what could be happening here
at this confusion of voices and souls in dialogue with the unseen,
the unknown rhythms of life pulsating in the blink of lights
where image and language coalesce?
what is this gathering,
this communion of poets and mystics,
where corporeal frequencies of dreamt realities,
evoke the melancholy and absurd?
At times there are small filmic miracles that chronicle some corner of creative realities experienced by some ladies in some country in Africa, and Lesotho is the mountain kingdom from which eagles, phoenixes rise from the jagged cliffs that home a myriad souls.
BIRDS OF A FEATHER is one such glance into the spirituality of sonic manifestations, that evolve in many young musician and creatives who are steeped in translating their cultural experiences through a multifloras lens.
Matlali Matabane is such an experimentalist, who once serendipity had chosen her an instrument, explored some inner personal transformations and turmoils as well as joys through chords and voice, serenading antiquated hills of the mountains of kingdom.
The sound emanating from the instrument wails of the traumas of a pst that still haunts our people and this documentary film is a record of the artist’s efforts to preserve heritage, told through astute eyes of incredibly unhinged cinematography, experimentalist and bordering on the avant-garde.
The documentary film, directed by the enigmatic Tsepiso Mahase, this cinematic journey is guided by womanhood who bears witness of travails of gender biases, hence the music, nearing hymnal renditions that required for religion but expressing a spirituality that unites all being like mycelium.
Having been recently screened at The Merafong Documentary Film Festival, the film resonated with audiences, as musicians, poets and social activists could relate to the efforts undertaken by the protagonist towards preservation of Basotho Musical Heritage.
The musical process documented through this film deploys spoken word poetry in imagery that account to experiences of Matlali, exquisitely globalising her experiences through a cinematic vocabulary that speaks to other people of the world who creatively strife for sonic inter-connected.
And there is indeed that power bestowed film which transcends space and time, where connections are woven efficiently between viewers and the creators of the visual experience itself, a sort of synergy of spirits which was expressed by well-enthused audiences captivated by the film’s vocality and expression beyond borders.
Matlali, as a sound scholar and artist living in Lesotho and South Africa, who is currently studying Music at Rhodes University, and through her explorative research and creative work she continues to excavate more synergies between electronic music and indigenous instrumentation fused with spoken word and performance art.
Interestingly, the Lesiba and other Basotho traditional sounds have haunted much of the Southern African landscape since time immemorial, but in the self-taught hands of artist Matlali Matabane, it has become an emancipatory tool essential for telling and breathing contemporary stories into unpredictable futures.
As an instrument synonymous with the solitude of herders and their personal contemplations, it is now shown in light of being a place of gender contestations and liberation, and this new evolution in the hands of femininity is proving richly endowed with winds of change capable of taking each feathered expression beyond the confines of borders, gender, race and social background.
The film is therefore a document of resilient craft nurtured in the most hostile space for creative output, where funding for film is virtually non-existent. It shows how young Basotho filmmakers are collaborating with their peers to create memorable and experimental works that bring new modes of social engagement.
The filmmaker Tsepiso Mahase
“African humanism recognises the Vital Force or the Supreme Being at the centre of, and integrating, human, animal and plant life and the inanimate elements of the universe. It is a simple faith, free tyranny of theological and intellectual argument. This is the measure of the imaginations invested in the power of oral expression.”
Eskia Mphahlele
Could a people who possess an unshakable belief in a god who orchestrates all human fate and laws of nature be not considered to be suffering a type of collective psychotic experience?
Is there a psycho-chemical mixture brewing in human brains that is breeding staunch faiths in mythological gods such as of the Greeks or Romans, spawning fanatical subservience to recent gods of collective imaginations engineered at the Vatican or Mecca?
Does the “worship instinct” in humanity qualify as a psychological disorder wired into our brains, that eventually engendered chosen races and their imperialist thought systems and their subsequent colonial exploitation and the “Othering” of people of colour?
And from what sinister roots does the contemporary gullibility expressed by masses congregating in mega-churches mean of the Black Mind?
What is this obsessed embrace of pseudo-prophets and the continued derogation of our ancestral spirituality for the promise of paradise in heaven?
How does religion work in the constant suppression projects orchestrated by the coloniser, and how is it that black folk continue to embrace a religion that has demonised them and deemed them inferior to other races?
The Colonial Gaze
In order for our collective colonial traumas to find closure in this hauntingly landless present, can the annals of history reveal hidden truths, and all treasures of innocences lost in unjust psychological wars?
