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Showing posts from November, 2011

Township seminar at UP

Click here to listen to the podcast Half of the speaking team. Mark Gevisser; Sakhela Buhlungu; Angus Gibson; Mpumelelo Paul Grootboom; Anton Harber; Tsepo wa Marnatu; Chris van Wyk. Gevisser: Place to talk across boundaries. In and outside of university. Across that boundary. All male panel. Ironically women are vulnerable (corrective rape) in township. Apologizes that women will remain vulnerable. Will each speak for 10 mins on their work and how it changes how we think of township. Then the resident scholar will comment on what they said and ask questions that bring it together. Harber: Jokes about the diff between Wits and UP. Doesn't describe Diepsloot as a township. Reasons why he'd wanted to write about Diepsloot. 1994 arose. Product of transitional period. Townships are enforced segregation. Calls it a settlement. Core area is called the reception area (received for allocation). People are stuck there.

Poem: Pretty by Katie Makkai

See the poem performed on YouTube When I was just a little girl, I asked my mother “What will I be? Will I be pretty?” Will I be pretty? Will I be pretty? What comes next? Oh right, will I be rich which is almost pretty depending on where you shop. And the pretty question infects from conception passing blood and breath into cells. The word hangs from our mothers’ hearts in a shrill of fluorescent floodlight of worry. “Will I be wanted? Worthy? Pretty?” But puberty left me this funhouse mirror dryad: teeth set at science fiction angles, crooked nose, face donkey-long and pox-marked where the hormones went finger-painting my poor mother. “How could this happen? You’ll have porcelain skin as soon as we can see a dermatologist.” “You sucked your thumb. That’s why your teeth look like that!” “You were hit in the face with a Frisbee when you were six, otherwise your nose would have been just fine!” Don’t worry; we will get it all fixed she would say, grasping my f