Stories are remembered, revealed, feared, and not always recounted in a way that is desirable, and in them there are lingering echoes of past conflicts and trauma.
And just as territorial and post-colonial spaces are perceptible and tangible while revealing all historical complexity in order to address historical silences, they can also obscure portions of historical memory which continue to haunt many victims of colonial brutality.
This obscuration and concealment ultimately reshapes the conditions of visibility for these victims while fostering new modes of appearing and surviving from the self-same obscurity and loss of identity.
In South Africa, narratives that exposes how grand colonial fantasies of segregating people of colour along their usefulness in regards to colonial demands, there coexisted narratives of the fetishization of homelands among the colonised which seem to be overlooked in academia.
Investigating how these homelands, which symbolised blatant dispossession of land, became havens for black identity formation along tribal lines; is another aspect of the collective healing project that require scholarly attention; to uncover how the oppressed would accept such an unequal and exploitative social arrangement.
And as these narratives analysing various forms of sedimented colonial violence that deformed collective minds of black communities begin to come to the fore, due credit can be given to the efforts of dissident scholars such as Professor Kopano Ratele, among many.
In a time of monumental debates, inadequate ways of coping with the past and current manifestation of colonial traumas are further exacerbating senses of dislocation and social despondency in many who are concerned with finding tools for collective healing beyond western methodologies and analysis.
It therefore becomes essential that they find spaces for the examination and re-imagining of African cultural traumas in our autocratically ordered and increasingly post-factual world beyond the confines of academia and glass-walled lecture-halls made for voyeuristic observations.
Their work seems to repeatedly deal with questions of dislocation and the collective imagination of home and its interrupted relation to identity whilst suggesting its instability and plurality.
It is commendable that there are researchers, scholars, psychologists and writers who develop works that translate inner landscapes of traumatised people; observing, dissecting, reassembling their distraught identities and narratives of survival in adversity.
And although the notion of place as a locale informed by sedimented social and ecological histories is eroded by globalisation, their continued search and analysis of black minds, developed through a community-based approach, pushes a variety of boundaries, inserting subtle shifts and offering new readings destabilizing expectations and norms of western socio-psychological analysis.
Transforming past experiences into indelible social marks often neglects and turns away from accuracy, but rather moves towards convening, sensing, and misbehaving with histories, and stories enshrouding particular sites of memory.
Words are gestures, are images, are forms of witnessing in a social project shaped by collective experiences, and through their various incarnations, words can assist in reconstruction of shattered identities and healing.
Therefore the intention for this video poem stems from how private lives were impacted by historical catastrophes, dabbling with themes of self-reflection, offering vantages to rethink the current wretched souls of black folks while challenging hegemonic narratives of pain.
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This video poem interrogates various interpretation of psychology in the African context, from how African centred research and practice converge to form hybrid form of psycho-analysis.
It also questions how western psychology has been adapted and reassigned African metal illnesses, thus compounding the mounting questions about how a field of study fashioned by colonial minds liberated the particularities of the minds of the oppressed.
Rather than following a narrative structure, the video poem embodies a process with no clear beginning or end. It reflects the continuous interactions between the artist and scholars, capturing both moments of cacophony and moments of alignment.
The emphasis is on the dynamics of collaboration, with individual authorship dissolving into new collective audio-visual shapes, reflecting on the historical, cultural, and psychological impacts of colonialism, as well as the process of revisiting the trauma it caused.
The video poem is consequently an effort to investigate the far-reaching emotional implications of western cultural hegemony and colonial systems of power for non-western subjectivities, focusing particularly on collective trauma and notions of repair.