This video poem is an attempt to rehistoricizes and repoliticizes the idea psychological trauma experienced under colonialism and other forms of oppression.
It questions all shackle of the collective psyche, rooted in the belittling gaze of the oppressor and the internalised untruths to which many have have surrendered.
The First Chapter
How does hearing multiple voices translate to the contemporary black mind which has been obscured by white analysts? Does the voice of the one assailed by voices transcend the collective schizophrenia of heeding many echoes that want to subvert our inner selves?
The Second Chapter
Civility and barbarity, when juxtaposed against the colonial onslaught that saw white settlers mission to civilise the native, beckons us to question to what extremes of animality does the western mind yearn to see in the African mind succumb?
The Third Chapter
How did western standards of beauty infiltrate the self-respect identified in garments of black femininity? What did the new woman become after giving into the thirst of western voyeuristic masculinity that intoxicated and demonised black masculinity?
Land remembers, events, those who populated it and it is intwined with our perceptions and memories. Through its beauty and horrors, it influences our worldview and trauma carried through that window by those who were exploited and deemed.
These traumas, especially those experienced by black people are like tattoos, and this film attempts to explore traces of unrealized and forgotten utopias of deserved respect and human dignity.
The denial of these dreamscapes of liberation from past traumas from an ongoing past need an exorcism of sorts and often we look to psycho-analysts and therapist fro healing tool.
Sadly, western psychological theory seems devoid of possibilities for such healing, expoing the pitfalls and shortcomings crafted from colonial and imperialism psyches.
To date black folks grapple with the memories, emotions, and associations we attribute to places of our incarceration, exploitative labour and education systems geared towards creating consensual slaves, and must end.
But how?
It appears that “self-analysis as collective” plays a crucial role in remembering and understanding the past while also managing periods of transition, an aspect deeply connected to the current works of Professor Kopano Ratele.
As a community centred psycho-therapist, he constantly explores methodologies that can be employed by black people to re-evaluate sources of their personal and collective trauma, crafting culturally oriented ways of collective healing that is not dependent on tools from western theory.
Meandering through our bonds means building bridges between pains and our desired joys, but these bridges are often built on landmines. New theoretical reflections are becoming necessary, where we abandon myths of the past, traditions we held dear but that kept us in the caves of antiquity from whence we we damaged.
Trauma is no longer a static reality that keeps fathers flocking to killer mining shafts stained with blood and sweat, where many are incapable of reeling against their collective catastrophes. It is a vantage point from which to envision a new reality of healing that does not require tools from our oppressors tools, a disavowal of curses hurled against us some supposed inferior being.
This time we have people who are approaching therapy from a multidisciplinary perspective, exposing earthbound histories and spiritual resonates with an entire continent of the wretched of this earth.
And despite all transhistorical cruelties of the imperialists, anxieties of those wanting free of mental shackles and a spiritual renewal, screams beyond schizophrenia and depression and violent tendencies that demonise black communities.
Perchance there is new lens to view the damaged souls we hold with us as a content living with perpetual ravages of wars. Maybe that grammar of the past haunting the present can be shattered as a myth that has kept the entire globe in psychological warfares with itself.
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Black Trauma And Shortcomings Of Psychology
Inter-generational trauma is a phrase that often describes the transmission of a memory of a traumatic events and the instinctual responses for personal preservation that one individual transmit throughout the rest of those to be born with their genetic code.
That is my layman understanding of the idea, but what I can attest to is the validity of such traumas and their continued impact on black communities throughout the world.
Colonial trauma, characterised by oppression and inferiority complexes that evolved from the absorption of derogatory stigmas still plays out in contemporary social dynamics where people of colour are still deemed as inferior mental, cognitively and even creatively.
One thing I can also not deny if the fact that whatever effects of contemporary psychological trauma experienced by black pope in their communities is adding onto a heap unresolved and abnormal psychologies, many of which are associated with witchcraft.
This supposed abnormality in the psyche of Africa Mind is a rather mystical phenomenon that is both spiritually valued and yet needs to be elucidated in terms of contemporary understanding of phenomena, psychic or otherwise.
To understand the origins of some unbeknown fear consuming a person who is assailed by auditory hallucinations means being able to dispel the idea of sorcery inducing said psychosis in the person concerned, as well as those interacting with the “abnormality” in this familiar person.
This can turn into uncomfortable feats of depressing family duels where others misunderstand situations, allowing for reactions to accumulate further traumatic occurrences through squabbles, slurs and curses hurled during moments of psychic breakdowns.
