Exploring Advocacy and Sustainability with Tjawangwa Dema through Poetry

Q: Talk us through the process of developing this body of works, considering that it forms part of the larger “an/other pastoral” project with Lily Green. A: Lily is director of No Bindings and in 2019 we decided to collaborate on a poetry, community, audio and interview-based project that would ultimately culminate in a book of poems written by me with illustrations by Tebogo Cranwell. Some of this process is documented in a BBC Radio 6 episode, a Noods Radio episode as well as in an e-archive that forms part of the book. We are of course grateful to Arts Council England, New Creatives, Grapevine and many others for their generosity in making this work possible. [ihc-hide-content ihc_mb_type="show" ihc_mb_who="1,2,3,4" ihc_mb_template="1" ] Q: The collection serves as your third publication. What would you say you’ve learned between having Mandible and The Careless Seamstress move within the world and getting another book out? A: With previous books, I wasn’t really involved with the backroom publishing admin. I did my job as a writer, providing the text as a manuscript. But beyond revisions and maybe commenting on the cover, I wasn’t really involved in the admin. With an/other pastoral I was very hands-on from the very beginning. I wanted to learn how publishing and distribution works, what publishers need from writers and so on, so I had input in everything from languaging grants and marketing materials to editorial processes and art direction, through to mapping contracts and distribution. It was a wonderfully productive apprenticeship of sorts, but I wouldn’t want to spend 90 percent of my time overseeing those kinds of logistics instead of writing. Q: Your writing is characterised by compact phrasing. In some cases, this serves as both synecdoche and a challenge to the reader against being lured to what lies in the worlds you offer only a glimpse into. What would you say are some of the challenges in executing this and what excites you about reaching a point where the pen no longer revisits a poem? A: Though poetry is largely an economical form, I love language both when it is efficient and when it sprawls. What is important to me is that either effect be compellingly justified, in poetic terms, through its beauty or affect or memorability and so forth. I look for this language not just in poems but in sermons, proverbs, televised dialogue, music, fiction, or conversations at a braai; language that answers the question ‘Why as a reader am I standing in this place, at this time, facing this direction? What is it that the author or text needs me to witness or be present for?’ I’m never worried about perfecting poems, only getting them to a place where I can intentionally abandon them. Of course, I have a responsibility to craft to abandon the poem only at the point at which I think it is at its most readable, as readable as I am able to make it. I’m not talking about evading revision but about never truly being able to stop editing, to stop asking the poem better questions. And so, I rely on judgement, on intuition and on practice to determine when to stop. Even now there are lines, sometimes individual words or line breaks, that I want to change in my published poems. As to the rest of it, poetry is invested in convention and economy. I say this knowing that The Mahabharata is 15 or so times longer than the Bible – still, economy at the line and word level is important to me. If you can find shorthands; devices, techniques, knowledges from languages other than English that allow you to selectively say more with less language this is exciting for me. Q: You approach nature with so many different treatments within the collection. Was there an element that you found yourself more easily drawn to or least connected to in your explorations? A: Race. I was always thinking about Blackness, about what it means in different geographies to move in the world as people of colour. It’s not something I think about a lot when I’m in Botswana but out in the world it’s difficult to think of anything not entangled with race. You know those campaigns or advertisements encouraging people to take more walks or make use of the ‘great outdoors’? Well, when I would see those I wondered who could afford – economically and emotionally – to take up that offer. But this inevitably led to questions about power and borders, about capitalism and language and so we loop back to the manyness of things. Q: Would you care to talk about how your explorations of writing race and Blackness have grown or changed in this collection? For example, a poem like “Meditations on Fugitivity” is a geopolitical commentary that extends over various locales where colonial footprints may be traced, yet doesn’t seem to be about any place in particular. A: When I look back, I think a fair amount of poetry I was exposed to was quite geo-specific, with titles including the word ‘Africa’ or landscapes conjuring snow, and so on. There’s nothing unusual in that. Place preoccupies many poets but I’ve spent a fair amount of my adult life reading about, visiting and living in various countries and I’m not surprised that something of that diasporic subject and movement is reflected in my work. Travelling