Uitgeskryf: die klimeid se lyf

(‘written out: the girl’s body’)

The politics of being for womxn in restricted spaces

Historically, the word ‘meid’ was used to oppress enslaved black and indigenous women. The word Klimeid means little daughter in Namaqualand dialect. Although the term ‘meid’ is still used to disparage black women, the Nama people use the saying - Klimeid se Lyf to sing praise and honor a woman's good work. Women can own their journeys no matter what was done to them because they feel it in their bodies. Klimeid se lyf serves as an affirmation of accomplishments made against all odds. Despite what the world says, she did whatever was necessary and excelled at it on her own terms.

Thus, in this context, even though the black female body was written out, we still acknowledge her by saying - Yes, Uitgeskryf - but praise the Klimeid se lyf.

The exhibition is largely photographic with elements of film and poetry. The work evolved out of the PhD work of Cheri Hugo and Janine Lange, and includes artists Verity FitzGerald and Esther Engelbrecht. The juxtaposing of the images with multimodal works in the themes of ocean and desert/post/mining spaces, speak to one another of the politics of exclusion and insertion of womxn in spaces that are in some way both historically and presently troubling spaces. They speak also of the struggles that accompany the challenge of insertion and attempted inclusion, the shifting of positionality depending on place and space.

The symbolism of the deserts and oceans carries significant symbolism for the womxn in this project. It talks of the links to the land and ocean that, over time, have become areas of scarcity, restriction and death.

The desert, for indigenous ancestors, were places for hunting, foraging and medicine. These indigenous knowledge systems were eroded over time by colonial powers restricting access to the land by the reclassification of culturally significant sites as protected areas. This has pushed indigenous people further away from the land which they knew and relied on for their livelihoods; not financially but as a source of life and custom. With the discovery of valuable minerals in these areas, indigenous people were further forced off the land and dispossessed of their cultural heritage through ethnocide by the redefining of brown bodies into colonial and apartheid classifications. This, along with blood-quantum logics, eventually did away altogether with the idea of indigeneity, leaving, at present, large portions of the population doubting their indigeneity and their ‘place’ in South African society. Very few people of indigenous origin have been acknowledged as being of the land and even fewer have been granted access to ancestral lands once again. In mining, specifically in the copper mining belt, womxn have been rejected and not been given space nor had their stories acknowledged.

For our indigenous ancestors, oceans were places of sustenance through stone-walled fish trapping. For enslaved people brought here from parts of West Africa through blackmarket trade and from South East Asia, oceans meant death. There are vast tracts of unknown murky waters into which our dead were thrown after starvation in the hulls of slave ships. Many people with enslaved descendents have, to this day, a fear of the ocean as transgenerational stories of death at sea were carried on for hundreds of years. The ocean, for many people of colour, holds a dread; the ghosts of those captured, mamed, and never spoken of again, but whose suffering and anguish at loss of lives never fully lived, echo from the depths.

During the years of colonial and apartheid rule, ocean spaces became places of exclusion, like so many other natural resources, that saw people of colour excluded and unable to access, and even now, facing constant micro aggressions in their attempts to gain access to what was once a place of life and hope for future generations.

Womxn have, throughout history borne the brunt of race and gender discrimination and exclusion through patriarchal systems. It is for these reasons that we have taken our bodies into these spaces, to claim back for ourselves and to represent for the many who have been othered and excluded from these spaces, that we stand for them, that we are them. In small ways, just being, and being in spaces of exclusion and restriction, we enact rebellion with our bodies and claim our inclusion and as well as theirs.

The theoretical underpinning of feminist theory and methodology has been a guide and a framing for this work. We believe that we add to the wider discussion around women and their autoethnographies, valuablity and navigation of the figure or embodiment of our intersectionality.

The artists

Cheri’s and Verity’s contribution is focused on Cheri’s PhD work around the survival strategies that womxn of colour employ in the face of patriarchal academic spaces, focusing on the interaction with the ocean as a metaphor for being in academic spaces. Verity FitzGerald, a photographer who works in ocean spaces, worked alongside Cheri to bring the work to fruition. Together the concept and technical execution process is the result of this exhibition.

Cheri, an illustrator and academic, has chosen the ocean as her ‘landscape/seascape’ in which she is inserting herself, a space she doesn’t feel is inherently her own as a BIPOC womxn, and one in which she feels like an imposer on someone else’s territory in a way. She is currently working on a project around swimming methodology and how it relates to academic work/processing.

Verity’s own work as a photographer addresses the history of and inequalities within water spaces. She is an insider in this world and she experiences it differently to how Cheri sees it and experiences it. She is at home there and interacts with people in that space on an equal footing, people who are Cheri’s superiors in the workplace and university. For her personally, even though she can see that there have been inequalities around the ocean, has not experienced that herself.

Janine’s and Esther’s contribution, focuses on some of the elements emerging from Janine’s research, which was based on her fieldwork in the Northern Cape which focused on the intersectional intergenerational impacts of mining on the surrounding communities. Esther Engelbrecht, a Northern Cape poet, brings to life some of the themes through poetry, from an insider’s perspective.

Janine, an embodied narrative practitioner and student, has been pursuing fieldwork in the Northern Cape, doing ethnographic research and co-constructing visual histories in the post/mining towns of Okiep, Nababeep and Concordia. Her aspiration throughout the work has been to co-construct meaning, and as such she has worked in partnership with people in the local community to represent themselves and the complexities of their stories in ways she, as an outsider, could never do quite in the same way.

Esther is an insider in Nababeep, the town where the headquarters of the Okiep Copper Mining Company resided. She is an author of prose and poetry and works in the field of cultural and rural development amongst womxn in the region. Her poetry and prose is pointed, witty and profound. The way she experiences what has happened with mining is from a first hand perspective, having been personally affected by living in the region and having personal dealings with the mines through family who have been employed in the sector.