Families have been torn by such often misunderstood phenomena among black communities, and to understand the abnormal psychology that drives my people, I had draw from my own person experience of dealing with a mentally disabled kin.
There is an incident in my early adulthood when I encountered someone who suffered what we later discovered was termed “auditory hallucinations” by psychologists and psychiatrists, after a protracted struggle that saw families consulting Sangomas, Prophets and other diviners in an attempt to “heal” or at least understand the condition manifested by our kin.
Although the phenomenon began gradually, there was incredible concentration and a meditative attentiveness that suddenly grew into an obsession, and claims of “hearing insulting remarks from people” and sudden burst of laughter as though the patient were eavesdropping on people’s thoughts.
There came a point where “the patient” convinced their minds that they were exhibiting telepathic powers, but absurdly the remarks “heard” were nothing close tho the thoughts in the accused minds.
A compulsion to act out violent and injurious commands later evolved with the intensity of the auditory hallucinations, and this eventually rendered everyone mute to avoid being “mis-heard”.
Yet, this did not deter the patient from repeated attempts of self-harm, suicidal tendencies and a variety of anti-social behaviour.
And when finally the intervention of a western psychologist diagnosed her condition as An Acute Auditory Hallucinations caused by certain abnormal neural activity in the frontal lobe of the patient’s brain.
The explanation confounded more than made sense of the situation, because even when mystics were discerning that the patient “has calling to become diviner”, the conundrum became why the wrong messages received during these telepathic seances between minds.
In short, the experience had its effects on myself as one who directly had to sift through options, and perchance in the process of attempting to understand another’s psychic dysfunction, I could have developed my own.
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And considering that most of western psycho-analytical theories seem solely constructed from observations of people of western origin, I would like to posit an argument that western psycho-analysis remains baffled by the complex psychological and mental conditions that assail most people of colour.
Psychology in general, lacks a vocabulary to analyse black trauma, and thus requires a new pair of eyes to delve in to what WEB Du Bois called the ‘Souls Of Black Folk” or what Franz Fanon termed “The Mind Of The Oppressed”.
There are a billion souls residing in each individual, that is belief that is held by many spiritualists who also subscribe to notions of memory being stored in genes.
As a filmmaker, I am immensely drawn to such ideas of multi-dimensionalities of being, therefore this inquiry into schools psychology and their analyses of black psychologies is also an expedition into my very mind, to listen to those many gorgons residing in my soul, the unexorcised demons who I must embrace.
***
There surely are indecipherable codes to spheres of black psychological constructs, mental reception and transmission of everyday events in relation to what could, in Carl Jung’s terms be called, a “collective unconsciousness” of black people.
But how does an individual spontaneously arrive a divergence from ‘normal functioning of the mind “ in societal terms?
Is this spontaneity similar to the revolutionary spontaneity that psycho-analyst Franz Fanon alluded to when he analysed psychological effects of wars for liberation on revolutionaries who themselves came to revolutionary situations through spontaneous means?
Are there specific inter-generational traumas that linger and are later triggered in individuals, taking forms of spontaneous psychosis that eventually grow to become fully fledged mental divergences?
What processes and ongoing turbulent dynamics assist to create a constant state of mind that veers between euphoria and rage, chaos and seeming
These and other question are the driving impetus for this enquiry in the form a documentary with contemporary psychoanalysts who deal predominantly with problems within black communities, their diagnosis of populations who have otherwise been overlooked by western psycho-analysis.
It is not a methodological investigation that aims to determine what differentiates inter-continental perspectives on the effects of generational trauma, but understand what simply makes madnesses different from culture to culture, if there is such a clear difference.
I recall the vivid nightmares depicted by Ben Okri in The Famished road, where the Magic Child Azaro traverses spiritual realms and dimensions that overlap with his present incarnation among mortals.
That other worldliness of the depictions through the authors literary genius invokes “memories” of actual beings, some similar to those experienced by people hallucinating , those living on the threshold between two conditions.
Concepts of persons being born to linger for a short while among the living, the idea of post-mortal journeys that have begun even before one in born to die… these concepts speak to the black psychological experiences that many live and interact with on a constant basis.
I have encountered children prone to scratching themselves incessantly because they are convinced warts are infesting their pores and lice are crawling all overs their skin, and others who compulsively drag some invisible web from their eyes.
These behavioural abnormalities are often attributed to witchcraft among black communities, for instance the invisible webs that string about one’s lashes being construed as obstacles by witches to obscure ones inner vision and render them incapable of “planning for their futures”.
