BHEKIZIZWE PETERSON is not only a film script writer (Fools, Zulu Love Letter), he is also a prominent scholar in African literature. I first met him in Durban in November 2006. He was one of the speakers at the already mentioned Memories of Modernity conference, where he talked about the legacy of Peter Abrahams and other black writers from the pre-Apartheid era. On the evening after our presentations, we were the last to leave the restaurant, and since we didn’t fit in the last taxi we did an improvised night walk back to our guest house in Berea, close to the former Cato Manor. We got lost. But in Bheki’s company I felt completely secure. When we meet again a few months later, it’s in his office at the African Literature Department of Wits University, and I ask him to elaborate on his comparison of Peter Abrahams and Frantz Fanon.
“On an empirical level Fanon is obviously the one that is more read and more cited, since he is a strong continental and international figure. But what I found interesting in Abrahams is that he makes observations that in a sense predate The Wretched of the Earth. In Tell Freedom, for instance, he presents a fairly complex elaboration of the psychology of oppression and its implications for constructions of identity; how colonial modernity relied on the rigid segregation and racial policing of space, the circulation of the notions of superiority and inferiority, all often resulting in the ‘nervous conditions’ that Fanon talks about. In my opinion, currently, there are at least two ways in which the intellectual and creative work of black people is frequently under-appreciated. There’s, firstly, this idea that what black artists and black thinkers have been doing was simply to bear witness about their immediate experiences and that, in the post-apartheid period, their ideas and works are passé and have little to add to contemporary debates and challenges. I am working on a re-reading of Solomon Plaatje’s Native Life in South Africa where, over and above chronicling the impact of the Native Land Act of 1913 on Africans, Plaatje deals with complex matters such as the ethics of suffering. Plaatje argues in ways that speak profoundly to our more recent experiences of Sarajevo, Rwanda and Zimbabwe about the complicities that, as humanity, we enter into if we do not intervene in the alleviation of suffering and injustice wherever it manifests itself. And now, post 1994, the assumption and anxiety is that black artists and intellectuals may find themselves in limbo as far as possible themes are concerned. In the popular press you saw this question – I don’t know where it came from – what South African writers, and black writers in particular, were going to write about now that apartheid is ostensibly dead? Therefore, I think Abrahams is very important. He’s insight and influence has been acknowledged by other African writers, Ngugi wa Thiong’O for instance. But in South Africa, you’d be hard pressed to find a study of Peter Abrahams’ novels. And that applies to a lot of South African writers, like Alex La Guma, who are neglected. So, my emphasis on Abrahams, Dhlomo, Plaatje and writers that wrote between 1900-1960 was again to try to draw on and validate preceding generations and their ideas. I think it’s very dangerous if my generation, or even the next generation, assume that they are the path-bearers and pioneers. There is a long tradition of very important creative and intellectual work that, whatever its limitations, has to be not only resuscitated but also defended within the current status quo.”
So what you say is that there isn’t really continuity, but a rupture in this tradition…
“The continuity is very thin because, in crucial ways, the projects mounted under segregation and apartheid, did not facilitate much institutional knowledge or consolidation of black creative or intellectual traditions. But I wouldn’t say that it amounts to a rupture, because there is an awareness, even if it tends to be fugitive rather than deep in its nature. Even at the height of apartheid censorship and repression, prohibited ideas and texts continued to circulate. But we tend less and less to revisit the traditions that should still speak to us and against which, to whatever degree, we still need to measure ourselves against. I think that if you want to understand questions around race, culture, identity, within a globalizing world, my sense is that first generation of African intellectuals are crucial and instructive because they were at the cusp of tremendous social, political and economic change at the turn of the century. I use to say that they were at the crossroads of history and had to master ‘the poetics of the crossroad’. Having to think through and negotiate between a complex socio-political condition that they were invested in but that did not deliver on its promises of ‘civilization’ and yet at the same time knowing or feeling that it wouldn’t remain the way it is. That the impasse and its convulsions had to be transcended. There are many similarities between that moment and the moment now, when this country and the continent is trying to negotiate an independent path, whether in economics or in culture, against global pressures and forces. The previous turn of the century was a very globalized moment and world as well.”
At the present crossroads, what are the main options or alternatives that you see for the future?
