum Club from 2019 to 2022, and is now Copy Director for the agency silo of the organisation. They have written and directed plays and short documentaries, worked as a collaborator, along other academics and cultural workers, and took part in A4 Arts Foundations Distributed Residency as part of Bubblegum Club’s art collective.
Her writing has appeared and been featured in various print and digital South African, African and international publications including TSA Art Magazine, Dazed Digital, The Face Magazine, ArtThrob, Something We Africans Got, Mail and Guardian and more. As a storyteller, curator, artist, director and academic-in-cry-sis, Lindi thinks of the worlds she creates through language as radical spaces of (re)imagination and critical questioning. Word woven worlds that engage with H/historical and socio-political legacies that construct and govern society and shape subjectivities. Her work, praxis and writing seek to bring to the centre the narratives of those bodies and their interior worlds, radioactive and overflowing with H/history — often relegated to the periphery — to ask who and what moves at the margins, why and how? And are rooted in Affect, Play, Phenomenology, Critical Race theory, Post-Colonial theory, Queer theory, Black Pessimism and Black Feminist Thought.
Her writing has appeared and been featured in various print and digital South African, African and international publications including TSA Art Magazine, Dazed Digital, The Face Magazine, ArtThrob, Something We Africans Got, Mail and Guardian and more. As a storyteller, curator, artist, director and academic-in-cry-sis, Lindi thinks of the worlds she creates through language as radical spaces of (re)imagination and critical questioning. Word woven worlds that engage with H/historical and socio-political legacies that construct and govern society and shape subjectivities. Her work, praxis and writing seek to bring to the centre the narratives of those bodies and their interior worlds, radioactive and overflowing with H/history — often relegated to the periphery — to ask who and what moves at the margins, why and how? And are rooted in Affect, Play, Phenomenology, Critical Race theory, Post-Colonial theory, Queer theory, Black Pessimism and Black Feminist Thought.