A strong, clear voice for Women’s Month

HAVE you heard of Toni Giselle Stuart? In Women's Month, the Avbob poetry project celebrates the work of this poet, performer and teacher of creative writing. She believes collaboration can enrich our lives and heal intergenerational trauma. Her poems have been published in collections and magazines and she has performed them here and abroad.

Recently she participated in a jazz suite in three movements about the life of Krotoa (Eva), a Khoikhoi woman who excelled as a translator when the Cape was still Dutch. She has collaborated with South African filmmaker Kurt Orderson.

Here are some of this exceptional woman's statements:

All forms of creative expression offer us a medium to work with our wounds and trauma, to alchemise them into wisdom. Poetry is simply the medium I work with, because words are what I know intimately, and they have always called me. But I do think poetry has a particular, inbuilt mechanism that shows up what is not true, what is contrived, what hasn’t quite touched the bone-raw truth of things.

I wrote it to show South African women, and particularly Creole South African women, that we are more powerful and have more agency than we have been led to believe and that our voices hold power. Krotoa spoke three languages, that we know of. She was a central figure in negotiations between the Dutch and the Khoikhoi during the Dutch-Khoikhoi Cattle Wars.

About her collaboration with others:

I never set out to do this work. I came up in the Cape Town cultural scene in the early 2000s. Poets, musicians, filmmakers, artists were creating work together. It was just how we moved. Poetry became the place I turned to ask the questions I was afraid to ask out loud. Questions about who I am, where my people come from, as a Creole South African woman, and just who I am as a soul in a human body. Through poetry, I found communities of like-hearted people who were willing to express, ask the right questions, and feel deeply.

About Women's Month:

I feel the questions we have to ask ourselves most urgently are: Am I living from my heart, rooted in my body, or am I only living from my head? Where have I erected a mask and a shield as a form of protection? When we truly remember and reclaim our creative power, our lives become ours, and our ability to positively impact our community and the world around us grows exponentially.

About healing:

In the wake of colonialism and patriarchy, there is work to be done around retrieving what was lost, writing through the wounds that were never tended to and healed, and restoring ancient wisdoms, especially between mothers and daughters.

Stuart runs a company, The Firefly Garden, which helps writers find their own voice and creates a nurturing environment in which they can tell their stories.

In this way, writers change the world, word by word.

♦ VWB ♦

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