I do not know what it is like to be chosen To be looked at like something That matters To be held with warm hands To be embraced To be turned into a home I do not know how to make anyone stay How to fight for what is mine I do not know how not to stay When everything leaves Bokang Maragelo, in Things the fire left behind , p.
Speaking at the launch of the bookstore, The Commune , in Braamfontein , Johannesburg, academic and poet, Danai Mupotsa shared how so many of our conversations are saturated by conversations about hate. Speaking in the context of colonial education, Mupotsa continued to share the ways in which we are taught in ways that are very violent. As Mupotsa observes, many of our understandings of love are premised on lack and insecurity.
In many contexts where so many have not learned or been given the tools to love the self, we experience love through a deficit lens. Living in a world that Mohamed calls unbearably sad, and that is increasingly characterised by various forms of intensified violence against women and children, the environment and various other marginalised persons, it is not unreasonable that discussions of love and loving do not saturate our daily lives.
Mohamed reminded us that choosing the path of numbness does not save us. Mohamed shared that masculinities, especially the ones that are vicious and cruel, are premised on the inability to feel, or on denying feeling. In this tradition of resisting feeling and numbness, I share a challenging experience that made me feel so deeply in profoundly moving and sometimes heart-breaking of ways in to the present.
This is one of the most challenging texts I have ever had to write. It has taken months of thinking through, sometimes having words to put down, but often being eluded by vocabulary to articulate what I long in my heart to say. I want to write about love and the grief that comes from parting with a lover too soon. In some ways this is easy, as the story is not complicated. I loved someone, who loved me, and we parted. So, the story perhaps is not as profound or remarkable as I would like, or imagine.
