Collaborative Conversations: Celebrating Twenty-One Years of The Mothertongue Project

To celebrate Mothertongue's 21st anniversary, Collaborative Conversations weaves together the reflections of a group of artists, scholars and writers who have journeyed with the organisation over the last two decades. Since its inception in 2000 with What the Water Gave Me, The Mothertongue Project has used participatory, integrated arts methods to create theatrical works that strive for personal and collective dialogue and healing in South Africa. In poetry, scholarly writing and transcribed oral conversations, the contributors now think and feel their way through the aspirations and achievements - and the alchemy - of The Mothertongue Project's work. Accompanied by photographs of performances from across the 21 years, this book provides a sense of what a Mothertongue theatre piece does: it draws audience and performers into transformative, embodied conversations. Includes work by Awino Okech, Genna Gardini, Koleka Putuma, Makgati Mokwena, Malika Ndlovu, Mwenya B Kabwe, Nicosia Shakes, Nina Callaghan, Ntomboxolo Makhutshi and Rehane Abrahams.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Modjaji Books
• Release date: Oct 13, 2021
• ISBN: 9781991240101

Book preview

FOREWORD:

THE MOTHERTONGUE PROJECT AND ITS DIVERSE LANGUAGE EXPRESSIONS/DIALECTS

By Phoebe Kisubi Mbasalaki

I

Over the last three years, I have been working closely with Sara Matchett, one of the co-founders of The Mothertongue Project (MTP) on a cross-disciplinary project that brings together a group of eight people/womxn, mostly street sex workers, one of the most marginalised groups in South Africa. The global gender and cultures of in/equalities project — GlobalGRACE¹ deploys participatory theatre as the main research methodology imbricated within decolonial feminist praxes, very similar to the kind of work the MTP is doing. The project is entitled ‘Participatory theatre and the production of cultures of equality among sex workers in South Africa’ — a collaboratory project between the African Gender Institute and the Centre for Theatre, Dance and Performance studies at the University of Cape Town as well as the NGO Sex Workers Education and Advocacy Task force (SWEAT). The project draws on SWEAT’s radical approaches to creative activism framed within destigmatisation and decriminalisation of sex work in South Africa. As a decolonial feminist scholar and practitioner², the GlobalGRACE project was my first rigorous encounter with the discipline of theatre and performance, which opened up for me more possibilities of plural and embodied epistemologies. My contribution through this foreword to a book reflecting on MTP’s work over the last twenty years is a privileged honour.

This book considers not only the commendable work that the MTP has done and continues to do but also brings to life the cross-disciplinary nature of theatre and performance with feminism in its intersections with race, class, gender, sexuality and ableism, all imbricated in activism — creative activism. The work of the MTP as articulated through this book is the epitome of theatre practices rooted in creative activism and notions of well-being, healing of the body, as well as African decolonial feminist praxes, all necessary in a context like South Africa that has endured 400 years of colonisation³ and 50 years of apartheid. Their hangover effects (modernity/coloniality⁴) are very much evident in the various expressions of structural and physical violence such as gender-based violence, gangsterism, poverty, neglect of well-being and drug abuse in the communities the MTP has worked in. The kind of work and intervention that the MTP is doing matters, especially as a decolonial counter to histories of colonisation and apartheid grounded in plural epistemologies of social justice and well-being.

II

Here, I would like to highlight three broad themes in the book — by evoking the notion of storytelling. I start off with the layout of the book, i.e., how the story is told. The aesthetic of each chapter begins with excerpts from conversations from several stakeholders and theatre practitioners in the MTP who are also authors of the various chapters in the book. These opening conversations are curated in such a way that they set the stage of what is to come in the chapter that follows. Hence the storytelling tone of the book is such that it brings together conversations, reflective narratives and theorisation as well as poetry. This tone of storytelling lends the book a profound lyricism. Moreover, the opening conversations show the connection or bond between the MTP theatre practitioners, speaking to more than 20 years of nurturing radical relationships between womxn theatre practitioners.

