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114 pages

English

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This brave and moving collection of stories by South African lesbian women from different backgrounds reminds us, again, that rights are never finally won in legislatures or in court rooms. They are won by people exercising them. The authors of the stories and poems in this book have done just that. They have stood up to celebrate the dignity of lesbian women in South Africa. Each contribution is different. And each intensely personal. And each one reminds us of the urgent need for us to stop hate crime and to create a safe society for all LGBT South Africans.

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Romance

Romance LGBT

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Publié par	Modjaji Books
Date de parution	15 mai 2011
Nombre de lectures	5
EAN13	9781920590123
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0350€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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RECLAIMING THE L-WORD
SAPPHO S DAUGHTERS OUT IN AFRICA
RECLAIMING THE L-WORD
SAPPHO S DAUGHTERS OUT IN AFRICA
EDITED BY ALLEYN DIESEL
Publication Modjaji Books 2011 Copyright 2011 is held by the author of each story
First published in 2011 by Modjaji Books PTY Ltd P O Box 385, Athlone, 7760, South Africa modjaji.books gmail.com http://modjaji.book.co.za www.modjajibooks.co.za
ISBN 978-1-920397-28-9
Edited by Alleyn Diesel Copy editor: Gill Gimberg Cover and book design: Natascha Mostert Cover photograph: Zanele Muholi Author photographs: Courtesy the authors
Printed and bound by Mega Digital, Cape Town Set in Minion Pro
CONTENTS
Foreword
Introduction
Acknowledgements
Pulled out of the closet into my family s embrace Heidi van Rooyen
I have truly lost a woman I loved Zanele Muholi
The dog, the cat, the parrot and the pig and other tales Yulinda Noortman
A comfortable fit Janet Shapiro
Finding the real me in a storm of violence Marco P. Ndlovu
My journey Ashika Maharaj
Orientation quiz Liesl Theron
Who are you to tell me who I am? Keba Sebetoane
A life in-between Addie Linley *
Living a lie: Issues of identity Rani Soni *
Does your mother know that you re out? Alleyn Diesel
The Steve in me has a right Mmapaseka Steve Letsike
Then and now Shifra Jacobson
Discovering my identity Tonie Nozipho Ngcobo
Looking for Mister - or is it Ms? - Right: On being classified lesbian Althea Laine *
Poetry Mavourneen Finlayson
Thinking through lesbian rape Zanele Muholi
* Pseudonyms
FORDWORD
As I write this we are celebrating the 20 th anniversary of the unbanning of the ANC in 1990 and the subsequent release of Nelson Mandela. What a truly remarkable journey we have made from our dim past! We celebrate, among many things, a Constitution that has been rightly lauded as one of the most progressive in the world. We have, indeed, come a long way. And we should never forget that.
But we still have to travel further on the road to a full democracy. The long walk to freedom is indeed long.
While formal rights are guaranteed in the Constitution, there is much that still needs to be achieved. Rights must be translated off the paper on which they are written. They must become part of the ground on which we walk. They have to be clearly understood, and easily accessed.
As a feminist, I have always been prodded to push the boundaries of awareness and critique, to recognise the lurking oppressions that continue to be relegated to the margins. As a woman of faith, I am continually compelled to ask in new and daring ways, Who is my neighbour? Reclaiming the L-Word: Sappho s Daughters Out in Africa assists me in this ongoing journey, expanding my understandings of community and sisterhood . It makes me appreciate that there are many permutations of the woman-identified woman .
In a time of increasing fundamentalism in every sphere, and of narrowing definitions of the Other, we are constrained to address again our common humanity and our connectedness. The struggle for human dignity, equality and justice is neither divisible nor partial. It is certainly not selective.
We have to acknowledge that our Constitution does not automatically guarantee a change in public culture and the mindset of individuals and communities. This is why feminist activism must be ongoing, and feminist intellectual work that intersects with womanism and lesbianism is vitally important. While women s groups have fought for socio-political rights and gender justice, we have to continue to ensure that hearts and minds are changed, especially on matters of sexual orientation.
It is fundamentally necessary to link women s concerns with lesbian concerns. Apart from structural and economic discrimination encountered by lesbians, we must also address the social and cultural stigma that is experienced and endured. Such stigma is not only debilitating; it can also, in some instances, be life threatening.
This collection is therefore invaluable as it draws attention to the lived realities and experiences of lesbians. It reveals disquieting truths of the hostility and violence against lesbians. The stories remind us again and again that the feminist dictum that personal is political is indeed true.
