Khahliso Matela Video Poem
Noluthando! Noluthando! He angrily calls after she who beheld love.
Yet, when a malevolent voice yells that name in such wry animosity and repudiation, how contradictory and deprecating it is for the beloved who is running away in terror?
In densely contrasted imagery, a face and bulging eyes a woman sleeks through glaring paleness of a void, as though encased in a dream-room made of powdery oval walls, through which she aught find an escape.
This face, and semblance of her frightened demeanour, embodies the continued tyranny against femininity as expressed by misogynistic social systems still playing a great part in our everyday lives.
This video poem is a meditation on a moment expressing pent up menace of rage, the menace of the male gaze and an interpretation of masculine antimony towards fragility, how maleness seen solely expressed by terrifying womanhood to express its virile stature.
