February 23, 2016, 3:24am SA time | 7:24pm IA time
The Creative Writing Seminar at the Sol Plaatje University Art Museum continues today, and my own lecture is scheduled for 9am. The night before, unable to sleep, I turn on my laptop at 1:00 am to create a PowerPoint. I haven’t made a PowerPoint in years. Everyone in the States is awake – it is daytime there – so as I sit at the desk in the half dark, my leg shaking up and down, I simultaneously plug images into slides and write emails to my working companions in the US. Sleep waits until 3:30am.
As it were, the PowerPoint is a godsend. My brain is mush, so it is everything I can do just to simply read the words I wrote the night before. I stand before the crowd, sweating through my shirt, and try to talk about using research and fieldwork in creative writing – reading from Claudia Rankine’s Citizen and then describing my own project with research at and about the the First Battle of Bull Run. Rankine’s work reverberates through the room — sharing her Katrina CNN mashup seems to especially resonate here.
We move from this to a discussion about #BlackLivesMatter. I try to describe my ongoing inquiry into my role as a white person in the world, especially my role as a white writer: there are the lessons I have learned (and am still learning) from the Black Lives Matter movement, slow awakenings to the identification and use/misuse of my privilege. There are also the things that are being asked of me, as a white writer, by writers of color. First: the need for active listening — as a white person, I need to listen to, truly listen, to what is being said, without the interruption of defensiveness or qualifying statement. This aspect of active listening is especially important, since as soon as I begin to react or defend, I stop listening. Already this act of active listening has woken something in me, something that wasn’t there before: an understanding, a blossoming of compassion. The second need is that of amplification — using my privileges as a white writer to amplify and relay the writing, art, and expression of writers of color.
At this point, students from a local Kimberley high school arrive, filing into the auditorium in surprising silence, wearing their school uniforms, with faces that pour love into my chest. My mother heart is so proud of them! All of us visiting writers are in awe of these students – their demeanor seems to indicate that they are much older than they are – and they provide this space with that unseen vibration of youth and possibilities.
After my lecture, two girls (Desiree and Hope, I will soon learn) move to sit next to me, and, in a quiet way, sitting there, we first begin the unspoken dance of familiarity that people in close proximity perform, and then a whispering discussion of poetry and publication. They are in tenth grade, asking the big questions. I hand them copies of my book Calenday and Desiree asks “Are you a celebrity?” I nearly laugh, “Me? No way, no.” “Oh,” she says, “but I thought when you publish a book you become celebrity?” She leans in. “Oh no. I mean, I wish! But no.”  I look up, and realize that handing my book out has drawn a small crowd. The other high schoolers are hungry for books here, for reading, for authors. I’ve only brought a few books, but there is the thought of sending a whole box of Calenday there in the future.
Later, in another part of the day that seems like a full day in itself, Amy takes me to a STEM after-school program for high school students, run by ex-nuns (wait, can you retire as a nun?) where we will meet four students who are about to head to the States in a month. They are going to Atlanta, Washington D.C., Chicago and Muncie, Indiana. (When asked, I find I can answer all of their questions, except those about Muncie.) In order to prepare for their trip, they have written and memorized key talking points to represent Kimberley’s economic, cultural, environmental and educational aspects. They are also planning to research community projects while there – including solar energy, community gardening, poetry clubs, and the like. Listening to these young people, I try to think back to myself as a 10th grader: I had a secret crush on a senior in my school simply because he wore a They Might Be Giants t-shirt, and I played a lot of soccer. That’s about it. These young students are light years ahead of my 15-year-old self.