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RISING YOUNG SOUTH AFRICAN POET
GABEBA BADEROON
www.gabeba.com
PRESENTS READING
OFF-STAGE PERFORMANCES SALON
Kent Watkins
February 4, 2006
Friends of Off-Stage Performances, a private salon for the arts, were mesmerized by the poetry readings of Gabeba Baderoon this Saturday, Feb. 4. She charmed the audience with her award-winning pieces, accompanied by witty observations of their genesis. On Thursday, she had served on an African literature panel at Bard College in Upstate New York.
Ms. Baderoon is a recent winner of the DaimlerChrysler Award for South African Poetry, and her many achievements have been obtained over a short time as her star has shot to the top in the international poetry circles.
The poems that she read for this evening consisted of:
True, about the artistry in ordinary things, like the 'sweet geometry' of a tiled floor laid by a master craftsman.
Witness, inspired by an overheard encounter between two men, and events and people who slip off the edge of attention. The poem shows the way men give each other 'silence to lean their bodies against'.
I Cannot Myself, about the practical and deeply philosophical borders one crosses at passport control, where the speaker concludes 'I cannot myself be a question'.
War Triptych: Silence, Glory, Love, inspired by the idea that the images we see on the television screen actually seem to take us further from the people who appear there. This poem deals with human connectedness and loss; an Iraqi mother who lost her daughter to war, a Palestinian father who hears his son died in the Intifada and the idea that the losses of war reverberate forever.
Old Photographs - a woman looks at a photograph of her her husband taken by a woman who loved him in the past, and realizes how the past remains with us.
These were from her first two published books (Dream in the Next Body (2005); and Museum of Ordinary Life, 2005) and from her new book appearing in April, A Hundred Silences, Kwila Books/Snail Press, 2006). Gabeba is also a scholar, with a Ph.D. from the University of Cape Town, and has written for the media. Gabeba held the Guest Writer Fellowship at the Nordic Africa Institute in Sweden in 2005.
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