Blog
Oxygen | Uhuru Portia Phalafala
20 days ago
Each August, South Africans celebrate Women’s Month. But what difference do such celebrations make in a country where gender-based violence remains shockingly prevalent?
No-one has considered this question more deeply than Uhuru Portia Phalafala, poet and senior lecturer at the University of Stellenbosch. She recently published a scholarly biography of South Africa’s erstwhile poet laureate, Keorapetse Kgositsile, as well as her debut collection, Mine Mine Mine (University of Nebraska Press, 2024), a verse epic that excavates the experience of generations of South African mine workers (including her own grandfather) as well as of the rural women they left behind.
It begins on what feels like a triumphant note: “In 2018 a historic silicosis class action lawsuit against the mining industry in South Africa was settled in favour of the miners.”
But it is not that simple. The miners, we are constantly reminded, are dead. They and their families cannot be recompensed for what they lost.
There are powerful recordings (available on YouTube) of Phalafala reading from the collection, doing justice to the many voices in which it is written. These readings are not mere performances, but renderings of something she felt compelled to write down.
“The epic came about in an organic way. My grandfather, who passed away in 2017, directed and dictated its writing in 2019, so this is an ancestral co-creation. It’s a spirit book. It came into expression from deep within me, as intuitive knowing, as whispers, dreams, and other forms of messagings that compelled language and articulation in this time, in this modality and tone.
“It began as sonic, oral and aural. Work songs set its tempo and metre. The memory of mining continues to live in our bodies and bodies of land, so there is always potential to tap into that memory through the body, through the chimes, whistles, shakers, tonality, metre and speech act, which are those of the land too.”
Much of the collection is concerned with the mostly invisible work of the women who spent long years waiting for and mourning these men, unable to find an outlet for grief and sorrow that is passed on across generations: “under patriarchal oath and code of silence: / we do not speak of our heartbreak.”
Towards the end, we are granted a glimpse of women using their mothers’ names to forge new identities “out of stardust / and spectacular smithereens” of their former selves. Phalafala provides some hope for the journey towards that goal:
When asked how she responds to Women’s Month as a poet and academic, she warns that celebration is premature.
“It’s a giant leap to move overnight from putting women in the waiting rooms of history, to celebration. We are being killed with impunity. We have an epidemic on our hands. We have historical and contemporaneous wounds to attend to.”
Does she believe that poetry can help previously oppressed people to breathe more freely?
“Poetry cannot save lives, but it can give us life in the deathscapes in which we are forced to live. However, we cannot live by this provisional breath, this ‘combat breathing’; it is not sustainable. We want to end the deathscape! The question remains: What kind of work does this require?”
In the next few days, write a poem in praise of anyone you believe to be doing unacknowledged or underappreciated work.
The AVBOB Poetry Competition reopens its doors for submissions on 1 August 2025. Visit www.avbobpoetry.co.za and familiarise yourself with the competition rules.
No-one has considered this question more deeply than Uhuru Portia Phalafala, poet and senior lecturer at the University of Stellenbosch. She recently published a scholarly biography of South Africa’s erstwhile poet laureate, Keorapetse Kgositsile, as well as her debut collection, Mine Mine Mine (University of Nebraska Press, 2024), a verse epic that excavates the experience of generations of South African mine workers (including her own grandfather) as well as of the rural women they left behind.
It begins on what feels like a triumphant note: “In 2018 a historic silicosis class action lawsuit against the mining industry in South Africa was settled in favour of the miners.”
But it is not that simple. The miners, we are constantly reminded, are dead. They and their families cannot be recompensed for what they lost.
There are powerful recordings (available on YouTube) of Phalafala reading from the collection, doing justice to the many voices in which it is written. These readings are not mere performances, but renderings of something she felt compelled to write down.
“The epic came about in an organic way. My grandfather, who passed away in 2017, directed and dictated its writing in 2019, so this is an ancestral co-creation. It’s a spirit book. It came into expression from deep within me, as intuitive knowing, as whispers, dreams, and other forms of messagings that compelled language and articulation in this time, in this modality and tone.
“It began as sonic, oral and aural. Work songs set its tempo and metre. The memory of mining continues to live in our bodies and bodies of land, so there is always potential to tap into that memory through the body, through the chimes, whistles, shakers, tonality, metre and speech act, which are those of the land too.”
Much of the collection is concerned with the mostly invisible work of the women who spent long years waiting for and mourning these men, unable to find an outlet for grief and sorrow that is passed on across generations: “under patriarchal oath and code of silence: / we do not speak of our heartbreak.”
Towards the end, we are granted a glimpse of women using their mothers’ names to forge new identities “out of stardust / and spectacular smithereens” of their former selves. Phalafala provides some hope for the journey towards that goal:
“Choosing the comfort zone
is electing to breathe mine dust
when there is oxygen,
to breathe underwater
when there is land.”
is electing to breathe mine dust
when there is oxygen,
to breathe underwater
when there is land.”
When asked how she responds to Women’s Month as a poet and academic, she warns that celebration is premature.
“It’s a giant leap to move overnight from putting women in the waiting rooms of history, to celebration. We are being killed with impunity. We have an epidemic on our hands. We have historical and contemporaneous wounds to attend to.”
Does she believe that poetry can help previously oppressed people to breathe more freely?
“Poetry cannot save lives, but it can give us life in the deathscapes in which we are forced to live. However, we cannot live by this provisional breath, this ‘combat breathing’; it is not sustainable. We want to end the deathscape! The question remains: What kind of work does this require?”
In the next few days, write a poem in praise of anyone you believe to be doing unacknowledged or underappreciated work.
The AVBOB Poetry Competition reopens its doors for submissions on 1 August 2025. Visit www.avbobpoetry.co.za and familiarise yourself with the competition rules.