“Well, it remains a very layered and over-determined moment, meaning that you’re dealing with so many nodes of socio-economic contradictions, of power. First of all, in the South African case, I still think that there is a need to figure out how to cease to be just a state and to become a nation. We have a state that all citizens are subject to. But the sense of a national community is still very fragile and divided, with very unequal access to the means of life, to human rights and cultural rights. So that is still a major issue… Because if you don’t want to even start to imagine a different sense of the idea of a South African nation, what you are saying is that the current de facto sense of the nation, which is strongly under the sway of whiteness, is the one that should prevail, and I have a problem with that. And that applies to a whole lot of issues.”
Would you say that it’s historically determined - that South Africa at this moment needs a national project?
“Yes … It’s just simply saying: How do you move forward? Any re-articulation of the nation needs to deal with where and how the majority of the people are at this point in time. Whether you call it a national project or not, there are social, political and economic changes that are imperative in order to address the deep levels of inequity and inequality between different sectors of the society. Now, as far as national identity is concerned, many intellectuals and writers would, understandably, be wary and skeptical of that kind of social engineering. Many, as you know, see the notion of the nation-state as archaic, nationalism as either a spent or dangerous force, identity as multiple and always in a process of becoming, and truth and history as provisional, etc.etc. Ultimately, the insights of such positions, and some are simplistic and selective renditions of metropolitan theories, need to be considered against the specificities and challenges of the local situation and they need to be differentiated from those seeking to rationalize all forms of social paralysis. I am against the strategies and politics of deferment that usually informs such critiques that, in my opinion, amount to new strategies of containment, of maintaining the status quo. On the level of national identity or imaginary, for instance, any ‘national project’ needs to acknowledge and to assert an African identity, an African cultural ethos. Schools, universities and spaces of art and culture need to have a greater commitment to the teaching of African literature, performance, music, visual and film culture. Instead, this intervention is always recast into questions such as ‘are you saying that Shakespeare is irrelevant?’ In fact, I always say that we who have been working against the previous order and its many forms of eurocentricism, we have been the most experimental, the most exciting, the most interested in how we can incorporate our own creative work in not only the national, but the continental and the global creative imaginary. That’s why I come back to the first generation of writers. Again, they had to master different forms of knowledge and artistic practices at the same time in order to survive. And for me that is the exciting legacy that we carry. Whereas those who are in power do not feel they have to master anything of those that they have subjugated. And paradoxically that becomes their limitation and parochialism. Because we’ve had to go through the African texts, we’ve had to go through Shakespeare, and whatever was deemed high culture, but the opposite wasn’t necessarily true.”
It’s interesting what you say, since literature historically has played a decisive role in shaping national imaginaries. Coming from Europe, where you have this general notion that literature is in crisis, one is struck by the impression that literature here is thriving and dynamic. Do you think that has to do with what you’re just saying?
“Somehow I think what has tended to happen … I mean this is obviously a very complex question that you’re posing… From the turn of the century it’s in the imagination that all sorts of experiences and desires could be articulated. You see, the imagination insists on deserting ‘reality’ because of its protocols and limitations but in its very flight from history, the imagination remains chained to and, finally, returns to reality with a sense of estrangement that is informed, hopefully, by an insurrectionary vision. So when you look at the marginal spaces that black artists and writers – or black people in general – occupied and were then able to voice themselves, construct senses of self and secondly also engage with the oppressive processes that were going on. The margins, in bell hooks’ formulation, became not only a site of deprivation but also radical possibilities. For me the arts have also always been the one major stage where ideas in what you could call the black public sphere have been worked through. So it’s through the arts and through culture and spirituality that people have been engaging with these larger than just pro-state or anti-state sort of issues. I think the arts have always had that. And if you want to have a sense of not only the pulse of the black experience but also the shaping of that experience, it’s in the literary magazines, music, paintings and dramas that you’d need to go. So, the arts are fundamental … and this is my kind of challenge to artists, that it’s always important to deal with issues that the larger society is reluctant to deal with. An obvious example is the TRC. That’s one process that on the official level, or the national level, has taken a particular journey, structure and logic, and within that it has achieved a hell of a lot. It really has been able to create a level of awareness, access to information, and ability to think through a number of issues relating to what happened in this country. But again, for all sorts of complicated reasons, including the way it unfolded, its theological form and juridical premises, it has only scratched the surface of the many other levels and dimensions of what people went through and needed to articulate. And the arts become crucial in calling into question the TRC and addressing some of its and the nation’s fault lines. Some of the uncomfortable notions that we’re starting to deal with include questioning what this ‘Rainbow nation’ is, how we deal with the past – especially when you’re dealing with violence and trauma. Some people would argue that OK, it’s been acknowledged, it’s been done, let’s move on!”