I bring the consideration of storytelling forward for several reasons, one prompted by Sara Matchett’s opening conversation for Chapter 3 by Rehane Abrahams. This conversation captures both the formation of the MTP as well as its very first performance, What the Water Gave Me, written and performed by Rehane Abrahams, directed by Sara Matchett, both co-founders of the MTP. In the conversation excerpt, Matchett states:

… This led to us calling ourselves the Mothertongue Project. The production ended up being called What the Water Gave Me. The correlation between ‘the tongue of the mother as storyteller’ and the metaphor of water are made explicit by filmmaker, writer, academic and composer, Trinh T Minh-ha, who speaks in her book Women, Native, Other about the storytelling being associated with water in symbolic and feminine ways. The storyteller, like water, is irrepressible in her defiance of being categorised and contained. She is all-inclusive; possessing the immense power and profound wisdom of the universe, she is respected and is honoured in the community. Min-ha equates the storyteller with Great Mother who guards womxn and presides over all waters. (58)

This quote points to storytelling as a central idea in the book. Secondly, it emphasises storytelling as symbolically resonant with motherhood and community/community-building. The notion of motherhood is one that is highly contested in (western) feminist scholarship. Early Marxists, feminists and social critics noted how ideals of motherhood shaped expectations of womxn in society: expectations that relegated motherhood to the private sphere and as devalued labour with the excessive burden of care placed on womxn. Liberal and radical feminists’ critique was directed to the nuclear family, one also relegated to the private domain as an oppressive mechanism that maintains patriarchal interests, again with the burden of care, shouldered mostly by womxn. I, however, locate the notions of motherhood and community-building with the MTP as firmly imbricated in African feminism(s), which come across in the book. It is a conceptualisation of motherhood that connects the private to the public sphere. It invokes the notion of (other)mothering as articulated by black British feminist scholar Joan Anim-Addo as ‘a politics of potential, pluralistic and democratic community-building, where Black thought and everyday living carry a primary and participant role’ (2014:44). In other words, this is a notion of motherhood and community as rooted in Ubuntu as well as (feminist) kinship and ethics of care. We know Ubuntu as a praxis is imbricated within human dignity and justice. ‘Ubuntu, both as a philosophy and praxis evokes justice through the principles of equality, equity and fairness as well as human dignity in a relational context’ (Matchett and Mbasalaki, 2020: 76). We see this through the work of the MTP as articulated in this book addressing youth unemployment, physical and sexual gender-based violence,homophobia and teenage pregnancy in addition to complex historical continuities of slavery and colonialism, to mention but a few. All these combined bring forth the symbolism that Trinh T Minh-ha speaks of in terms of the great mother, the storyteller who guards womxn and presides over water.

Thirdly, the idea of storytelling is embellished through a mother tongue. Mother tongue connotes an intimacy to a certain language. I also read mother tongue through the discursive notion of languaging. In fact, it is the ‘mother tongue’ that binds/glues all chapters together. It is the red thread that runs throughout the book. Taken in its most literal form, mother tongue is one’s first language, one we are intimately connected to. A loose definition of mother tongue is a language a person has grown up speaking from early childhood. Native language is another way of translating what mother tongue is. For many, there’s a fondness and fluency in speaking their mother tongue. I therefore read the first language/mother tongue of the MTP as community-based theatre whose fluency is articulated in this book through its diverse language manifestations. Or as Matchett puts it in the above quote, the tongue of the mother as a storyteller. It is definitely not a single language, there is a plurality to it — whose various expressions I locate in indigenous dialects or vernaculars. We know that colonisation/coloniality historically sought and still seeks to erase indigenous languages and elevate a dominant few — namely, the languages from the metropole or central territory of the colonial empire, such as English, Spanish, German, French and Portuguese. This is expressed eloquently by Nicosia Shakes (Chapter 2) who posits that ‘Mothertongue also indexes ongoing initiatives to value the indigenous languages of South Africans classified under apartheid as African/Black, Coloured and Indian, following their violent suppression’ (42). In other words, both the MTP and the book offer a vernacular or storytelling that is a decolonial counter to this historical linguicide and suppression of indigenous languages in South Africa. The book therefore offers a kind of vernacular or dialect that I locate in the discursive frame of languaging as opposed to language in its material form, such as isiXhosa or isiZulu. In the next section, I get into these various dialects/vernaculars the book and project express.

