In this poetic commentary on Dathini Mzayiya’s video portrait of Miriam Makeba, Lindokuhle Nkosi inscribes moments of death, spiritual calling, sorrow and exile born by Makeba, during her singular and passionate life
”. Linyekula, in his corporeal poetry searches for, in his own words, “other ways of breathing”.
Makeba’s future, the one she dared herself to envision, saw her coming home. Saw her people free. Her idea of personal freedom was inextricably linked to the liberation, of not just the Black people of South Africa, but Black people the world over. Into her songs she imbued not just a future, but a challenge to the future to be more.
When Miriam’s policeman husband tries to shatter his will and dominance into her face, it is Christina who tells her to move to Johannesburg. The political is deeply personal. Today, like yesterday, I fight for my life. I take my medicine in the form of words and herbs. There is uncle. Stabbed footsteps from his house, the unintelligible story writ in blood from the gatepost to the street. A 30cm incision from below his third rib bone pouring down. The men in my family have strange ways of dying and the setting rarely ever changes. Always almost home, but never quite. Always a shebeen a stumble away. In the street, alone, no one to catch the final wheezing, to give that breath a direction, a way home.
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