2 - Names: Mother, What is My Name?

Summary

Kgositsile's work demonstrates how monopolized colonial geographies and politics of knowledge can be reconfigured through poetics of the body. In his poetry, his body is mobilized as a body of knowledge that enshrines principles of interconnectivity, interrelationality, and interdependence with other living bodies, human and non-human. His political commitment to Black liberation and solidarity in the Black world is fortified by gestures of intimacy, interiority, depthoffeeling, ‘breathing together’, and belonging. At the foundation of this sensibility is the bedrock of the matriarchive that attuned him to his feelings as a legitimate place from which to fashion a political identity as poet of the revolution. The matriarchive underlines his erotic registers and poetics that are productive in asserting and affirming his purposeful action: to his mother, he writes of the ‘slow sadness of your smile’ and ‘the slow sadness in your eye / remains fixed and talks’ (1975a: 9). Her unwavering eye, fixed and articulate, is ‘stronger than faith in some god who never spoke our language’ (1971: 28). Galekgobe's enunciating eye transmits knowledge in his mother tongue that he receives as gospel: her sadness commands a course of action to overturn the conditions that would have her live in so-called maids’ quarters in white suburbs of the white man's city, in the country of her birth. Her eye becomes his faith, the clear conscience and compass that orients his purpose in exile – ‘the determined desire / past the impotence of militant rhetoric’ (1971: 28). While the matriarchive entangles his political sensibilities with poetics of the body, it also demands – beyond the poetry – political action.

The matriarchive is his navigation system in exile, an internal guide with coordinates in a rich and substantive repository of mother tongue, Tswana oral/aural cultures, Southern African cosmologies, and philosophies of being. Kgositsile grounds his felt sense of self and orientation to the world in a creative grammar of geopoetics. In his poem to Madikeledi, ‘sadness’ appears thrice, which he writes of as ‘more solid’ than any system that ‘tried to break our back’, and which ‘strength[ens] the fabric of his heart, for us’ (1971: 80–1).