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5
Contents
editorial
KHADIJA TRACEY HEEGER
Redefined
GEORGE LEWIS
New Music Decolonization in Eight Difficult Steps
GIORGIO AGAMBEN
The Supreme Music. Music and Politics
Theme Social Impact
SAIDIYA HARTMAN
Riot and Refrain
THOMAS BERNHARD
Executioners
WILLEMIEN FRONEMAN & STEPHANUS MULLER
Music’s “non-Political Neutrality”: When race dare not speak its name
STEVEN ROBINS
Spectres of Racial Science at Stellenbosch University: From Eugen Fischer’s Eugenics to the Department of Sport Sciences’ Retracted Article
MOHAMMAD SHABANGU
Education as the Practice of Freedom: Towards a Decolonisation of Desire
CHUMANI MAXWELE
The Solitary Protest That Gave Birth To #RhodesMustFall
SISCA JULIUS
Chappies bubblegum
EMILE YX? JANSEN
Heal the Hood & World with Afrocation
MESULI NALE
Move For Two: Educating for Leadership Through Dance
SARAH MALOTANE HENKEMAN
On the Social Impact of Telling Your Own Story in Your Own Way
ACHMAT DAVIDS
The Social Impact of Language: The "Coloured" Image of Afrikaans in Nineteenth Century Cape Town
JACKIE SHANDU
On the Social Impact of Self Hatred
AZOLA DAYILE
Imbamba – Uthunyiwe: On the Social Impact of Migrant Labour
YAMKELA F. SPENGANE
On the Social Impact of Name Changes
ANELE NZIMANDE
On the Social Impact of Motherhood
ZIYANA LATEGAN
Problems of and for Philosophy
galleri
JOAN OTIENO
Art as the Social Impact of Repurposing Waste Materials
GARTH ERASMUS
Xnau
GARTH ERASMUS
Virulent Strain
ANDREA ROLFES
Not the Paradise Garden
MZOXOLO VIMBA
Sunday best, kakade!
ROCHÉ VAN TIDDENS
Four Compositions
JAMES OATWAY & ALON SKUY
[BR]OTHER
borborygmus
ZIYANA LATEGAN
Invention as Ideological Reproduction
LETTA MBULU
Not Yet Uhuru (Amakhandela)
TUMI MOGOROSI
De
ANDREA LEIGH FARNHAM
A bad relationship with the truth
DAVID MWAMBARI
On the Social Impact of Reading Radical Literature
PHIWOKAZI QOZA
Choreographies of Protest Performance: 2. Somatic Communication and the experience of intensity
DUANE JETHRO
Shangaan Electro: shaping desire @180bpm
CLARE LOVEDAY
WOMEN IN MUSIC.co.za - A website for South African women music practitioners
ERNIE LARSEN
Escape Routes
LIZ SAVAGE
Myanmar: a post-colonial tale of fear, treachery and hope
STEVEN CRAIG HICKMAN
Weird Literature as Speculative Philosophy
frictions
VANGILE GANTSHO
"we have forgotten who we are"
JETHRO LOUW & GARTH ERASMUS
21st Century Khoisan Man
LUCY VALERIE GRAHAM
Seven settler poems
SERGIO HENRY BEN
Some Monday shit.
RIAAN OPPELT
The Boys in the Box
TRICIA WARDEN
Five Poems Two Songs and a Video
JOHAN VAN WYK
Man Bitch
ARI SITAS, GEORGE & DEBBIE MARI
Cold was the ground - A Requiem for Elephants Too**
ARI SITAS, GEORGE & DEBBIE MARI
Cold Was The Ground- A Requiem For Elephants Too* Part I
ARI SITAS, GEORGE & DEBBIE MARI
Cold was the ground - A Requiem for Elephants Too** Part II
claque
JANNOUS NKULULEKO AUKEMA
Something of Inexplicable Value: A Resurrection
FRANK MEINTJIES
From collective to corrective: South African poems of decolonisation
KNEO MOKGOPA
“This Bloodless Wound” - A Review of Kirsty Steinberg’s Confrontation
