Gabeba Baderoon is a South African poet and scholar.
Gabeba is the author of The Dream in the Next Body (2005), A Hundred Silences (2006) and The History of Intimacy (2018, 2021), and the monograph, Regarding Muslims: from Slavery to Post-Apartheid, and co-edited the essay collection, Surfacing: on Being Black and Feminist in South Africa.
She teaches Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, African Studies, and Comparative Literature and co-directs the African Feminist Initiative at Penn State.
My Tongue Softens on The Other Name
In my mother’s backyard washing snaps above chillies and wild rosemary. Kapokbos, cottonwool bush, my tongue softens on the rosemary’s other name. Brinjal, red peppers and paw-paw grow in the narrow channel between the kitchen and the wall that divides our house from the Severos. At the edge of the grass by the bedrooms, a witolyf reaches ecstatically for the power lines.
In a corner in the lee of the house, nothing grows. Sound falls here. Early in the day shadows wash over old tiles stacked against the cement wall. In the cold and silence my brother is making a garden.
He clears gravel from the soil and lays it against the back wall. Bright spokes of pincushion proteas puncture a rockery. For hours he scrapes into a large stone a hollow to catch water from a tap that has dripped all my life. Around it, botterblom slowly reddens the grey sand. A fence made of reed filters the wind between the wall and the house. Ice-daisies dip their tufted heads toward its shadows.
At night, on an upturned paint tin, he sits in the presence of growing things. Light wells over the rim of the stone basin and collects itself into the moon. Everything is finding its place.
War Triptych: Silence, Glory, Love
I. Accounting
The mother asked to stay.
She looked at her silent child.
I was waiting for you.
The quiet of the girls face was a different quiet
Her hands lay untouched by death.
The washer of bodies cut
away her long black dress.
Blue prayer beads fell
to the floor in a slow accounting.
The washer of bodies began to sing
a prayer to mothers and daughters.
The mother said,
who will wait for me.
(written after a newspaper article on the aftermath of the bombings on
a holy day in Najaf, Iraq)
II. Father Receives News His Son Died in the Intifada
When he heard the news, Mr Karim became silent.
He did not look at the cameras,
nor at the people who brought their grief.
He felt a hand slip from his hand,
a small unclasping,
and for that he refused the solace of glory.
III. Always For The First Time
We tell our stories of war like stories
of love, innocent as eggs.
Gabeba Baderoon is a South African poet and scholar.