Religion and other lingering effects of missionary activities within our societies has profound effects on our collective psyche hence it was essential to follow Professor Ratele to find and weave a counter-narratives to prevalent representations of black trauma and collective healing.
This ongoing investigation of suppressed memories, psychic remnants of traumas and the organic evolution of these components into future generations, poses questions about tendencies that seem inherited, especially around black kin.
Through an analysis of actual patients, persons deemed mad or otherwise purporting to be diviners and sorcerers, this exhaustive survey of cases that I have heard and experienced will potentially assist me to reconstruct the mosaic of broken inner worlds.
Contemplating the fate of individuals who are in close relation to those affected by mental breakdowns, and also finding ways of detecting triggers and propensities for psychological breakdown among black people of varying ages groups.
***
Images And Text By: Paul Khahliso Matela Zisiwe
https://herri.org.za/10/
Be Kind to yourself and go sit somewhere with Clarence Hamilton's "Good Morning, Fish.
You'll smell the aromas of tripe curry and pap and remember the Aunty who pulled up her nose to the #kasi food, you'll recognize the pretty girl whose mother forced her to Wella straight her hair to escape from her roots, the O'ms who got paid every fortnight and nursed a bottle of whiskey way into Sunday morning, the Aunty who tried to manage and manipulate her own violent beatings, because neither community and state recognized that she needed help, the melting pot of race, class and religion.
The school authorities (church?) who easily assisted the Apartheid system in celebrating and upholding the divisions - the ideal Republiek which held our people into a passive submission, always reminding them that they were a step higher and better than blacks. You'd understand the #impipi mindset a little reverently?
Here too, you'll find the unity of these small communities at times when someone breaks or aches. The neighboring lending/borrowing to make a pot of food at sunset and the #glammaboys - stoepsitters, playing dice and cat calling the girls who took their daily walks to the shops.
Clarence Hamilton writes about two boys' escapades and experiences growing up in Noordgesig - the story tells the Joster/Pieraks colored experience, growing up during 60's and 70's. Their stories reflect the search for self identity in the time of SA Apartheid, the freedom to choose one's understanding of humanity.
I can almost hear a laughing O'm Chris Van Wyk say “Ah, comrade, you used some nice English words there.”
It's a MNCA (grand-lekke-delish) book kawus (bra's) and I sincerely hope it lands in the list of prescribed books for high school learners.
Xarra Books Xarra Books - Books, Music & Art
Reviewed by: Kim Dearham
On Filming Heritage
The Western concept of the museum, which was exported to the former colonies, has always been horrendously inverted and homogenised to depict singular narratives of dominant cultural players, neglecting to expose a series of historically silenced narratives of the colonised cultures and peoples.
Although the normative definitions of heritage (which often implies artefacts preserved through ages in places such as museums) tend to speak of tangible property, one is left to wonder how can a people whose land and property was illegally annexed construct a compendium of properties (in absentia) that form their heritage?
I mean properties that speak to the creativity of the community, their methods of securing food and their cultural customs and rituals, which were buried with debris of wars between settlers - the same settlers for whom churches and other monuments were built by black blood and sweat.
Today, we are inundated with monuments and other carcasses of brick and mortar erected to testify that religion and war are sources of colonial pride, while our villages have been trampled underground and cities built over bones in unmarked cemeteries allocated natives who died defending their heritage.
Without a doubt, displacement and constant bridging border frontiers meant that a lot of our collective heritage could not be retained for future generations, as properties of inheritance for posterity. This lack is therefore a form of disinheritance, a tale of stolen and usurped heritage which needs to be excavated from the ruins left behind.
And the lack of de-colonial narratives in museums and absence of black experiences and the biased representations between colonisers and colonised, have psychological implications on communities and for contemporary recollections of history, which cannot be ignored.
Yet many such spaces continue to be riddled with erasure and omissions of vast collections depicting the lives and strifes of people of colour, where even Native leaders who were prominent in their time have faded into relative obscurity.
These varied forms of erasure which expand into the history of modern amnesia about historical events and their contemporary impacts are proving detrimental to heritage preservation, more so when many people don’t feel the vitality and complexity of their identities represented in these places of heritage preservation.
Sadly, heritage sites and museums now face a challenge of systematic art theft, which is a phenomenon that has been known since antiquity mainly because of ignorance about the ideological rooting of each monument or museum and the rage towards the absence of acknowledgement of silenced communities in these contemporary heritage preservation enclaves and sites.