III

Language connects communities, nations — it is one of the main mediums at the heart of society. Language conjures up the notion of representation. In addition to representation being one of my research interests, I have taught a course entitled ‘Politics of Representation’ in various contexts/countries. We know that gross misrepresentations through history of colonisation and coloniality have filtered through into the present and have been passed off as legitimate knowledge. The story of Sara Baartman and gross misrepresentation of African female sexuality in knowledge production is one grand example of this. Language and languaging matters!

I am drawn to two particular scholars, namely cultural theorist and black political activist, Stuart Hall’s articulations of (discursive) language and representation as well as post-structuralist scholar Alton (Pete) Becker’s theorisation of languaging. Stuart Hall denotes language as a representational system that is a ‘privileged medium in which we make sense of things, in which meaning is produced and exchanged’ where ‘meanings can only be shared through our common access to language’ (Hall, 2010:1). Hall also connects language to operate within a system of representation as ‘media through which thoughts, ideas and feelings are represented in culture’. He further notes that ‘representation through language is therefore central to the process by which meaning is produced’ (1). Within this, he locates language within ‘poetics’ (semiotics) and ‘politics’ (the discursive) in its construction and constitution. The discursive has historical specificity and is concerned with questions of power, regulation of conduct and construction of identities and subjectivities. The discursive construction of language for me conjures up Becker’s articulation of languaging, which he denotes as ‘the shift from an idea of language as something accomplished, apart from time and history … to the idea of languaging as an ongoing process, something that is being done and reshaped constantly’ (1988:25). The notion of language as an ongoing, discursive meaning-making process frames this book. The various chapters are written in such a way that one gets an in-depth understanding and appreciation of the work of the MTP, with the cyclical and circuitous pathway of meaning-making relating to what the NGO does and how this has been written about or represented in this book. In what follows, I give mere glimpses of the language and languaging and break it down into three key dialects/vernaculars/expressions of the first language or main language of community-based theatre with which MTP engages, as articulated in this timely book.

The first language or main language this book puts across is the language of radical community-based theatre led by a group of womxn. The language of community-based theatre is a response, an intervention, and an engagement with the dominant narrative of violence — physical, economic and structural through exclusions. This book locates the narrative of violent exclusions in the following: historical exclusions of womxn in theatre spaces, neglected well-being of marginalised communities, high levels of unemployment among youth in South Africa, gender-based violence (GBV), rape, teenage pregnancy, foetal alcohol syndrome, murder/drive-by shootings, poverty, high levels of drug abuse, homophobia, gangsterism, to mention but a few. Moreover, this narrative of exclusion is conceptually located in histories of colonisation that manifest through the grammars of race, class, gender, sexuality and ableism. It is intersectional.

The first dialect from the main language or mother tongue (of community-based theatre) I call the language of creative activism. It is a language I am very familiar with, because it is at the heart of the South African work-package 1 of the GlobalGRACE project. SF Harrebye has defined creative activism as:

a kind of meta-activism that facilitates the engagement of active citizens in temporary, strategically manufactured, transformative interventions in order to change society for the better by communicating conflicts and/or solutions where no one else can or will in order to provoke reflection and consequent behavioural changes in an attempt to revitalize the political imagination. (Harrebye, 2016: 25).

The language of creative activism is rooted in notions of freedom and justice for marginal communities as well as visibility. The arts offer specific and nuanced kinds of languages through provocations. Nicosia Shakes (Chapter 2) terms this as ‘activist aesthetic’, Matchett talks of ‘artivist’ or ‘artivism’. Elsewhere, Matchett and I discuss ‘enactivism’ (Mbasalaki & Matchett, 2020). For Shakes, ‘activist aesthetic’ is ‘theatre-making that is consciously engaged in liberating pedagogies as well as dedicated to socio-political advocacy’ (39). Matchett and I emphasise embodiment in the use of ‘enactivism’ and argue for ‘embodied activism through performance, where the aesthetic serves as an activator/agitator for activism’ (9). This agitator we refer to as the ‘aesthetic grammar’ of activism and social change, which structures the language of creative activism in this book.

