Made from Absence: A Relief Map of the Flats
Gabeba Baderoon - Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender
and Sexuality Studies, African Studies and Comparative Literature,
Penn State University, U.S.A
In this poetry reading, Baderoon presents work from her current
book project, “The Concussion Diaries: Relief Map of a Drifting Mind.”
Both a memoir of pain and a history of the Cape Flats, an area to
which Black people in Cape Town were “removed” during apartheid,
“The Concussion Diaries” approaches the complex absences of these
two themes obliquely. For instance, the memoir seeks a language for
conveying the absence of concussion without trying to fill its lacunae.
To do so, it takes a position near to pain, next to it. Alongside this, the
diaries linger on a place known for its absences, the Cape Flats -- which
once formed a seabed behind Table Mountain and is constituted of sand
30 meters deep - writing beyond the tropes of loss, neglect, and racial
contempt through which it is commonly known. In images of a waste
landscape and throwaway people, the presentation traces the unspoken
histories of genocide and slavery and their legacies of disposability which course through the more visible abuses of apartheid and its
aftermath. While the Flats is usually seen from above or by driving
through it, “The Concussion Diaries,” refuses to leave or peer distantly
at the landscape and its occupants. Instead, the author crafts a “relief
map” of sand and its transformations and recovers other timescales and
centralities that the people of the Flats have made from their absence.
17 авг 2024