We need efforts such as this to raise consciousness and ongoing activism at all levels, so that homophobia, among other prejudices, is addressed. Moving lesbianism away from spectacle and the exotic, the collection emerges from the wellsprings of lived experience. It tells flesh and blood stories - stories of the values, loves, struggles and challenges of living in a society that continues to perpetuate many myths, mythologies and misconceptions about lesbians. Moving in their honesty, and brave in re-imagining the world, they tell of highly-wrought decisions to live with integrity and with grace. They remind us of the great diversity among women of our continent and region, and the need for sensitivity and openheartedness to the many faces of lesbian and transgender experiences in our time and place.
The following poem by Lebogang Mashile, in her collection, In a Ribbon of Rhythm , evokes the compelling and redemptive power of telling stories, of bearing witness:
After they ve fed off of your memories
Erased dreams from your eyes
Broken the seams of sanity
And glued what s left together with lies,
After the choices and voices have left you alone
And silence grows solid
Adhering like flesh to your bones
They ve always known your spirit s home
Lay in your gentle sway
To light and substance
But jaded mirrors and false prophets have a way
Of removing you from yourself
You who lives with seven names
You who walks with seven faces
None can eliminate your pain
Tell your story
Let it nourish you,
Sustain you
And claim you
Tell your story
Let it feed you,
Heal you
And release you.
Tell your story
Let it twist and remix your shattered heart
Tell your story
Until your past stops tearing your present apart.
Reclaiming the L-Word: Sappho s Daughters Out in Africa is a triumph of courage at reclaiming the voices of those who have long endured being sister outsiders .
Dr Devarakshanam (Betty) Govinden Senior Research Associate in the Faculty of Education, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa
INTRODUCTION
Jou can see that there is no easy walk to freedom anywhere, and many of us will have to pass through the valley of the shadow of death again and again before we reach the mountain tops of our desires . 1
Although lesbians have existed in Western societies throughout the centuries of written history, at least from the time of Sappho, the woman-identified poet of the island of Lesbos in ancient Greece (7 th century BCE), their lives have remained largely invisible, unknown to, or ignored by, historians. Indeed, even after the rise of the second wave of feminism in the 1960s and the emphasis on recovering the history of women, separate from that of men, most feminist historians tended to overlook the existence of lesbians in their midst.
Just as the patriarchal suppression of the position and achievements of women throughout most of Western history has been disempowering by keeping them hidden, so, too, has the deprivation of knowledge about lesbianism resulted in their separation from one another, and their contribution to society as women with an alternative view of the world has gone unacknowledged, thus effectively prohibiting many from forming any positive self-image. Ignorance of one s past inhibits an ability to grasp or learn from experience, and so to be enabled to make informed decisions about the future. This tends to suppress the knowledge and motivation needed to change a pernicious and damaging situation to allow for a full flourishing of one s humanity. Enforced isolation fosters ignorance, withholding the support of others that is necessary for emancipation. Women together are strong! - but, as South Africans learnt through years of apartheid, separation is truly disempowering.
Too often, stories involving lesbians have been written, or rewritten, so as to conceal their real interests and motivations, in order to make them appear more acceptable to mainstream views and values, and less threatening to the status quo. How shocking for some young woman to find that her adored role model was in fact deviant! This has meant that, as well as traditional (usually male) historians expunging certain details from the stories of women suspected of being lesbian, the women themselves have usually imposed a self-censorship, hoping to pass themselves off as normal heterosexual women. Which all means that until very recently stories of lesbian women, whether biographical or autobiographical, have tended to conceal the nature of their sexuality. Few honest, explicit writings exist which allow us a clear insight into the fears, agonies, secrecy and joys of lesbian lives, providing the kind of understanding which brings an empathetic appreciation of alternative relationships, and their ability to provide enrichment and fulfilment for both partners.
In general, until fairly recently, the only knowledge available of lesbian lives in the modern West has been of those famous/ notorious women such as Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, Mary Renault, Nancy Spain, Ethel Smyth, Natalie Barney, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday and Josephine Baker, or of those relatively few women brave enough to write honestly about themselves, for example, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Colette, Radclyffe Hall, Audre Torde, Pat Parker, Mary D