RONELDA S. KAMFER
Avoiding the obvious routes: Jolyn Phillips deconstructs the legend of Bientang
UNATHI SLASHA
Partaking in the Séance: Preliminary Remarks on Lesego Rampolokeng’s Bird-Monk Seding
WAMUWI MBAO
There are no barbarians: Michel Leiris - more phantom than Africa
ESTHER MARIE PAUW
Jess Auerbach's From Water to Wine: Becoming Middle Class in Angola
MBE MBHELE
Not nearly a review of Ontologicial Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation by Calvin L. Warren
MBALI KGAME
Mphutlane wa Bofelo's Transitions: from Post-Colonial Illusions to Decoloniality What went wrong and what now?
MALAIKA WA AZANIA
Why Do I Scream at God for the Rape of Babies?
TOAST COETZER
Country Conquerors: van blikkiesband tot firebrands – on the Social Impact of Rastafari
GEORGE KING
One Disc, Two Composers, Four Works: When Seven Defines the Music of Friendship
ERNESTO GARCIA MARQUES
Live Jimi Presley: white noise a la Neubauten
ekaya
DEREK DAVEY
Dodging the sjambok
CHRISTINE LUCIA
A Reflection on the Mohapeloa Edition
THEMBELA VOKWANA
Towards a Decolonial South African Musicology: Reflections on Christine Lucia’s Michael Mosoeu Moerane Scholarly Edition.
ANKE FROEHLICH & INGE ENGELBRECHT
Genadendal Music Collections Catalogue: an introduction
off the record
PETER DELPEUT
The Forgotten Evil pilot project digital version
PETER DELPEUT
The Forgotten Evil pilot chapter 5 charisma
PETER DELPEUT
The Forgotten Evil pilot chapter 9 The Forest of Astravas
PETER DELPEUT
The Forgotten Evil, pilot chapter 11 character
LOUIS CHUDE-SOKEI
When Echoes Return: roots, diaspora and possible Africas (a eulogy)
VEIT ERLMANN
The Disappearance of Otherness: ‘Africa Civilised, Africa Uncivilised’: Local Culture, World System and South African Music
IGNATIA MADALANE
From Paul to Penny: The Emergence and Development of Tsonga Disco (1985-1990s)
NIKLAS ZIMMER
Basil Breakey: Jazz contacts, Jazz culture.
OLIVIER LEDURE
Ted Joans
SAM MATHE
NDIKHO DOUGLAS XABA
CAN THEMBA
The Bottom of the Bottle
DANFORD TAFADZWA CHIBVONGODZE
Jonah Sithole’s Sabhuku
feedback
ALEXANDRA DODD
herri: a plenitude of material, ideas, sounds and voices
FACEBOOK FEEDBACK
Social Media Responses to herri issues 1 - 4
the selektah
ZARA JULIUS
A call for renewed internationalism: A sonic liberation front
PhD
DECENTERING THE ARCHIVE:
Visual Fabrications of Sonic Memories
NICOLA DEANE
FRAGMENTS By Way of Introduction
NICOLA DEANE
PASSAGE I: SURFACES A Surface Reading of the DOMUS Archive: framing space & time
NICOLA DEANE
PASSAGE II: INVAGINATION A Subjective Fold of the DOMUS Archive: a pocket of one’s own
NICOLA DEANE
PASSAGE III: NOISE A Hauntological Reconstruction of the DOMUS Archive: the noise remains
NICOLA DEANE
PASSAGE IV: THE MASK (De)Scripting the DOMUS Archive as Faceless Protagonist
NICOLA DEANE
ELISABETH UNMASKED by Nicola Deane
NICOLA DEANE
CONCLUSION Irresolution
hotlynx
shopping
SHOP
Purchase or listen
KOLEKA PUTUMA
Black Girl Live
contributors
the back page
MIKE VAN GRAAN
Covid-19 and its Existential Challenge to Theatre
© 2024
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KNEO MOKGOPA