That was what I was going to ask you. Would you say that that is happening in the arts now? Or are writers and artists tired of the TRC and apartheid, and wish to close that chapter and move on?
“I’d say that the idea that you can close the chapter and move on, that ‘after all we have a society and a nation to build, so let’s all put our shoulders to the wheel’, that type of argument comes from certain sectors of the population. It’s definitely the position of the opposition parties, and a significant part of the white community. Therefore it’s important for the arts to interrogate that. You need to reflect on the continuing high level of not only crime but of violence in general in this country. Maybe it cannot just be simply explained away by referring to socioeconomic conditions. Maybe one is dealing with a wide range of brutalized people, people that still have to negotiate their experiences through the recourse to different forms of violence. And I use violence here in its broadest sense. Poverty in a sense is violence. There’s a whole lot of positive vibes about the changes that have happened, and the possibilities that are there for people. But I think many black people find that they are not even close to the gates, or they don’t even qualify to enter the gates of the society.”
There is a lost generation.
“Yeah! Lost in the sense of societal exclusion but not in terms of their need to survive, their hopes and dreams. And what happens to them? If we don’t find both creative and social projects to address their conditions, they will be the ghosts that haunt the future. They re not going to just disappear.”
Historically, the usual way of dealing with that problem has been sending them to war.
“Yes. That is the easy way. It’s interesting how important different forms of violence are to the reproduction of a society. And it’s frightening. And that’s what I find frightening about the silences, the awkward issues that we’re not prepared to address. One has got to be careful, because the danger for me is that we can confuse my position, the experiences of the black elite, as being an indicator of what has happened in the society. That is dangerous, because the options that I have should not delude me about what ordinary people are going through. And I don’t even need to imagine it. I see it and read about it all the time. And we’ve got to resist therefore just to talk about ‘law and order’ as euphemism for the negative profiling of especially black youth. Believe me, I am for law and order, but there are certain responses to what we’re going through that are just as fascist as the apartheid regime. And in terms of the creative work that we do, we need to disturb those kinds of comfort zones.”
When you talk about the arts, how do you see literature in relation to other art forms?
“For me it’s not so much a question of genre, it’s more the power of the imagination. What does your impulse, your use of the imagination, allow you to do? Firstly, of course, it allows you to not just reflect on experience but to think through and try to capture issues of desire as well. That’s when you enter the realm of the future and its possibilities. And in contrast to journalism and other forms, it gives you a sense of the sensory, it gives you access to the emotional, embodied knowledge of what people experienced and are going through, and that to me is extremely crucial. The second thing of course is the arts’ ability, through the imagination, to transcend whatever social or creative borders that exist. It’s in the arts that you are going to get another sense for instance of this city than what you’ll get from city planners or the municipality or even journalists. And for me the third thing, which is very very important, is its role in creating either utopian or dystopian visions, I mean the idea that what prevails now is not it. That to me is the power of literature. … I was reading an interesting comment made by a resident in one of the favelas of Rio, that to be poor is very demanding, and when you’re poor you’ve got to imagine space where there is none. That’s really powerful, because in a sense that one-room shack still has to fulfill all your needs and desires, and therefore you have to renegotiate the use and sense of space both physically and mentally. I imagine that it’s the same in a prison. And this is also what you do in the arts, this ability to create another world on top of the real one and, it is precisely in the tensions and contradictions between the two worlds, that insight, memory, fear and hope reside. That is perhaps the greatest truth. And it’s a truth that always has you in the middle of your problem, isn’t it? Because even at the moment when you transcend it, it continues to remind you of what your experiences and conditions are. So in a sense, in as much as the truth may be partial, provisional, depending on the vantage points from which we try to apprehend it, that does not nullify the quest for truth, neither does it justify peddling lies in the name of relativist and cynical attitudes towards the notion of truth.
Coming back to the TRC and literature as a way of negotiating the tension between memory and trauma, what strikes me is this obsession with reconciliation – which in a Latin American context would be very difficult to understand. Does that have to do with this ambition to build a nation, or a national project?
