are at the same time truly outstanding in their craft. This explosion is hard to pin down because it is not so much a school, nor can we really chalk it up to the arrival of a democracy that has freed up the imagination. Let’s face it, South African reality is very often much stranger than fiction, as many writers in the seventies and eighties often commented. Some cynics argue that novels and theatre ticket sales are so low because the newspapers and news bulletins have so many bizarre stories that ordinary people’s appetites are satiated. I am not convinced.
There are some really exciting ways of thinking about ourselves as individuals and as a society that are being suggested in the works of several artists working today. In certain disciplines in the academy, we study various arts and take both the structure and content of certain arts seriously. But we seldom talk to each other across the boundaries of these creative arts: music, literature, theatre, film, fine art, photography, digital arts, and so forth. Those of us who move between different artistic spaces also notice their insularity all the time. I am not just speaking of the academy. It often strikes me at an exhibition that the artists are grappling with issues that some writers in the same city are also exploring, but often the two groups have never met and have no familiarity with each other’s work. It would be so electrifying to speak across these boundaries sometimes. This inspiring conversation across boundaries does occasionally happen. Sociologist Shireen Ally’s book launch was an excellent exploration of this. At the 2010 Johannesburg launch of From Servants to Workers: South African domestic workers and the democratic state, she invited novelist Zukiswa Wanner and visual artist Mary Sibande as her co-panellists. Ms Wanner’s debut novel The Madams and Ms Sibande’s Sophie from Long Live the Dead Queen series revisit the ever-present, hyper-visible domestic worker figure and presence in urban South Africa. More recently, in her performance on the place of love in world altering politics staged at the Windybrow Theatre in November 2012, Mmatshilo Motsei brought a painter and a dancer on stage with her. There is also the notable collaboration between poet Kgafela oa Magogodi and filmmaker Jyoti Mistry on I Mike what I Like (2006). It does not happen often enough. At the same time, such collaborations are not easy for artists or audiences due to our limited, medium-specific literacies. I battled with aspects of poet Lebogang Mashile’s 2008 collaboration with Moving into Dance Mophatong as much as I did with Motsei’s show because I struggle to make sense of professional dance. Yet, difficulty is an opportunity to try out different ways of making sense.
What might it mean to have a conversation about an artist in the same ways that we have conversations about politicians, activists or celebrity gangsters, in the same public domain that their art circulates? This book is my engagement with this question, as a writer in conversation with the ideas in another artist’s work.
Simphiwe Dana is the artist I wanted to have this conversation on paper with the most. When Melinda Ferguson and I first met to discuss writing this book, she cautiously offered me the opportunity to write my dream book. She offered it cautiously, I imagine, as both a writer and a publisher. Writers do not really like being told what to do; writer-Melinda was sensitive to this. In her new publisher’s hat, she could not switch off her internal writer voice even though she had a vision for the range of titles she wanted for an imprint that bore her name. I was flattered that she wanted me to write one of the first few books in her exciting new imprint, MFBooks Joburg. That excitement has not died down as I write this.
When she first burst onto the scene in 2004, with her debut album Zandisile, Simphiwe Dana offered various aesthetic challenges to her audiences. That album appealed to listeners who may not ordinarily dance together. Simphiwe’s music charmed jazz audiences who recognised a familiar jazz aesthetic in her sound. Yet the wit and playfulness in her debut album also delighted kwaito fans and admirers of what was increasingly being labelled Afropop. Her artistry grasped at the serious without compromising on pleasure. She mesmerised South Africans through the airwaves that year, alongside various other artists who were musically hard to pin down, like Thandiswa Mazwai’s debut solo offering Zabalaza and MXO, whose 2004 album Piece of Mind was classified Afropop although its acoustic, rock-meets-hip-hop stretched that label. It was 2004, the year that marked a decade of South Africa’s democracy, and although the country was not utopia, the hope for what the country could still become was palpable. Kwaito and, more recently, the Afropop of groups like Mafikizolo and Malaika had been the sound of the times. While the star power of these groups would remain deep-rooted well into the second decade of democracy, there was also a hunger for something more. Although Simphiwe Dana makes sense when located in the musical traditions populated by Miriam Makeba, Busi Mhlongo, Ringo Madlingozi, her peers MXO and other Afropop/Afrosoul artists, her voice and politics are also very distinct.
The book is called A Renegade Called Simphiwe because Simphiwe widens many people’s senses of what is appropriate and imaginable. She is a rebel even within defiant spaces. Simphiwe Dana is simply not interested in adhering to conventional ideas about where to live, who to love or how to write. One minute South Africa worships at her throne. The next minute, we are trying to rein her in. This says something about her, as someone whose investment in trying out what interests her, and living her truth trumps risking societal censure. It also says something about South Africa’s sensibilities. As a renegade, Simphiwe does not play safe.
This book is a writer’s portrait in words, a writer thinking out loud. I have had moments of utter joy writing it. And there have been times when I just did not want to write it anymore. In between were weeks where I could not write a word and would not let myself. Life has also happened in the space between writing as well as through those spaces. I have written the bulk of this book whilst going through a major life transformation and it has tested precisely that which I seek to transform. Midway through writing this book, I was finally rewarded with the strength to confront a personal demon of many years that I had been working hard to get the emotional strength to face. The rewards of that second process have given me peace of mind for the first time since I was a child. Perhaps the decision to write a book that I simply wanted to write, which does not really translate clearly into any of the writing personalities or ambits I am comfortable occupying, had something to do with this.
Finally, I try to write what I would like to read. This is hardly original, but I have found that, as a reader, I often find value in books other writers felt compelled to write.
CHAPTER 1
No paradox:
A renegade’s community
How can you not believe in your own brilliance, Black girl, at a time when the face of genius is Lebogang Mashile, Thandiswa Mazwai, Zanele Muholi, Gabeba Baderoon, Zukiswa Wanner, Xoliswa Sithole and Simphiwe Dana?
For a few years, I would ask this rhetorical question from my literature and media students at the university where I profess as part of teaching critical thinking about power through creative forms. It is a question that many of the students have commented on subsequent to this. When I asked this question, I was not saying this is the exclusive face of brilliance. I was drawing attention to the importance of thinking against the grain, encouraging an intellectual and political stance that functions differently from the dominant messages that Black girls and women are given about themselves, about ourselves, in contemporary South Africa and beyond. I was pointing out that, as brutal as South Africa, and South African public discourse, often is to young Black women, there was a certain type of woman artist who was achieving the previously unimaginable. As real as the policing of women’s bodies is in South Africa, and the world, it is possible for women to think of themselves – of ourselves – differently. It is important that a critique of power not end with reaction, but that it goes further to imagine something new, more exciting, more pleasurable. Picture what we can create if we dare give ourselves permission to imagine freely.
It is important to create alternatives just like it is necessary to speak truth to power. These need not even be separate processes,