while Black, as others have said, can be a complicated endeavour, and for me any trouble I encounter brings me back to language, be it finding an instruction manual to decipher or de-escalating an argument or writing a poem. Q: Along with commentaries on race, the ways you treat femmeness, womanhood, matriarchy mark your work in numerous ways. What, if anything, do you think Another Pastoral gave you space to say about these thematic areas? A: I made the space. That, more than the specific subjects, was what I was after. It’s not always easy or convenient to prioritise or speak on the things that are important to you but I try. But to be clear I’m not dismissing the ‘what’ of it all. I’m not a mother, so of course motherhood fascinates me and it certainly finds its way into every collection I write. I grew up very much the ‘tomboy’ and my version of that included being practised at quietly taking up space and doing things my way. So that is something I think of as inherently available to women. Q: The book features illustrations by Tebogo Cranwell, each of them referring to images and themes teased in the writing. How was it adding this extra element to the book? A: The way we, No Bindings and myself, approached this was that we asked Tebogo to enter into a conversation with a number of poems at the draft stage. To read them and then take it from there. Tebogo was chosen from a highly competitive shortlist of illustrators that we had our eye on and we trusted her vision based on her amazing body of work and specifically the pitch she submitted to us. Q: I particularly enjoy your ability to humanise your characters’ voices so much that they become portals into the worlds they inhabit. What was the inspiration behind “The Netmenders”? A: Thank you. I appreciate that. It’s often difficult for me to answer this seemingly straightforward question. I’m in the business of remembering and extrapolating, of memory and imagination and it’s not necessary to remember which is which in the poem. I use my phone and little notebooks to take ‘field notes’ whenever I’m out and something catches my eye or ear but that is just stimuli, impetus from which I pull the story. I keep everything the poem needs with it and edit out the rest and I’m hesitant to put it back in through ‘explanation’. I can only hope the poem moves the reader even if parts of it feel somewhat mysterious. Q: What are you hoping an/other pastoral will do for you as it continues to move through the world? What life do you hope for for it? A: an/other pastoral has just been longlisted for the UK Poetry Book Awards and is an African Studies Association’s Aidoo-Snyder Book Award finalist, and so it has already begun to move in some of the ways I hoped for it. What has surprised me is the number of parents saying they are currently reading it with their young, I absolutely didn’t expect that. I welcome it. I just don’t know what to do with that movement! Q: As much as I suspect that your answer may be that you don’t have one, which of the poems in the collection sits closest to your heart and why? A: Ah! Well, yes. The answer oscillates between ‘I don’t have one’ to a different one every once in a while. I tend to think at the line level, you know like ‘I think this is a strong line or beautiful phrasing’ that kind of thing. And on those grounds I refuse to incriminate myself. Q: Are you reading any other poets or writers at the moment? Who, and what are you getting from them? A: Always. I’m in the US now and I find I’m reading more poets from here as a way of learning about the country sure, but mainly about what people are thinking about; what questions they are asking through their art. For example, I’ve been spending time with poet-scholars from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and, naturally, I’ve been looking up or returning to their work. I use social media as a kind of poetry aggregator and follow a couple of people who are good about posting and starting threads highlighting various poems daily. Once a day, The Slowdown podcast sends a poem directly to my email and so on. Katherine McKittrick’s Dear Science is back on my desk as I think about future projects. Q: What would be your parting statement if I’ve missed any pertinent questions? A: I’m speaking now as a Motswana: read to and with (your) children. Infact, have the ones who can read, read to you. Whatever time you can spare to give them your full attention, even 10 minutes of reading together every day or every week day will do more for that child than you can imagine. [/ihc-hide-content]

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Exploring Advocacy and Sustainability with Tjawangwa Dema through Poetry

When it comes to recognisable names in Botswana’s literary scene, Tjawangwa Dema is one of note. KATLEGO KOLANYANE-KESUPILE got a chance to engage her on the an/other pastoral collection released in 2022

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Exploring Advocacy and Sustainability with Tjawangwa Dema through Poetry

When it comes to recognisable names in Botswana’s literary scene, Tjawangwa Dema is one of note. KATLEGO KOLANYANE-KESUPILE got a chance to engage her on the an/other pastoral collection released in 2022

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