On beauty

 Where two or three are gathered there is poetry

And to think I woke up feeling tired this morning.

I wrote the poem above during a writing workshop I curated at the African Women in Dialogue (AfWID) Conference hosted last month. Part of the workshop was to write short poems inspired by Rafiq Kathwari’s short poem “On receiving father from JFK after his long flight from Kashmir” which I came across in one Padraig O’Tuama’s substack. In other words I began this month buzzing from the energy of the conference. However, the word conference is misleading for what the last week of January became for me. When 1000 women from 55 African countries gather for a week it is hardly a conference or gathering (though these are useful short-hand). It is monumental. Historic. While this was the third time AfWID was happening, it remains to be a never-been-done-before feat.

For a week I was surrounded by hundreds of African women wearing the brightest and most beautiful clothes. They carried their bodies in accordance with the flowing fabrics and the sweltering Joburg heat. It made me realise, we really have no business wearing anything else but a bubu in summer!

I could share about the substance of the sessions but I mostly feel drawn towards reflecting on what it feels like to be among African women being together in various forms of beauty and joy. Beauty is often so hard to pin down as having value in the world because it has been mired in the quagmire of the beauty industry politics which targets women to buy products to alter their bodies while making others (often men) richer. Beauty has also been marred by racial capitalism which would have us believe that the only bodies that are of value are white, young, able-bodied, thin and therefore productive. And yet, there I was at AfWID surround by bodies which do not fit into this mold.

When I arrived at AfWID I felt my heart expand when I walked into the dining area filled to the brim with African women who had travelled many hours. Perhaps it was the collective energy we all carried; the anticipation of experiencing something we seldom experience when we go to other conferences. Gatherings of people carry an energy. When I walk into a room with people wearing navy suits I find myself taking on a different posture. In fact, let me be honest: I am often twitchy. There is a dis-ease as though we are entering a performance and I am reminded of the words “All the world’s a stage” from Shakespeare’s play As you like it. Navy, grey, black, suits and shift dresses (and respectable heels for women, kitten heels or pumps) are a social uniform which tell a story about what it means to be serious in the world. Those found wearing bright colours are attracting attention to themselves rather, which takes away the substance of their contribution. So when I walked into rooms where no-one looked like the person sitting next to them (everyday for a week) I found myself adjusting and engaging my senses.

But I want to return to beauty and what it can mean when 1000 women from a continent that is beleaguered by ugliness. I am being euphemistic. A continent beleaguered by violence, war and death. But I do not want to talk about death for now. The beauty I experienced was about an insistence on being alive which defies the destruction that we live with on this continent. Even as we gathered, women from Sudan reminded us of the war they would be returning to which the mainstream media has been ignoring. Rwanda was war-mongering and Congo was ablaze. Mozambique was falling in and out of the news cycle because violence has become our daily bread. And yet, we woke up every morning for a week and wore bright colours and insisted on beauty as though it were armour. Perhaps this is the spell beauty can cast in the world. It can defy death. It expands our imagination and insists on aliveness. Beauty is a refusal against destruction. It demands to be seen and experienced. 

Witnessing African women demand beauty and therefore their sense of creativity and aliveness and dignity reminded me that there are parts of our lives which are still ours. Despite the frustrations and demands that come with the practicalities of bringing together 1000 women from all over the continent where movement is curtailed and expensive, when we did eventually come together we danced, sang, observed quiet, wrote poems, made speeches, shared ideas, healed, talked together, debated, reflected, listened, made beaded bracelets, took photos, made demands of our governments and tried to make sense of the world we have even as we try to create a new world worthy of who we are. 

Beauty insists on our bodies being full participants. For a week beauty was about being in the one another. Those who believe in the presence of African women, those who believe that African women should be alive to fulfill their deepest desires will curate and fund and organise an experience which is unquantifiable insofar as the ripples it will create in the future. Knowing a fraction about the people behind the scenes tells me that beauty is also about systemics. It is about knowing and understanding the bureaucratic processes, the emails, the phonecalls, the hotel bookings, the transport, the interpretation services for multilingual engagement, the food prepared, the funding applications. A long list of systems which bring 1000 women into a room.  This reflection should have been a love letter to the people behind the scenes who put their bodies and resources on the line in order to make AfWID happen (for the third time). They make history. They create the future. They make beauty. They keep us alive.

1000 women from 55 African countries echo Toni Morrison’s words:

“I think of beauty as an absolute necessity. I don't think it's a privilege or an indulgence, it's not even a quest. I think it's almost like knowledge, which is to say, it's what we were born for. I think finding, incorporating and then representing beauty is what humans do. With or without authorities telling us what it is, I think it would exist in any case. The startle and the wonder of being in this place. This overwhelming beauty—some of it is natural, some of it is man-made, some of it is casual, some of it is a mere glance—is an absolute necessity. I don't think we can do without it any more than we can do without dreams or oxygen.”