“This Bloodless Wound” - A Review of Kirsty Steinberg’s Confrontation

They say Nelson Mandela brings out the worst in us. In some ways, “Mandela” has been made liberal democracy infected with the excesses of Capitalism and a need to obscure our trauma with misreadings of one another’s rhetorics and grammars. We fight over him. Who gets to archive him. Who gets to speak his name. Mandela, for many, still represents our highest hopes and heart plunging desires. Desires to live with dignity, “…to be left alone”, as Baldwin described it, “arrive at my own maturity in my own way, in peace”. Over the past weeks, this desire has never seemed so unattainable.

This country is so wounded and so depressed. The beings living this violent democracy, having to make a life in it, fighting for space, for Mandela, in it. All of us here, in “this place weeping”, economic animals without a political and social utopia to hasten. All of us, kulomhlaba owomileyo, revolting without a revolution, as Jaco Barnard-Naude described it, at what seems to be, very much to be, the end of history.

And so, of course, queer people living in this country have traumatic stories to tell.

I’ve started reading Confrontation by Kirsty Steinberg. I’m not a very good reader. I’m stubborn and irreverent and, worst of all, slow. So I’m not done. During this time, Jacob Zuma was arrested and is serving a prison sentence for contempt of court. The country looted itself, or the country was looted by its working poor, or Jacob Zuma supporters instructed the nation to revolt against his arrest, or people are poor and are “tired of not having stuff”. The poignant hysterical discourse of riots, making a spectacle of what has been peacefully structural. This making out loud what is unspeakable is vibrant and palpable in the vignettes Kirsty shares with us in Confrontation.

Confrontation is the memoir of the author with the pen name Kirsty Steinberg, first published by Naledi in 2020. In it, Kirsty unwraps boxes of her childhood and carefully details and narrates true stories spanning her upbringing in the Free State and Cape Town. At this point, Kirsty’s childhood has been a difficult and painful one, having her parents divorced at a young age, being emotionally abused by her stepmother and physically abused by her stepfather. Kirsty shares with us the painful story of her sexual assault by a family friend at a very young age and her experiences being ostracised and bullied for being fat and depressed. She was also assigned male and bullied throughout her schooling career for being believed to be too feminine for her childhood body.

Kirsty’s articulate and sure deployment of grammar pierces the story with resolute certainty. Kirsty is saving herself in these pages. She is boldly telling the truth of what happened to her and contesting her own erasure in a powerful and evocative way, and I want to applaud her for it. This taking up space thing can be dangerous and filled with violence.

White suffering, and the intellectual and psychological complexity of it, is the only suffering I’ve ever been asked to look at, growing up during the years that Kirsty grew up in. I know how their noses turn red at the tip when they cry. I know how their cheeks burn behind their “South African sun” freckles when they are drunk. I know how their eyes, as blue as is’bhakabhaka and as green as utshani, are undone by the deluge of their tears. How their lashes cling together when they are wet and cold after swimming. White subjectivity has fought relentlessly to own the space of grievable suffering ever since Whiteness was invented for me. Studying and understanding White people has been a natural survival strategy in as much as studying masculinity is a survival strategy for all people that were assigned male at birth.

Kirsty has no problem being grievable to me. I am not unused to reading the inner-most traumas of White people, not unused to affording them an abundant source of sympathy and humanity. I must, to survive. At the same time, Afrikaans identity is haunting for me. Afrikaans people come to symbolise living spectres of the terror of the past, figures from a collective nightmare come alive and wanting, too, to make a life happen beside us all. Their wounds are wounds, yet bloodless as a papercut, as Kirsty compares them.

In a violent democracy, we must all see and unsee each other to manage our survival. We align and misalign our notions of humanity to negotiate our hopes of dignity. This is the calculus Mandela gives us. In Mandela, I can reach Kirsty. I can hold her pulse and empathise with her shaking, triggered body as her skin hums in goose pimples. I can feel her shock as her jaw locks into place and her teeth screech against each other.

In The Catastrophist, Ronan Bennett retells Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Instead of Charles Marlow, we have an Irish novelist named James Gillespie who runs a passionate affair during the revolution in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In Confrontation, a young Kirsty discovers herself against shame and degradation while the country struggles, trying to make itself around, through and by violence. It’s difficult for me to read her story for many reasons. I am glad she has written it.

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