Q&A ︎︎︎

When home creates time.

A conversation between Siviwe James and Thulile Gamedze

Siviwe James
︎ ︎︎︎ ︎

Thulile Gamedze
︎ ︎︎︎ ︎

In the lead up to Siviwe James’ debut solo exhibition Ubuhle ngaphaya kwameva, she sat down with fellow cultural worker Thulile Gamedze, and had a candid conversation about her life experience so far, as well as the powerful creative work she has made as a result. Below is a condensed and edited version of their conversation.   

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Thulile Gamedze [TG]: You work across disciplines and bring a lot of things together [including fashion, video, writing, podcasting, photography, archival research, and oral histories]. Do you have a core imperative?

Siviwe James [SJ]: I think the core thing is wanting to tell stories. Now that I'm no longer making plans for my life and I'm pursuing everything else, storytelling becomes a central place to bring it all back together…Letting something be heard, letting people listen back to themselves.

TG: I like what you're saying about people listening back to themselves. Can you say more about your approach to listening and hearing?

SJ: In 2021, 2022, I was going through heavy grief. My husband had passed away in 2020, so I had moved back home. We had had a custody issue before that, and I had to deal with the police, judges, courts…Everyone was listening to my perpetrators, not bothered to hear my story. I had an awakening moment listening to an episode of the Syntalk podcast called “The Mystery of Violence”—hearing them talk about how within violence, we find humiliated people. That sense of humiliation from not being heard sits within us—from justice systems overlooking injustice, and perpetrators always being allowed to speak over victims, and at times act as victims themselves. No one hears the victim.

Through this body of work [Ubuhle ngaphaya kwameva] I was trying to open up the room for us to hear back from that silenced person. By making their memories prominent and reshaping them for a new telling, space is created for compassionate listening. No one wants to hear from the black woman's position, no one wants us to voice things when they are uncomfortable. We have to be perfect. Being married taught me how silencing this role can be for a woman. Through the work, I attempt to make space for people and stories that aren’t usually heard.

TG: I came across you talking about ‘decolonial listening’, and Rolando Vázquez.

SJ: Vázquez says it so nicely. He speaks about listening as an act of humbling one's position in order to relate better to other worlds. You know, it's about foregoing your initial response.

TG: You talked just before about how you stopped making plans in your life. I guess that when you enter a practice of deep listening (and forgoing your immediate responses), capitalist approaches to time and plans just don't function anymore?

SJ: Yeah.

TG: So I was thinking about what listening means for your time...How does time operate in your practice?

SJ: For me, there is no concept of time in the traditional sense, as in managing my output. I've been shown that if I'm really here for the story, then at some point I have to neglect this thing called time. And that’s frustrating when you've got demands to meet—but the best work I've done is stuff I've sat on...Stuff where someone's been saying to me, “Hey brah, we've got to get this podcast out now—when are we seeing some edits?” And I'm going, “I don't like it...I'm gonna sit on it...I'm gonna push the date back...”

By the time you finish the work, it feels like you’ve honoured it...I'm not responsible to time—to that machine. I'm responsible to the people telling me the story, to the place in the universe where that story is going to end up sitting. That's my sense of loyalty. It’s important because no one has spent this time with our stories. It comes back to acknowledging how much space has been given to black bodies, to us. These are our stories—we need to insist on a different timeline.

TG: I deeply respect people who are not interested in adhering to industrial time in this way. I had a friend who passed away in 2017. She was always late, just available to be captured by various pockets of time—one thing leading to another, etc...But whenever she arrived, she was always so present, always really existing in time in a way that was very special and rare.

SJ: For me, the irony is that as much as I love this attitude towards time, I'm the most punctual person you'll ever find.

TG: This is interesting.

Home has helped me pick up the pieces.

SJ: I enjoy being present. I went home recently to see my dad's eldest brother, and to go sit at my dad's grave—something I've been doing for the past three years.

It's an activity of time...planning the trip, the journey. Most people are like, “Why don't you get someone to drive you there?” But I enjoy itexi—it's such a slow activity, to sit through the taxi’s delays...Getting out to catch another one, carrying icooler box with groceries. It's the experience...I find myself getting lost in that. Since coming home, I'm getting to catch up with certain moments in time.