“No, I wouldn’t agree with that. I don’t think the emphasis on reconciliation is necessarily a wide-spread and popular one. It’s probably more interesting to pose the question on its head: Why do we need reconciliation? What is it that made us not to be reconciled? Have we taken care of the business that created the divisions? That’s when I think the issue becomes much more complicated for both the state and the church, as well, because reconciliation can easily become just an easy way of not dealing with the real consequences and the real ways in which the past is still very strongly present in this country. So, unless those things are resolved, what are you reconciling? And I’m not just talking about reconciliation in terms of races. Have the disparities been reconciled or erased? I don’t think so. Have those who’ve been victimized had any kind of redress? I don’t think so. What kind of reconciliation are we talking about? Are we just expecting everyone else to reconcile themselves to the idea that the state needs everyone to walk in line in order for it to achieve its objectives? For me that’s another form of again continuing violence in the society. Even the little things have not yet been finalized. Even the few people who actually appeared in front of the TRC, who were then supposed to get some kind of acknowledgment in the form of reparations, even on the bureaucratic level, that has not been finalized. And I think it’s more than a shame. If not even those one-dimensional things could be achieved, then what about the range of much more complicated issues? So I think the idea of reconciliation, as noble as it may be, is open to very opportunistic and dangerous uses. And it’s obviously again those that stand to benefit more from moving on that end up becoming the key champions of reconciliation. That is my unease with it. You know the kind of theological input has so many assumptions that one needs to question. And that’s what we try to do in a project such as Zulu Love Letter. The idea that you can draw a parallel between, say, the nation, as the body politic, and the individual body and then insist that they remember the past in the same way, and that they heal from the trauma of the past in the same manner. And we try to say no, it doesn’t work that way! The state and the person do not grieve in the same manner. So if the state as a body has been able to distance itself because of political imperatives or expediencies, or through the practice of willful amnesia, it shouldn’t expect that every other part of society, including individuals, are in line with that whole process. … Some of the TRC films, interestingly enough, make similar pleas, implying that ‘he who is without sin, let him cast the first stone’. Such movies try to show that we are all implicated and, in the process, they draw equivalences between perpetrators and victims.”
Yes, but that’s exactly what strikes me, not only in these TRC movies, as you call them: that the focus is all on Reconciliation and not on Truth. And my incisive question is: Should literature and art at all deal with reconciliation? Mustn’t truth be its first concern?
“I think, ideally, yes. Because the truth will suggest a much more meaningful reconciliation. And a more meaningful reconciliation for me is one that speaks about the truth of the powerless, of those who experienced the violence and the trauma. That’s who we need to atone to. It must be a truth that also speaks about redress and about current veracities such as non-existent or inadequate housing, education, health care and so on. The forms of structural violence that we continue to unleash on the poor while we pay lip-service to democracy, human rights and globalization. Part of my problem is that the logic and the needs of the dominant forces in our society tend to impose themselves on the rest of the society. Again, because of the idea that we start from a divided racial past, we always talk about black and white. My point is that there are so many other forms of reconciliation that are crucial. There are many black people who just need to be reconciled with themselves, there are many families who need to effect forms of reconciliation within the family. There are so many things, especially in terms of violence and trauma, within the black community that need to be dealt with. Because that’s where a large part of this violence played itself out, to many contradictory and painful consequences. All of us have to deal with these things. We all have to negotiate all sorts of very painful and difficult experiences. And here I’m not talking about in relationship to the state, but in relationship to ourselves and those who have been close to us.”
Well, it’s for obvious reasons that the white minority wants to stress reconciliation, and to let things remain the way they are. But isn’t there also within the black community a reluctance to go through this process and perhaps a fear of what it may provoke, precisely because the worst violence was the so called black-on-black violence? This fear of the dissolution of society must be a real fear.