These ideas of creative activism really form the central thread of both the MTP’s work and the tapestry of this collection, as nuances of articulating what creative activism is come through in the book. We see where embodied creative activism works in conveying/addressing complex narratives in relation to slavery and colonisation, through the performance of What the Water Gave Me by Rehane Abrahams (Chapter 3). Abrahams writes:

I wanted to use the practice of embodied performance to challenge these simultaneously socio-historical and psycho-physiological inscriptions on the body and through the process of performance reweave the performer back into wholeness with self and community (62)

The making whole/wholeness with the self and community speaks to the decolonial notion/languaging of ‘re-membering’ or ‘humanisation’, which can be achieved through the addressing of contested histories (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018). Further on ‘embodied activism’ in the performance of Walk (Chapter 8) adds to the dialect of ‘aesthetic activism’. This chapter is a cartography of an intervention of a feminist autobiographical performance, over a period of seven years, as response to womxn’s public uprising/movements against gender-based violence nationally in South Africa and globally. This chapter brings to life what happens when feminist theatre theory of embodied performance meets Boal’s techniques of Theatre of the Oppressed, where there is a dissolving of boundaries between the spectator and performers, demonstrating ‘how de-silencing can create a community of solidarity’ (167). Gardini posits, ‘ Walk does not retell nor recreate experiences of assault, but instead articulates women’s longing for freedom from sexual threat through a personal performed response’ (158), showing that the language of ‘activism aesthetic’ is imbricated within the language of freedom and social justice.

This book also brings out the intricacies of the ‘activist aesthetic’ as not always being appreciated by certain constituencies. Alex Halligey highlights socio-spatial activism through the performance of Breathing Space (Chapter 6) in the farmland community of Darling in the Western Cape. Halligey emphasises the dichotomous nature of the language between community-based theatre versus professional theatre. The language of power as discursively infused in hierarchy in this dichotomy is well presented. The dichotomy is set against the backdrop of continuities of colonisation and apartheid along racialised and gendered lines that manifest through marginality, dispossession and violence in juxtaposition with a professional theatre festival and tourism. An introduction of community-based theatre into this context displayed a disjuncture between mainstream theatre and community-based theatre, alluding to spaces of privilege endorsing mainstream theatre more so than community-based theatre with the embodied ‘activist aesthetic’ treated as ‘amateur’. These are a mere three examples of how the ‘activist aesthetic’ as a dialect of radical community-based theatre is developed throughout this book.

The second dialect I locate is the language of collaboration — a kind of meaningful collaboration. This is what I call collaboration as praxis: one that is committed to crossing structural borders along the lines of race, class, gender, sexuality and ableism through transforming power hierarchies embedded in these structures. In short, I refer to this as cross-border work. This is a kind of collaboration that addresses tensions and contradictions between academic and non-academic realms and one that is accountable to people’s own struggle for self-representation and self-determination (Nagar, 2003). This kind of cross-border work doesn’t come easy, there is a lot of emotional labour that goes with it. The language of collaboration or co-creation also runs through the entire book.

One such expression of crossing structural borders is unpacked in Chapter 4. Awino Okech deliberates on the complex cross-border collaboration with a group of teenagers in Manenberg township through exploring sex and sexuality against the backdrop of a dominant language of violence (physical, sexual, economic), teenage pregnancies, drug abuse and young womxn dating older, often married men. While reflecting on this work and lessons learned,Okech notes, ‘This project left me with an understanding of the importance of practitioners taking responsibility for the disruption we create in communities’ (95), showing honest reflection on ‘doing’ collaborative community work and the disruption this ‘doing’ does. The language of reflection takes centre stage in this chapter.

Another strong variation of co-creation comes through Chapter 5. Matchett and Ndlovu speak to Uhambo: pieces of a dream. Uhambo explores the connection between a narrative that proclaims freedom as a birthright, and the lived realities of the womxn MTP worked with in the Uhambo process, birthing the poem included in the chapter by Malika Ndlovu entitled 'Pieces of a Dream'. The language of co-creation comes across in three different layers, firstly through workshops and interviews with communities of womxn around the contested notions of birthright and democracy in South Africa. Secondly the co-creation of artistic material as a way of responding to the workshop and interviews with community members, seen in Malika Ndlovu’s poem. This poem speaks to the dream of birthright that was supposed to bring with it freedom from democracy but never materialised for many, interrupted by grammars of race, class, gender, sexuality and ability — a broken dream. The powerful aesthetic of poetry is displayed here. Thirdly, a co-creation in Uhambo is located in bringing theatre and visual arts together in a live event that combines performance, portraits and installations. The three kinds of co-creation coalesce into a collective deployment of ‘activist aesthetic’, one of the other main dialects of the book and the MTP.

