Dimakatso Sedite: With poetry, there is nowhere to hide

Dimakatso Sedite was born in Bloemfontein, South Africa. Her poetry has appeared in Teesta Review, Brittle Paper, New Coin, Stanzas, Kalahari Review, BKO, Botsotso, Aerodrome, BNAP and elsewhere. She was the joint winner of the 2019 DALRO Prize. She holds an MA in Research Psychology from the University of the Witwatersrand. Yellow Shade (Deep South, 2021) is her first book of poems.

Yellow Shade is your first collection, but I am curious about how long you have been writing for.

I have been writing intermittently for myself since I was about 19 years old, or even earlier, if the short story I wrote when I was 10 is anything to go by. I would write mainly short stories and some poems, throughout my 20s and 30s, but did not see myself as a writer by any stretch. It was only in 2016, 27 years later, that I decided to submit my work for publication in journals. So, in that way, I’m a bit of an anomaly. All poems in this book were written between 2016 and 2020.

It has already been said that there is a strong physicality in your poems and you have said that writing a poem for you starts with an image rather than an idea. What is your process for writing poetry?

I find it easiest to write early in the morning, before the clutter of the day starts to clog my mind. That is the time I am least guarded, because I have not yet put on my coat of daily defences. I write a poem in bits and pieces, so a single poem can take me weeks or even months to write. When clichés start creeping between the lines, I pause the writing, to be resumed when new bits of the poem enter my head again. At times I struggle to find the right word(s) for the imagery I see in my head, and will not end the poem until I find that word. The self-editing usually starts with the sixth or seventh draft, and may be repeated six to seven times before the poem becomes ready. There are some poems that do not need to be worked this hard, but they are few.

I try to make the ordinary look strange, to surprise, to heighten the reader’s senses, all with the aim of trying to make the reader feel something. My poems have a hint of vulnerability about them, the kind that carries a surprising resilience within it.

I am very taken by your use of language; I thought I had detected some influence of Dylan Thomas.

I find your observation to be interesting because Dylan Thomas has not been one of the poets I have read. I write largely about the ordinary, and there is something about simple lives that I find exquisite, laden with feeling, and I try to express that in words. Dylan Thomas lived in socio-historical times and a socio-political context vastly different from mine. The only commonality I see is that, like me, he was perhaps not afraid to go where most people dare to tread, by confronting our own mortality. Writing about things we cannot control seems to loosen sand underneath people’s feet, and that can be quite unsettling.

I have always had a wild imagination. As a three-to four-year-old, I would often wonder how the words that were being spoken in daily language looked like even before I could read and write. I would create a story out of a picture emblazoned on a Rooibos tea box and the like. But then again, all children dwell in that fantasy world. I just never seemed to have lost that. I have been told quite a few times that I live in a dream world. During the time I was working for a child rights organisation, I was always drawn to direct work with children so that I could create that imaginary world that could be found only in play, and in a sense poetry is about a play of words. I grew up in a socio-cultural context where stories were being told and not read, this necessitating one to create an imagery in one’s head. I have a Sesotho and Setswana linguistic background, which is intrinsically visceral in its expression. The rhythm and arrangement of my words are influenced by my daily way of speaking, which is in my two mother tongues. 

Needless to say, township primary schools in apartheid South Africa had no textbooks, so we would complete the picture in our minds as a book was being read out loud in class. This deprivation got offset only by my father’s large collection of Reader’s Digest condensed books and magazines, which I read a lot of, as well as the convent education I received later when I started high school. Our little library had these post-Russian revolution novels that Sr Sighilde (one of our English teachers, who was originally from West Germany) would lend us to read for leisure (whose titles and authors now evade me). There was something about how they had been written that I had found fascinating and different.  I also read a lot as a pre-teen and teenager, and spent a lot of my pocket money on magazines (including Time magazine, to which I had a subscription) and newspapers. So my writing has largely been influenced by the ordinary, the not so obvious, and the distant past.