“Yes, the crucial question - and I think that is the case even in Latin America – is how do you engage in these processes without reigniting the possibility of a return to violence and the political crises it engenders. Because again, when you have so much unfinished business and at the same time so many different and unequal accesses to power, and even the capacity to unleash violence, that is one of the major stumbling blocks. The issue is that that prudent decision on what to do may be just a kind of re-inscription of what you are trying to address. It is very complicated, but that’s what I’m referring to, that we went through experiences within the black community that far exceed what is referred to as black-on-black violence: families, communities and oppositional groups were divided, because of different ideas on how to respond to apartheid. You could have a member of a family who decided to stand up against the government, who might end up in exile. But the regime, in order to pursue its objectives, did not always target those who were conscientized and often times directed their terror at those that the regarded as the weakest link in the chain. The main area of acting upon you was through your family. It does not matter how you justify the correct decision to resist apartheid, when you know and when you’ve seen what the rest of your family members have had to go through because of your decision. That’s again a very difficult thing to deal with post the experiences. So, that’s the way in which we have all been, for good and for bad reasons, complicit. And that’s why I am so insistent on those things. It’s not from a position of arrogance that I’m questioning the common sense understanding of reconciliation. It’s actually from a very frightened, humble and compassionate awareness of what still needs to be resolved within the black community … And this is also the painful thing about truth, is it not? In the sense that it demands you to walk down paths that often you would rather not. But it’s again running away from other sorts of terrible fictions, where there’s more explicit lies than the truthful lie of fiction.”
These objectives, are they important for you in your own work?
“They are not only important, they are crucial, whether you are an academic or an artist. In academia we like to talk about rigor, about the truth as constructed via genres and institutional processes, etc, but important as such qualifications may be, they should not negate the pursuit for truth, and the issue is not necessarily that you’re looking for a singular truth, or a final truth. It’s just to say: Probe! You have to probe, and it’s via the process of probing that you move away from the one-dimensional and simplistic. And for me the impulse in the arts is, more than the idea of truth as a final destination I suppose, the idea of always being able to question. It’s not the Truth that I’m proclaiming, it’s more this kind of probing spirit. And part of the probing is, as I said when we started talking about Peter Abrahams, that one makes clear that you’re not always dealing with absences, with deficits. Part of the probing also involves celebrating what we’ve been able to achieve, whatever the circumstances. And I’m sure many people have observed this. For all the kind of global misconceptions of South Africa, people are always struck by the urgency, and the sense that things matter, when they come here. In a sense we’re still historically naïve enough to think that we can change things. And that needs to be reinforced against the global kind of … I don’t know whether cynicism is the right word, because I think that generally people do care, and the world is much more complicated than I sometimes make it out to be, looking at other countries from a distance. When I come to these countries I find that the people are fellow travelers, with the same concerns.”
How do you see the relation between the two practices? Is there a connection at all?
“There is a connection! I can only speak for myself, but I find the articulation between the two very interesting. I feel the need at times that some of my concerns and experiences can only be expressed in a creative format. An academic paper won’t do, and that’s where the impulse enters into the writing of scripts, producing and so on. Other times, once I’ve gone through the creative process, I feel a similar need to address some of the issues in a more academic way. In both cases, I feel I am engaged, at the very least, in processes of retrieval and reconstruction, what H.I.E Dhlomo, another important intellectual and dramatist, called ‘assembling the broken gourds’.”
Have you ever considered combining the two methodologies in the same work?
“I think I do. There’s always a kind of criss-crossing. Often times, each method is shot-through with the tactics of the other. When I write some of my academic stuff I think I write from a much more creative source and point of view. I don’t even necessarily want to follow the structure of what would be assumed to be the protocols of scholarship. Sometimes I feel an experimental style is better for a specific kind of topic and intention. And one of the things I always expect from people in terms of my academic work, which is the same as with creative work, is that they are not too happy with my endings, because there is rarely a conclusion. Well I think there is, but not in a sense of this neatly tied up resolution…”
There’s no reconciliation?
“Yeah (laughs) … And, without defending what could be the limitations of my creative work, I think sometimes people do not appreciate, or are not able to connect to, the weight of tradition that comes into a creative work. And it could be all sorts of knowledge, not only academic or intellectual knowledge; it could be even, say, the knowledge of the arts, you know, where you are able to draw on so many other artists’ work. So in that sense my creative work is also informed by processes of observation, processes of thinking, of appropriation and so on. In Zulu Love Letter we try to sort of subvert and use ideas of Shakespeare but within a particular context. One of the security policemen is made to cite extracts from Hamlet and Macbeth, and the idea there was… there’s a tendency in this country to simplify, you know the violence of apartheid as having been just the violence of the Afrikaner … So instead of condemning this security police-man as a pathological Boer, we have him quote Shakespeare. But again, for me, that’s a knowledge that you’re drawing from one terrain to the other terrain as well. I don’t know what you’d gain from trying to police the borders between the two, as both an academic and as an artist.”