Another aspect of the co-creation is elaborated on in Chapters 9 and 10, drawing out nuances in cross-border work by speaking to ‘Curating Care’ (Chapter 9) and ‘Arts Development as a Way of Belonging to Self and Place’ (Chapter 10). In these chapters Matchett and Callaghan centre in on the Langeberg Youth Arts Project that employs and works with six young womxn and men aged 22-32 who live in the Langeberg region, whose backdrop of violence, dispossession and poverty is clearly articulated. The chapters complement each other well because the ethics of care (which is connected to Ubuntu) speaks to belonging. Belonging is a useful notion to engage with, especially with regards to marginal communities, whose lived realities are incongruent with citizenship said to be offered by instruments like the constitution of South Africa. Here I am reminded of the work of the late queer activist Mikki van Zyl (2009) who proposes ‘belonging’ as a crucial construct that reveals the limits of human rights discourse for the most vulnerable South Africans. For Van Zyl, ‘belonging’ as a concept exposes the structural relations that the language of universal rights and citizenship sometimes obscures. Belonging conjures up an ethics of care as located within Ubuntu. Gouws and van Zyl (2015) note how ‘in Ubuntu, ancestry, kinship and community are woven into the self through myriad social and affective bonds. These bonds are expressed through care for each other’ (173). They add that ‘through the aspects of caring for one another and belonging in a community, Ubuntu sees people bound together in relations of mutual respect and dignity, where one’s humanity is diminished by acts of greed or deeds of oppression’ (173). This is the gist embedded in these two chapters. Matchett addresses the question of what it means to curate ethics of care in a context where ‘chronic disconnection is often accompanied by feelings of uncertainty and fear’ (183). She charts this curation through what she refers to as ‘somatic presence’ and Mokwena's conceptualisation of ‘withnessing’ which calls on embodied recognitions within a communal engagement. Here I would like to note that usually, theorisations about the community tend to mask the body or the embodied, yet this chapter connects these two beautifully. Callaghan situates narratives of youth voices, who speak for themselves, articulating their transformation and nurturing a kind of belonging. This comes through profoundly in the Langeberg Youth Arts Project company member Ashley’s words:

With all the skills I learned at Mothertongue, it also changed me as a person to reach out more to other people, to show more interest in what others are doing in the community as well. (209)

Indeed, these few examples speak to the dialect of co-creation as central to the MTP’s articulation of radical community theatre.

The third dialect of this book I locate in the language of healing connected to spirituality and mythology. In a context like South Africa rooted in harsh histories of violence, dispossession, poverty and neglect of well-being along grammars of race, class, gender, sexuality and ableism, there is a collective trauma. It stems from unjust histories of slavery and colonisation as well as the perverse language of violence in its various raced, gendered and economic manifestations. Therefore, the language of healing as a (decolonial) counter or interference is imperative. Indeed, the kind of work Sara Matchett and I do with the group of sex workers centres around this, which we theorise as embodied social justice. We argue for this

... form of embodied social justice and wellbeing, for a group who live on the margins, and are constantly failed by South Africa’s neoliberal order and laws. This embodied social justice is encountered through healing within the self and as a group — the sex workers’ theatre group. This is realised through the ‘unbuilding’ of the discourses and experience around criminalisation and stigmatisation of sex work in South Africa, this way producing new embodied epistemologies that re-member and humanise sex workers. (Matchett and Mbasalaki, 2020:84)

This is the language of healing that runs through MTP’s work and which is foregrounded in this book. Chapter 7 on Washa Mollo: Theatre as a Milieu for Conversations and Healing is a cartography of ‘re-mapping personal narratives’. Matchett and Mokwena argue out mythology that is connected to the language of the psyche; through mythology as representation of a female African heroine, through breath and the ‘aesthetic emotion’ or ‘sensation’ (141), through working through pain ‘learning to be in the pain and to incorporate it back into the self without it incapacitating the self’ (142-143); through the language of empathy within an aesthetic provocation; as well as transformation. Moreover, the difficult work of re-visiting and engaging with histories of colonisation and slavery in its myriad of continuities adds another layer to this language of healing. Centring the embodied subject in Abraham’s and Matchett’s Womb of Fire (Chapter 11) this language comes through in ‘a syncretic spirituality and objects of cultural memory [that] translate and re-member an erased diasporic and Khoekhoen narrative continuity and recuperate embodied feminine agency’ (225). Both the performance — Womb of Fire — and the chapter are profound.

