If you asked me how old I was when I last saw my father alive, I would not be able to tell you. Memory cannot serve me correctly, or at all, because memories need an anchor, and prohibitive silence does not a good anchor make. He was there – father, mine, until he wasn’t. Then he was dead. What is a forever-child to do, one who dreamt of a moment of reckoning, when it cannot be borne? She becomes a poet. She conjures the dead. She speaks. 

I was not meant to become a poet. For one, I hated the Romantics and all their meandering. For another, I was the wrong type of liar. My grand lie was that I loved poetry. I had to – I was a literature student, and what kind of literature student does not like poetry? I then discovered a blog, Read a Little Poetry, where I fell in love with all types of verse, but was inexplicably drawn to Mark Strand’s “Keeping Things Whole.” I read it over and over and, at the time, would be at a loss to tell you why this burst on the page was so exquisite to me. I do not want to glorify pain, but I will admit there is an adjacent, almost proportionate pleasure when one’s particular hurt is given form. Despite having a POV that ostensibly belonged to my estranged father, this is what Strand’s poem did for me. I was fascinated by the speaker’s voice, their rationale. I wanted, subconsciously, to pierce their world.  

Obvious as it seems now, I did not know how much I was reading my father into the poem, etching his amorphous face into each line. For it was simple – his very absence was to be absence itself. To speak his absence into the room would be a transgression. So, I did not. In fact, you would be hard pressed to find a coherent thought about my father in my first draft manuscript. In that initial work, I somehow managed to “keep things whole” by bypassing the issue at hand.  

What, exactly, was blocking me? There is a phrase Koreans say to children, to which they often acquiesce: 어쩔 수 없는 거야, 어쩔 수 없다. This roughly translates to “It cannot be helped.” It connotes, to me, at least, “get over it, there is nothing to be done.” I cannot think of a phrase that better encapsulates the attitude that people had to my pain. An inevitable and unremarkable pain. 어쩔 수 없는 거야. Black men disappear, deal with it. 어쩔 수 없다. One disastrous situationship warned me – you’re not going to get published unless you write about (let me clean up his language here) the brutalisation of black women. And one can hardly consider something that small brutal.  

And so it went, with my second manuscript draft where the estranged father remained ensconced in silence, “the absence / of field.” I submitted that draft to uHlanga, my dream publishing house, sure I would receive a publication offer. I received nothing. After some time, I could no longer stand it. I contacted uHlanga and, in a serendipitous turn of events, they had lost my manuscript but assured me they would read it. Ultimately, the manuscript was rejected. As despondent as I was, I held on to the silver thread that came with the rejection email: a direct line to the editor, and a promise that if I further developed my (incoherent) manuscript, or wrote something else, it would be held and considered in earnest, reading period or not. For a while I went dark. However, I emerged knowing what I had to do – confront my ghosts, write the manuscript I needed to before I could write anything else. It worked.  

Having lived abroad for close to seven years, I knew that the collection would be characterized by a duality of sorts: being South African, being shaped by my time in South Korea; being abandoned; leaving home indefinitely; craving intimacy, binding myself indoors with only houseplants for company. My editor spotted this duality early on. In fact, it was part of the intrigue: the pattern of educated young South Africans taking to Asia, living there for years, maybe even decades, some never fully returning. What could be behind it? I cannot say for sure. A common thread I have picked up on, anecdotally, is pain. Something hurt, so we bolted, cast our nets for the sky and landed on soil where we were aliens searching for ways to remake home.  

Home, that thorn in my side. That word glamoured into a texture so slippery that even as I contest it, I cannot help but to think of honey, rooibos tea, papa and nama. Home. I was so far away from it when writing about it – what did that mean? What did it mean for a South African-born poet shaped by years of living outside of the continent to write about a pain born on the continent? What did it mean to be read and edited by a South African-born poet and writer now based in Edinburgh, Scotland? What did it mean that the South African cover illustrator would have trouble laying hands on the book whose artwork she had created in a joyous frenzy because she was based kilometers away in Taipei? What was this book, anyway? South African, African… global? It took hands across time, seas, and time-zones to turn a pain so mundane into a book called Rootbound. All this against the backdrop of a resource deficiency that seems to plague African writers, most of whom are not fortunate enough to move to countries that shape global conversations about literature.  

The trauma turned into art, and the dream took form – that should be it, right? Wrong. Or, as Koreans would say, 산 넘어 산 – after the mountain, there is another mountain. My next mountain? Getting the collection into the hands of readers. Brittle Paper has published many essays by authors lamenting the African writer’s plight – their need to gain global recognition to sustain lives as writers, and to be elevated as writers in their home base. There is much that is troubling about this phenomenon: a lack of cultural and actual capital, the concurrent inclination to tailor one’s work for ‘global’ audiences, the potential of being rendered inaccessible for one’s home base.  

Knowing this, am I immune to the desire for global recognition and success? Of course not. Though, had you told me years ago that I would be self-studying social media marketing, graphic design, and at-home photography with hopes of breaching the global social media consciousness, I would have laughed. There is something comical about it – an introvert, bad at technology and obsessed with the written word, trying to figure out fast, unforgiving algorithms, and crack the culture of the aesthetic. It is an especially twisted irony, almost cruel, as my collection opens with a dedication poem sparked by a racist tweet. Even now, reading the opening lines, I flinch:  

Today you happen upon a tweet by a white girl your age:  

“three things black girls don’t have. long hair. a boyfriend.  

fathers.” 

 There was a time that I could tick off each item on this list and I hated myself for it. I was young, I was lost, I bore the brunt of ‘daddy issues’ that were not of my own doing. I feel for that girl. I hold on to her as I struggle to navigate complex digital spaces that seem determined break my brain. She keeps me going. For her I will do the work that demands poetry, that conjures the dead. I will dare to speak across whatever medium it takes.  

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