It’s interesting, and I don’t know if that is typical for South Africa, but I noticed that most writers are academics on the side. Which is very unusual in Sweden. Many Swedish writers even take an anti-academic position, and would rather work as journalists than as university teachers.
“You’re joking! (laughs) … Now, look, you have elements of that here, too. But it’s not very strong. Firstly because for most black writers even access to the academy is difficult. But for me it’s a kind of strategic location. Which means for instance that I can do the kind of films that people might not be able to do if they have to deal with day-to-day pressures. For many other film-makers the struggle for survival means that they end up doing all sorts of projects and things that they would rather not do, and the projects that they are passionate about tend always to be put aside. And it’s really tragic. So, I appreciate the space that is created by the academic work. And, I must say, I’m not here just as a solution. This is also one of the things that I have always been interested in. And one of the models that I had when I grew up was Professor Es´kia Mphahlele, who was a writer and an academic, like many of the other great African writers, Ngugi and Chinua Achebe, so there was always this thin line between the two.”
But film production is much more expensive than writing books… Don’t you have problems finding financiers?
“Finance is a major nightmare, and what happens is that if you want to do stories that are not seen to be commercial enough or not part of what the mainstream industry wants, that complicates it even much more. And that is why there are big gaps between the productions that we do. I mean, our first production – Fools - was made in ’97, and I think it took close to ten years to pull that project off. Zulu Love Letter came in ‘04, which was quicker. So, hopefully in our case there is a momentum, and people start to see a track record, and producers may start to express a desire for collaboration and so on.”
Tell me a little about your current film project!
“We’re busy with a feature-length documentary on a South African visual artist, Dumile Feni. He was rightly or wrongly known as the Goya of the townships. He left South Africa in 1968, spent over twenty years in exile and passed away just before he was due to return to South Africa in 1991. So we’re exploring his life and his work, but also trying to structure it dramatically by looking at it from the point of view of his daughter who had never met him. When he left the country her mother was seven months pregnant. So it’s a journey for her and for us, about reconnecting with Dumile’s work. But again, as I said with regard to Abrahams and that first generation, his work speaks about very profound issues that go way beyond the simple representation of apartheid. It looks very powerfully at questions of relationships between man, woman and family… especially in relation to the politics of exile His work is also very powerful in its exploration of different forms of alienation, with regards to the black male figure, issues around his sense of powerlessness, of emasculation and so on. So, again, these are themes that are very resonant now. The whole issue of masculinity, which strikes me as being fundamental when dealing with the strengths and anxieties of young people today…. As we talked about earlier, Law and Order is often just a euphemism for young black men. What do we do with these young black men? How do we embrace them with love and make them understand that the sharing of love is not confused with being soft? I mean, they live in a society where they have constantly been projected as dangerous, and it’s tough for them to deal with these kinds of conceptions, because they encounter them every day. So Dumile’s work grapples with all these issues and provides an interesting case study on how to see their own dilemmas via someone else’s experiences. And also from the perspective of crossing genres it’s an interesting project. It’s not only interesting, it’s a big headache.”
You call it a feature-length documentary. But does it have fictional elements?
“Eh, no. The fictional element is going to be in the way we are going to structure it, stylistically and thematically. For instance, Dumile was a passionate lover of music, especially jazz. So music was a major catalyst or muse for him. Yet his own work was a great source of inspiration for a lot of South African writers and poets, such as Wally Serote for instance. So in the ‘60s and in his life there’s this kind of incredible fusion or mixing of genres and practices, where writers are proclaiming that ‘if you want to understand my prose, look at Dumile!’ And Dumile says ‘you should listen to jazz, Coltrane! Dudu Pukwana! Etc.’ And for me that’s another way in which genres or boundaries get dissolved. The struggle then is how to capture that within the documentary form. And Ramadan Suleman, who is the director, and myself, feel that the style and the structure of the documentary should capture that spirit, and that’s where we have huge headaches at the moment. It may be easier to proclaim these things in words. But as you know, once you’re stuck with a creative project, it has a life and a logic of its own, and it’s not necessarily obedient in listening to you, or at what your original intention was …”
this interview is published with kind permission of oscar hemer and bhekizizwe peterson