TG: Interesting.

SJ: These journeys feel like travelling through time. I mean, it's a route I traveled as a child. So there's been some sort of reconciliation with the past and present and future. There's so much healing when we're in the process of living with time.

TG: So you said that you moved back home after your husband passed away?

SJ: I did. Christo passed away in August 2020 and around the end of that month we were back. Christo and I, we had such a fast relationship but it also felt like we had known each other for way longer than we had. That relationship definitely made me understand racial and social politics that I had been naive about. I went to the Model C schools, grew up with white kids — I’m a suburban girl for crying out loud — but I was gravely misinformed or just naive to the complexities of my personhood in this country. We weren’t the sort of family that discussed race at home and uMama always taught me to treat all people from varied walks of life with respect. I was very naive to it—but when you're the only black at the dinner table, you really are the only black at the dinner table. And there's gonna be times when you need to decide if this is really what you want.

TG: Yes.

SJ: I tried very hard to stay in Joburg. But during COVID, I got retrenched. I then started a food business (Eat In) to keep things going, but it was just so much work. I was tired—I was absolutely tired. There was custody stuff in the middle of this, and so when Christo passed away, it's like my life was just saying to me, “Stop”. Stop. You're doing too much. Just stop. My mom was like, “There's nothing really left for you here”. And she wasn't wrong...You know when you're hanging onto the picture for dear life, and the cost of hanging on isn’t worth it? I'd lost so much weight, I was fighting for something that didn't want me anymore, and I had to let go. I left, came back home...It was the best decision ever.

TG: Yeah?

SJ: We wouldn't be having this phone call if I didn't. I wouldn't have done this work, because I wouldn't have had time to sit and listen to my wounds. It doesn't happen when you are living on your own, paying rent, dealing with adulting, having a child…

Home has helped me pick up the pieces. It has brought me back to my dad, allowed me to reconcile with him in spirit. I hadn't seen my dad's grave since we buried him—and he passed away when I was eight. There was just a lot of fetching myself that was necessary.

TG: Home created time.

SJ: When we left Joburg, Dr. Erica (de Greef) from African Fashion Research Institute reached out to me. We had known each other from my college days at LISOF and had remained in touch over the years. She told me that they were doing a short course titled “What is African Fashion?” That course was the wake up moment, the CPR that I needed.

It took me on a journey of unpacking the things that had made me bitter about fashion design. The biggest thing was the disconnect between how I would have written about my work, and then how bloggers would translate what they saw on the runway. There was an injustice being done. We weren't really investing in a language of clothing realised from our standpoint as Africans. The course was a great exercise to think about language, positionality, and the sense of agency we can have over our work...What do we mean when we say fashion from Africa or ‘African fashion’? Are we talking to ourselves? Are we speaking to the ‘outside’? That course turned the dial for me...

TG: Where did it lead?

SJ: Erica would encourage writing, and send readings. I would share stuff with her, like digital doodles—“Hey, look what I did.” And she would like it, nurturing a lot of those rogue thoughts. Often, if she was offered a presentation slot, she would put my name forward. I was still building language, just messing around. But after a few presentations, I started to take myself seriously. And it's been a free fall ever since.

TG: Amazing. 

SJ: I've been fortunate with my working relationship with Erica, as it has opened me up to new important relationships like the one I have with uSihle Sogaula, who is a curator and a fashion thinker. uSihle and I started chatting in 2021 when I proposed we pitch for Design Future Labs 2022. We found a common ground in our desire to sit with Xhosa sensibilities and locate ways of making our culture and language more present in places that continue to exclude it or treat it as fringe. This has grown in the last two years to include us working collaboratively in our practices as we explore how we make our everyday experiences and domestic memories a part of our research work. The exchange has challenged me to not just think about this work in English, but to make isiXhosa prevalent in the same way—not italicising it. What does it mean for isiXhosa to exist in academia without us translating it? Now we are here, making academics uncomfortable.

TG: Yes. I think that there should be more of an insistence on writing one’s own work, and being in conversation with the cultural, historic, social worlds in which we locate ourselves…

SJ: It doesn't have to be high brow—it's the act of putting what's inside somewhere, so we can trace you, so you can trace yourself, and so we don't misinterpret you. If we aren't documenting and writing these glossaries of our processes, we keep leaving that void for the next years.