I think it was Siza Nkosi who said that thematically she saw parallels in your work with that of Isabella Motadinyane – was Isabella’s work an influence? What other poets have influenced you?

No, not at all. I got introduced to Isabella’s work only in 2019, and similarities between her writing and mine were not apparent to me. Stylistically, we also write differently from each other. Before 2016, my reading had been mostly fiction. What struck me about Isabella’s writing was how effortless it was, as if she did not try too hard. Even ‘Sink a shaft’, her most erotic poem, has that innocence about it, the kind that seems to be a cross-cutting tone  throughout her book. Siza (Nkosi) may need to explain why she made such a comparison, because I might be too close to see. Writers who I think may have had some influence on my writing may not even be poets, namely Gabriel Garcia Màrquez and Ben Okri (who I think is a much better novelist than poet, and whose poetry I do not even read). To a lesser extent, I could also mention Antjie Krog, James Matthews and Patrick Cullinan.

Some of your poems deal with domestic violence. It’s a harsh reality for many women and an issue from which you do not shy away. But overall, do you feel that poets have a duty to address socioeconomic or political issues?

I think it is important for the reader to experience the book as a whole, instead of singling out one or two poems. That would be making the body of work more (or less) than what it intended to be. In Yellow Shade, gender-based violence as a subject appears in three poems: ‘The day she disappeared’, ‘Soldier in a black dress’, and ‘Last words to my sister’, and the book comprises 44 poems in total. You will notice that my book follows a narrative arc. The poems start with a somewhat light innocence that slowly builds up into what is stark and dark, before lightness creeps in again towards the end. So each poem carries a different tone that connects it to the next one, offering waves of symbiotic variations. Throughout the book, there is a fracture that attempts to build itself somehow ‒ a paradox of fragility, strength, humour, and hope. The poems came into being within a cusp of magic unfolding within my head. Each poem carries a different mood all its own, and deserves to be read with a similar attitude. On its own, a subject would never be able to hold a poem together, one would still need to write a poem around it, and that takes a lot of hard work, intuition and practice.  

Some writers may write to erase reality, others may write to confront it. Either way, they are all taking a position. Poems that are devoid of social issues are still politically laden. The more one hides, the more glaring the hidden becomes. Writing poetry is the ultimate test of one’s vulnerability, without which a poem  may not be possible. With poetry, there is nowhere to hide.

Do you feel that poets should have a role at all?

A poet’s only role is to make the reader connect with the poem, and that can happen only if one is honest with one’s writing. British-American poet Denise Levertov once said: ‘Insofar as poetry has a social function, it is to awaken sleepers by other means than shock’. Unfortunately, the feelings being evoked by a poem are not always pleasant ones, neither should they be. Not all poems are meant to entertain. We write poetry so that we do not have to explain. Once a poem reaches the reader, the poet starts to disappear. The poet’s ultimate aim is to make herself useless, because a finished poem no longer needs its creator.

What is your opinion of poetry as therapy, as a means of ‘healing’?

It takes a lot more than a brush with poetry for one to heal emotionally, that is why we have mental health professionals to help with that. What a poem can do, however, is to help a reader, or at times, a writer, with the cathartic process of offloading some of the emotional burden, and the sense of lightness that one feels as a result, may be confused with therapy, which would be a dangerous thing to do. Poetry is an emotional experience, but to assert  that it could replace therapy would be a bit far-fetched.

What has your experience been of getting published in South Africa? Has it been difficult for you?

I started submitting my work for publication only in 2016, so it might be too early to have a well-informed opinion on that. However, so far, it has been fairly easy to get published locally in journals and a couple of anthologies. I have been writing for myself, on and off, for a very long time, so I might have unknowingly had a bit of practice. I have experienced rejections from some local journals as well. I find getting published overseas to be a lot harder, although some of my work has been accepted in a couple of international publications. However, rejections have given me an opportunity to look at my work with a critical eye, and to challenge myself more, as I explore new ways of approaching my writing. When I began doing that, some of the journals that had previously rejected my work started accepting it. I still get more rejections than acceptances, though, so the need to improve remains constant.

