I met TJ Dema this week, she is a poet and art administrator living in Gaborone. Currently she's in Denmark and I got to hear her poetry in Roskilde this tuesday. In the car back to copenhagen she told me about he poetry scene in Botswana. I was very happy to meet TJ and get to know about her work so i figured you people should get to know about it too. I asked her if she wanted to do a guest entry here, and she did.

BASCULE: Botswana’s bridge builders

 

And so Asta Olivia very kindly, as I suspect is always her way, asks me to write a guest entry for her blog. I say yes before figuring out just what it is I have to say, typical. But of course words rattle all day in my head and perhaps this is a way to empty them by talking about my preoccupation with home and art.

 This is not actually a post about bridges because 70% of Botswana is covered by the Kgalagadi desert so bridge building isn’t a big pastime. The artists in Botswana are working at being good bridge builders; they are becoming less insular, and are embracing the world wide web although despite there being more mobile phones than citizens in Botswana, with one of the slower internet connections staying connected is not always the quickest thing to do. In short artists are getting better at reaching out to the rest of the world, at traveling, at inviting, at painting different faces of Botswana some literally with paint brushes others with words. For too long that job was left to the government which is arguably one of the better ones of the day, but now the artists at sitting at the table and having a say. The focus on wildlife tourism is economically justified and almost a fifth of the country, which is the size of Texas, is made up of conservation parks/game reserves etc but the people are also very cool.

Botswana is coming from a good place politically and economically but the arts are far behind most developments and part of what will determine how good tomorrow is, is what we do in transition. A few artists have already left Botswana as they felt they couldn’t get the support or the space they needed to work at their craft. The decisions we make in the gap between yesterday and tomorrow will shape who and what will be left behind. Either way we will need bridges but they are often such tenuous things, we would say impossibly structured if it wasn’t for the fact that people cross them and live everyday, if it wasn’t for the fact they actually exist. We trust, don’t we, that when we cross a bridge it will hold itself and in turn us.

This blog entry is not meant to come across as mordant but I’m in Denmark (courtesy of the Danish Arts council) as I write this and somehow this makes home both sentimentally blurry and simultaneously clear in recollection. As a poet working out of that space I see some Things specifically, like what is not there - an arts council, a consistently open and public meeting place for artists to run into each, no after school programs, no healthy second hand book markets etc But I am also grateful for what is there - a number of people working hard to build the space without being reliant of government support, some small support from certain individuals, the taking on of a crewing-mentality were people with different skills and resources come together to make something happen cost ‘free’ eg videographers recording open mics, graphics artists making posters for a subsidized fee, mentorship (not enough, not widespread enough but there) etc

Historically our poetry is spoken in Setswana, the national language, and other local languages specific to each tribe and it was predominantly a man’s game. Having gained independence from Great Britain in 1966 a lot more writing began to appear in English and some of it authored by women. There are now a large number of poets who are also female writing in both languages although the Setswana poetry does unfortunately get less press than that written in English. This is only problematic for me in the sense that it perhaps leads some emerging poets to think that they must write in English in order to find some level of success. A conversation for another day with cups of tea between us.

As far as I know collectives slowly began forming in the 70s with the University of Botswana’s Writer’s Workshop and the Medu collective, in 1980 the Writers Association of Botswana and later the Live Poets who read their work out loud in and around the city and in the early part of the last decade the Exodus live poetry! Collective which introduced spoken word almost exclusively in English into the capital city of Gaborone. Not long after that smaller collectives began to form and share their work publicly in cafes and at schools, of these the Poetavango collective in Maun which hosts an annual international poetry festival is by far the most consistently well organized.

This year the country’s oldest arts festival in the country, named Maitisong for the theatre that hosts it, for the first time ever had a clear and substantive spoken word poetry component. Previously all this work fell to collectives like Exodus live poetry! who neither owned the spaces they had to perform in nor had the kind of corporate or embassy network this festival has access to.

Audiences are there, there is no question of that. Sometimes plentiful and in the hundreds sometimes a handful. It depends which poets have been booked, which collective is hosting as well as on the usual ploys of publicity and logistics.

There is at any one time maybe one independent/trade publisher willing to publish poetry in Botswana but if I’m honest we have a textbook/educational market that revolves around what the syllabus dictates. Botswana has a total population of 2 million people one of the more consistent arguments is that this would hardly sustain fiction let alone poetry publishing but since the government occasionally purchases text in bulk on behalf of the schools that is the market to covet. In response a few writers are self publishing (again that is a conversation for another day) while others such as Barolong Seboni and Moroka Moreri have an impressive collection of published works behind them.

 My arts administration organization supports efforts by local festivals assisting with programming, booking artists on their behalf, recording poets or conceptualizing and coordinating our own live literature events such as the Poetry Africa tour and the Botswana-Swedish poetry exchange.

 If you’ve survived my assault on Asta’s blog to the very last word, tussen tak. I’m including some links here for a better introduction to Botswana and her poetries:

 

Dreaming is a gift for me CD https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CftrxsjQrg0

Snippets from the infinite word Festival https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESoM0fcvu8Y

Buy a poetry box set featuring 7 African poets incl 1 Motswana/me http://www.amazon.com/Seven-New-Generation-African-Poets/dp/1940646588

Recordings of my work plus 3 other Batswana and 4 Swedish poets I recorded as part of an exchange I co-hosted in 2013  https://soundcloud.com/themousai/sets/tabula-rasa-the-tj-dema

 

Photo: Gazette.de 

Photo: Greg Ball

 

 

 

Photo: Petra Rolinec