IV

I am yet to encounter a book like this that engages with such in-depth work cutting across the rigid boundaries of the academic and non-academic, as well as a book that is an intervention in the cross-disciplinary work of theatre, (decolonial) African feminism(s) and activism. Moreover, all the various issues discussed above are addressed with passion, scholarly poise, conceptual insight and most importantly, commitment to social justice.

REFERENCES

Anim-Addo, J. 2014. Activist-mothers maybe, sisters surely? Black British feminism, absence and transformation. Feminist Review. 108(1): 108-125

Becker, A. 1988. Language in particular: a lecture. In Linguistics in context. D. Tannen, Ed. Westport, CT: Praeger. 17-35.

GlobalGRACE. 2018. Global gender and cultures of equality. Available at www.globalgrace.net/more-about-project [last accessed: 2021, 20 February].

Gouws, A. & van Zyl, M. 2015. Towards a feminist ethics of Ubuntu: bridging rights and ubuntu. In Care ethics and political theory. D. Engster, & M. Hamington, Eds. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 165-186.

Hall, S. 2010. Representation: cultural representations and signifying practices. London: Sage in association with The Open University.

Harrebye, S.F. 2016. Social change and creative activism in the 21st Century. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Lugones, M. 2007. Towards a decolonial feminism. Hypatia. 25(4): 742-759.

Matchett, S. and Mbasalaki P.K. 2020. Butoh gives back the feeling to the people. Agenda. 34(3). 74-86.

Mbasalaki P. K. and Matchett, S. 2020. Aesthetic grammars of social justice: sex work reimagined. Journal of Home and Community Science. 14(1-2): 7-18.

Ndlovu-Gatsheni, S.J. 2018. Metaphysical empire, linguicides and cultural imperialism. English Academy Review. 35(2). 96-115.

Tamale, S. 2020. Decolonization and Afro-feminism. Cantley, QC: Daraja Press.

Van Zyl, M. 2015. A sexual politics of belonging: same-sex marriages in post-apartheid South Africa. Johannesburg: ResearchGate.

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PHOEBE KISUBI MBASALAKI is a post-doctoral research fellow on the GlobalGRACE project ( https://www.globalgrace.net) housed at the AGI and the Centre for Theatre, Dance & Performance Studies (CTDPS), University of Cape Town as well as the NGO, Sex Workers Advocacy and Educational Task Force (SWEAT). She is also a lecturer on the gender studies program at the Africa Gender Institute (AGI) – University of Cape Town. She holds a doctorate in gender studies from Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Her research interests are in critical race, gender, class, sexuality, creative activism, public health as well as decolonial thought and praxis.

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1 The Global Gender and Cultures of Equality — the GlobalGRACE project (www.globalgrace.net). The project is funded by the Research Council of the UK’s (RCUK) Global Challenge Research Fund (GCRF) delivered through the Arts and Humanities Research Council led by a team of researchers at Goldsmiths, University of London and University of Coventry. GlobalGRACE employs artistic interventions, curatorial research practice and public exhibitions to investigate and enable gender positive approaches to well-being internationally, bringing together academic and non-academic partners from Bangladesh, Brazil, Mexico, the Philippines, South Africa and the UK as well as consultants from Europe and the USA, to work collaboratively on six interlinked research work packages.

2 I work within the framework of decolonial feminism, noting Lugones (2007) emphasises that ‘colonization of gender is still with us; it is what lies at the intersection of gender/class/race as central constructs of the capitalist world system of power’ (746). Decolonial feminism therefore usefully offers us ‘a lens to understand the hidden-from-view interconnections between race and gender and the relation of each to normative heterosexuality’ (Tamale, 2020: 7).

3 Colonisation pertains to the systematic process by which a people exploit and/or annex the lands and resources of another without their consent and