This Friday, November 13, readers will hear Bientang in English for the first time. Jolyn Phillips’s award-winning epic poem, first published in Afrikaans in 2020, will be read aloud in a virtual event hosted by the Africana Studies Global Virtual Forum at Penn State’s Department of Africana Studies.

Phillips will be joined by five poet-translators: Ronelda Kamfer, Nathan Trantraal, Rustum Kozain, Antjie Krog, and Gabeba Baderoon. Together they will read from the collective translation, which took two and a half years to complete.

Bientang is a counter-epic about an Indigenous woman who lived at the Cape in the nineteenth century and left almost no trace in the colonial archive. The fragments that survive describe a woman who spoke to the whales, the last of her people, living alone in a cave at the edge of the sea. Phillips does not try to fill the silences of the past. She writes Bientang as a protean, elusive figure who resists being pinned down.

The poem’s language is as unsettled as its subject. Phillips moulds Afrikaans in unprecedented ways, testing its edges and drawing on its antecedents, !Kun, /Xam, and Khoekhoegowab. She also invents words and sets them alongside the scientific names for the Cape’s landscape. A poem built this way needed an equally imaginative translation, which is why a collective of poets took it on.

The reading is part of the Africana Studies Global Virtual Forum 2026–27, Decoloniality and Southern Epistemologies, led by Sinfree Makoni. The forum is a series of online conversations that seek to decenter hegemonic epistemologies, decolonize the Western canon, and challenge the notion of “universal truth.” A Q&A will follow the reading.

Event details

What: Bientang in English: A World Premiere
When: Friday, November 13, at 9:00 a.m. EST / 4:00 p.m. SAST
Where: Online (register here)
Readers: Jolyn Phillips, Ronelda Kamfer, Nathan Trantraal, Rustum Kozain, Antjie Krog, and Gabeba Baderoon

For questions or to join the forum’s mailing list, email hms6156@psu.edu. Anyone who needs an accommodation should contact Ozge Deniz at ozd5067@psu.edu in advance.