TG: Yes.

SJ: I'm quite intentional about looking for black writers. Unathi Kondile grapples with the idea of how black students go to these [white, Eurocentric] academic institutions.¹ They'll have creative work that is informed by their cultures and languages...But because the place they are presenting in is white, most of them struggle to relay their ideas fluently. Maybe they get marked down, or fail on presentation...You feel lost in translation as you go through the process of your own work.

I want to insist on creating that holding room—and writing is a form of holding, a way to anchor certain thoughts.

TG: Yes.

SJ: Hlonipha Mokoena has got a text about Chabani Manganyi’s work titled “Writing Against Oneself”, and that reminded me of the importance of my own autobiography—being the one that's telling the story, rather than someone else jotting down my history, and interpreting the things they’ve seen.²

I'm also grappling with how to balance the written with the oral, since we're trying to bring back other forms of knowledge-making...

TG: I suppose colonialism erased many creative practices that would have been engaged in oral history-making and cultural life—now it’s all been specialised and sliced up...We have the image on the white wall, and the explanatory text. There would be no specific need for writing as mediation, if our creative practices were already socially and culturally immersed in their own worlds, mediated by daily life...

SJ: Yeah. It is in the writing that we're making the language of the work more apparent, and validating it, as well as the culture and its meaning. Writing is a preservation. When we're doing it for ourselves, we're preserving something...

TG: Yes. And writing helps us value otherwise invisible things—I’m thinking about feminist work, theory around relationships, power, labour, storytelling, women's practices, queer practices…

SJ: One day I want to do a sound installation where I use these recordings from my old phone...Kitchen conversations, the spaces where you probably receive the most insights, where your spiritual meaning is found—that is where the counseling is, where problem solving happens. I want to prize those domestic moments without it becoming voyeuristic.

TG: Tell me more.

SJ: There was a morning when I was in my mom's room and I played her a video of women singing emcimbini. I was asking her to translate it and expand on the meaning. I was recording her, but then somewhere in between this, we started talking about her and her dad. She poured her heart out to me—it was such a painful and yet beautiful moment. A couple of months later, we had traveled home to visit her mother’s sister emakhaya. I was in bed and remembered the audio...I started stitching this video together with it, and I finished a rough draft. My mom walks in while I'm listening to it and she stops. She's like, “wait, what?”She sat and she heard back from herself, and something happened...She was moved. She wasn't expecting it. She felt heard in that act of listening. There was something there for her to be able to visit with, to reconcile with that very heavy conversation.

TG: She heard from herself...That’s beautiful—and I think we have moved full circle.

Tell me what you are planning to show for this project.

SJ: This show is titled Ubuhle ngaphaya kwameva, and it's a body of work I started two years ago. It's grief work… but it also visibilises the journey to re-existence after grief. I have pieced together the memories that mattered most to me during that grieving period...Voicing the parts of the story that I felt no one wanted to hear, and listening back to myself. There is a lot of Christo, a lot of myself. The print series is made up of these visual memoryscapes that collapse multiple memories into one scene. Each one tells their own version of what was, and some attempt to make way for what will be…

The presentation also explores finding safety in myself. It deals with the idea of what marriage is, especially from cultural and racial perspectives...What gets lost and what remains—making sense of memories.

Everything I do is grounded in memory work. I'm fascinated in figuring out how to instigate memory that doesn't make it confrontational, traumatising the person experiencing that memory. How can we facilitate the process of remembering—sitting with that memory, being in dialogue with that memory? I don't think we ever ‘move on’ from the memories themselves. We find ways of moving with them. We store them, and then events come up and they get brought back to the surface...

They become companions. 

1. Unathi Kondile, “Ukuqhuqh Inkwethu yobuKoloniyali: Getting Rid of the Thick Layer of Colonial Dandruff on our Heads,” On Curating 49, “Decolonial Propositions” (2021):38–45.
2.  Hlonipha Mokoena, “Writing against oneself: Chabani Manganyi as a Black autobiographical subject”, Psychology in Society 52 (2016):85–89.