It is however, another strategy that not only involves the transfer of valuable articles, but is also used as a way to legitimise cultural dominance - is the theft perpetuated by self-appointed “saviours of culture and heritage” who often leave unanswerable questions and as a result, the artefacts are torn from their context and turned into trophies - the visible confirmation of subjugation.
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Over several years of researching various museums, I find it unnerving that photographs, ephemera, and important source materials depicting various people of colour at various stages of the development of this country are scarce, and this scarcity seems to have been a concerted effort on the part of the archivists, who deliberately omitted all record of black lives in various regions of colonial settlements.
My enquiry is therefore about appearances and disappearances, what is given as proofs of past events, what is preserved and protected as heritage of a select minority, and also the unseen, forgotten and vandalised archives of those “uncultured communities”.
Renowned museums in towns and cities built by black servants and slaves, have no recorded histories of these involuntarily workforces preserved for posterity, and this indeed was a social project of denial which eventually made erasure a certainty for many communities.
Today, South Africa is famous for its assortment of architectural marvels that stand in many settler towns, established around churches which were clearly built by slave labour who were either subjects to a corrupt settler and chief or prisoners of various wars.
South Africa has rich collections of historical archives, artefacts and memorabilia, and some of these hold some extensive family ties and speak to the how historical events shaped personalities who would eventually be venerated by future generations.
During the dramatic historical processes of the first half of the 20th century, ideas of identity forged a draconian system of white supremacist nationalism among the Afrikaner nation and this unduly influenced how historical events affected people of colour.
Black experiences of the settlers’ wars such as the Anglo-Boer War were scarcely documented, save for the later part of the 1930 and 40’s when an emergence of black photographers meant that many communities were documenting themselves for posterity.
But these records could not be accepted into established heritage preservation institutions governed by racists with segregationist policies and their embedded belief that they are the sole chosen inheritors of this land’s heritage, its history and natural resources.
It is thus unsurprising how the country is inundated with Museums that conformed to the ideological dictates of apartheid ideologies, falsifying even the those truths essential for the perception and conveyance of local nature, architecture, and daily life.
Instead these museums and heritage sites became spaces that did not convey the depth of cultural and historical heritage of the diverse people of the land, and thus unable to demonstrate the intercultural dialogue that was happening throughout the social interactions between settlers and the native inhabitants of the land usurped.
Historians and archaeologists have undeniably amassed thousands of archaeological finds and items of decorative and applied art from past inhabitants of the regions now annexed by settlers who have entrenched their heritage through churches, farms and gravesites.
The meaning and import of individual heritage sites or museums does not, however, lie solely on particular people or items of importance collected by a site or museum, for all these museums have their own particular ways of conserving and making available the range of material they possess.
Although many museums now claim to NOT have been built by people of colour, the same museums nevertheless, still need to be viewed as living, fossilised libraries of truths that stand to be interpreted by varied perspectives informed by their own biases and prejudices, as well as their desire for redress of erasures.
My constant visits to various archives have become essential elements for marking time in a myriad of photographs, and have assisted me to realise how places change while its people develop and retain a sense of communal identity. In those images, the ways people are dressed and their hairstyles tell me about the lifestyle and culture that prevailed at a particular time.
Carrying out the activities described above takes courage and resolve, and dedication that is undifferentiated to self-discovery, a way of trying to piece together identity from broken museums that have neither figments of my past nor any truth regarding details of the said past.
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Museums and heritage sites enable us to engage with events we may have been unaware of or indifferent to, by living vicariously through them and altering the way we perceive them and our attitudes - museums should be spaces for interlacing stories from diverse cultures to underscore the themes of identity, survival, and collective strength.
Museums should facilitate crucial dialogues with art from the past in contemporary settings, offering a unique point of departure for unpacking expanded notions of culture as transient, therefore requiring constant revisioning.
Heritage preservation therefore entails approaching the many ecologies of life, gathering hundreds of ordinary photographs, family snapshots that capture the everyday experience of people, moving through different creative realms—from the family album, as a private space outlining the past, to the landscapes inhabited by Black bodies.
These are memory-spaces that must remain untranslated and liberated from speculative manipulation, must be protected from fabrications and avoid castaways of history, histories of inclusion and exclusion.
Exploring how objects bond to us and communicate with us memories, and how their absences and omission can impact our collective sense of identity, it is imperative that those items that have been stripped of their original function and have become “dead” objects in their reduction to artistic value be reassembled and preserved.
The dignity of each item that has been robbed can only be restored if the community to which it belonged is included in the rediscovery of its intended meaning; and this way each artefact and other objects become a tribute to collective intelligence of a people.