South Africa’s poetry journal landscape is quite small, because a lot of journals have inadequate human and financial resources to be sustainable, so a lot of them have shut down. Writers who have suffered the most have been those who write in indigenous languages, because there are such few publishing platforms for their work. However, in recent years, new, exciting journals have emerged locally, so that is encouraging.

There are currently only a handful traditional publishers of books of poetry in South Africa, all of which are small independent presses, with limited resources. Major local publishing houses are currently not prioritising poetry. This makes the poetry publishing environment quite competitive to prospective authors. So I took a risk and took time off work, so that I could focus solely on my writing, because I knew my manuscript would be competing with tons of others for a chance at being published. One also needs to be patient and willing to accept constructive criticism. For instance, my manuscript went through ten drafts before it was ready, after many rounds of many poems getting dropped and just as many new ones being written from scratch to replace the cancelled ones, as well as many rounds of editing. The whole process of putting this book together technically started in early 2018 and ended in early 2021.  

There are, of course, self-publishing and hybrid publishing options as well, but all publishing models have their own pros and cons.

What do you see as the challenges facing poets in South Africa?

I think there is an emerging trend of a collective identity, based on a particular aesthetic preference and/or social positions, which can also be complexly heterogeneous within itself. More than ever before, social media has made writers more aware of one another, making the writing experience less solitary. From an activism point of view, some of the writer allegiances play an important role as change agents, particularly those striving to redress inequities for historically disadvantaged writers, such as women, people of colour, LGBTQAI+ people, as well as writers living with disabilities and those who write in indigenous languages. Writer networks also make access to information and opportunities a lot easier. Within this dynamic writer context, a distinct writer identity is still a possibility for new writers, provided the writer can differentiate between the two. Usually, as one gains more experience, one becomes more aware of the kind of writer one is. 

There also appears to be an occasional intolerance of diversity in poetry. Oral poetry remains undervalued, as if a poem needs to be in written form, for it to be good. After 1994,there has been an increasing pressure on poets to remove a poem from its social context, to control certain emotions in a poem, to not stay true to what a poem wants to say, and how it wants to say it. What needs to be borne in mind is that there is more than one approach to writing poetry, and readers are a heterogeneous group with their own individually varied aesthetic preferences. This censoring may be symptomatic of a resistance to diversity and inclusivity. Such an environment may not be enabling, and may stifle efforts to explore fresh ways of producing new work. It is within the foundation of the old that exciting voices can emerge. Nothing happens within a void.

Creative writing programmes are often expensive and out of reach for most writers. Those being offered for free often happen as once-off sessions during annual book festivals. 

There is no culture of writer mentorship in South Africa (however, there are a few good exceptions), and local writer residencies rarely get awarded to those who need them the most: new writers, much less writers of poetry.

Lastly, we live in an era of instant gratification, and may, at times, rush to submit work that is not quite ready.

What has the reception to your book been like so far?

I may not be the best person to make such an assessment, so I will leave that to the reviewers and critics. In terms of sales, the book did fairly well during the month of the launch, particularly in direct sales, with in-store and online sales slowly picking up. Deep South has done a second print run of the book, in preparation for the second (minor) book launch which will happen either in the Free State or the Western Cape later this year.

What are you working on at the moment?

I am currently busy with a few new poems that I intend to submit to journals that have not published my work before. I am also exploring the possibility of acquiring translation skills through a learning programme, but have not made up my mind as yet.

Dimakatso Sedite’s book, Yellow Shade, is available from Deep South via their distributor Blue Weaver in Southern Africa, and international distributor African Books Collective in all countries. The book can also be purchased or ordered in South Africa from all bookstores that sell poetry. An ebook version is available from African Books Collective.