To the women who work quietly

 In a world that demands so much from black women’s bodies, you have removed yourself from the noise. You know who you are; I’ve seen you, working away from the limelight and yet your impact is felt. How do you do it? Or better yet, how do you maintain your quiet in a world that rewards visibility above all else? 

You are many women. I won’t mention your names because that would be a betrayal somehow. In fact, some of you remain nameless by choice. You prefer the anonymity which really messes with my analysis sometimes because I am always trying to trace erasure which often happens because of racist, sexist, classist, ableist (and every ism you can think of) decisions. In fact, you will roll your eyes, shrug your shoulders and laugh at me for writing this love letter to you. But I see you; sometimes  search for you, endlessly. Even as I write about erasure and invisibility, I have come to think about women who choose quiet. Kevin Quashie writes in The Sovereignty of Quiet: quiet as “a metaphor for the full range of one’s inner life—one’s desires, ambitions, hungers, vulnerabilities, fears. The inner life is not apolitical or without social value, but neither is it determined entirely by publicness. In fact, the interior—dynamic and ravishing—is a stay against the dominance of the social world; it has its own sovereignty. It is hard to see, even harder to describe, but no less potent in its ineffability.” It is your ineffability and sovereignty over your life, something inscrutable and yet it is possible for me to notice that your quiet is not silence: you are not erased. You have made a choice against the dominance of the social world. Simply quiet and present.

I have watched you reject celebrity status (even as it is foisted upon you) as you keep the main thing, the main thing. Even when people have borderline bullied you into visibility, you refuse. Even your refusal is quiet. You do not shout (sometimes I worry that you can’t because your voice was created differently). You smile politely, say thank you when the attention turns towards you but insist on returning to your life and your work.  I worry about you sometimes because you have found a way of disappearing in your work and it becomes your world. It is safer there, in your own thoughts, in your own space where we cannot reach you. But then I think, your world (and your work) is a clearing like the one Martha Postlethwaite describes in her poem “Clearing” because you have created a clearing 

…in the dense forest

of your life

and wait there

patiently,

until the song

that is your life

falls into your own cupped hands

and you recognize and greet it.

You have understood that the only way to be in the world is from a place of quiet; a clearing where you can hear yourself think and feel. 

I have watched you take your time, sitting in the back of the room. I have heard you chuckling at me when I put my hand up to think out loud or ask a question. Having watched you long enough, I now know that sitting in the back of the room is the best place to see clearly. You have the best view in the room to see all the people whom you hold in your heart (sometimes you hold them with disdain because people have broken your heart too many times). By sitting in the back of the room I like to imagine that’s how you see more clearly. And when you can no longer avoid the limelight, you are ready. You are in your skin, even if you are trembling. We do not see the trembling. We are mostly mesmerised by your presence.

You are the woman without the byline but the stroke of your pen and sharp intellect is felt. You are in the court cases which have shaped and fundamentally changed the lives of people. But there will be no news bulletin, there will be no tweet curated by you. Others might do so on your behalf; by others I mean me, your fangirl. And this will be mortifying and confusing and irritating to you. But I will do it anyway. 

You have literally opted to live at the foot of the mountain. You become the mountain. And those who need you will drive hours to be with you and find solace where you are. Sometimes you do the thankless work: the daily grind of showing up, everyday, no camera, no hashtag. Just you and your daily life. It is mundane and magical. You are the fairygod mother-sister-aunt-friend whose presence lingers after you have left the room. You are behind the camera capturing the memories. You are behind the scripts which shape stories. You are behind those who are thrust into the limelight willingly and unwillingly. You pay attention to details because you have the time to slow down and see the world with a lot more clarity. 

You are probably the many women who wrote the minutes to the uneventful meeting which made the eventful meeting possible. Perhaps you are the reason there were petitions for Lilian Ngoyi, Helen Joseph, Sophie de Bruyn and Rahima Moosa to carry to the Union Buildings. You are the ones who organised buses and train tickets to get women to Pretoria that day. You are Charlotte Maxeke’s best friend who edited the articles before she sent them to the newspaper. You are Nonstizi Mgqwetho’s friend who heard the poems before she performed them on stage and sent them to the newspaper. You are Brenda Fassie’s stylist who picked up her outfit before the show. You are Miriam Makeba’s hair stylist and tailor. You are the one who adds the beads to umbhaco wezibazana. You are the one who does the fundraising so that the training can happen so that the women are ready to go to Beijing. You are the one who writes the proposals and the letters but your name sometimes does not appear in the final draft, or it’s the name at the bottom of the list. You are the woman who coaches and midwives people into more of themselves. Your writing gives people a language to dream and expand themselves. You gather people towards prayer. People trust you with editing their manuscripts with care. You pick up the phone and call the women who appear in the newspapers and check in on them. You find the words to comfort. You hold people’s hands until they find their feet again. No tweets. No reels. No selfies. Just you, showing up quietly. 

Keep that quiet. Of course you do not need me to tell you that. You already know that you do not owe the world parts of you without your permission. Those of us who flirt with hypervisibility or begrudgingly find ourselves too visible need you as a reminder of what refusal looks like; that life is not always a performance on stage. Life is also and sometimes mostly the time alone with ones thoughts. But perhaps we need each other. At times you need me to coax you and even to troll you on the Instagram marketplace; and you will humour me everytime. Because you see clearly, people confide in you. You are the keeper of secrets that will never be sub-tweeted or repeated in a biography because you are the only custodian. 

As we wrap up yet another busy women’s month which requires women to say the same thing they said last year and in 1956 and in 1913; you have given only what you are willing to give of yourself; in service of yourself. It is the kind of selfishness that is necessary because the world will take and take and take some more. I have not written this love letter for you because you need it. I am writing it mostly for myself and the people who would fool themselves into believing that you do not exist. They downplay your work, or take the credit that is due to you for themselves. I am writing this as a reminder to myself that power lies in the quiet. Seeing the world clearly beyond the clutter is another superpower. 

Ndikuthanda wonke!

A