Living While Feminist

Today on the podcast I’m talking to Aaisha Dadi Patel.

Aaisha holds an MA in media studies from Wits, where she also lectures part-time. She began her career as a journalist at just twenty years old with the Daily Vox, and has made a mark on the South African media landscape covering everything from politics to polar bears. She is currently on the Wall Street Journal’s Africa desk, covering current affairs and economics updates from the continent.

Her piece in Living While Feminist is called – Feminism Is Muslim Women Talking Back –In that piece she says:

“In any intersectional context, the main thing to remember is that your struggles certainly do not have to be validated. Your anger is justified. You have the right to speak up for yourself against your own oppression, and voice your opinion on your own struggle, just as you are allowed to be an ally in another struggled. You are the one responsible for controlling your own narrative."

The piece explores how western feminism and islamophobia have contributed to the silencing of muslim women and muslim feminists, and the ways in which muslim feminists have challenged these two world views.

Since the collection came out in 2018 Aaisha has continued to challenge stereotypes and to tell stories about economic equality and current affairs. Listen to the episode to find out more about how she does it.

Today's episode features award-winning poet, an award-winning translator, an editor and a narrative non-fiction writer-at-large for Daily Maverick – Karin Schimke.

Karin has worked trained as a journalist and worked as a political writer. She has been a freelancer for the past two decades. Her features and news features have appeared in more than two dozen print publications and she currently writes features for the Daily Maverick and for Spotlight on issues from ventilators to food waste, hunger to domestic violence.

In 2013 she was the winner of the Sylt Foundation’s Writer Retreat, and a finalist in the South African Literary Awards for poetry. Karin was awarded the Ingrid Jonker Award for poetry for her debut poetry collection, Bare and Breaking, in 2014 and her second collection, Navigate was published in 2017. Karin has translated five books, edited seven more, authored another six, and contributed to six collections and anthologies. She won the South African Literary Awards Translation Award in 2016 and the Sol Plaatjie Translation award in 2019, both for the translation of Flame in the Snow – the Love Letters of Ingrid Jonker and Andre Brink.

In her acceptance speech she said:

“Translation is the rendering of meaning from one language into another. Translation is conversion. It is movement. A translator is able to change a reader’s understanding of the world, or, at the very least, supplement it. In the process of presenting the experiences of one language group to another, the essential literary by-product of imagination is switched on, and – as so much research over the years has shown – imagination is the route to empathy, and empathy the route to social change. Translation is a political act.”

I was lucky enough to include Karin’s writing in Living While Feminist titled. In her piece, Change, I think she did a fantastic job of translating the experiences of a changing body so that every reader would have been able to empathise and learn. She's just published her latest book - The Karen Book of Rules with Karen Jeynes.

Today I’m speaking to Desiree-Anne Martin. Desiree-Anne is a published author, poet and general word junkie – her writing can be found in anthologies, online, and in the Living While Feminist collection – the piece we’ll be talking about today.

In 2018, she published a poetry collection called Believe More Deeply, and a short story called ‘Orange, White and Blue’ in the Life Righting Collective anthology, This Is How It Is, published by Jacana. That same year she published her memoir – We Don’t Talk About it. Ever – which was described as ‘searing, brutal, and breathtaking’. In July 2020 Desire won the national arts24/ Kwela Books Corona Fiction Competition, with her story of a young girl from the Cape Flats dealing with her father’s alcoholism during Lockdown called ‘Delirium’, beating out over 1200 entrants. She is hard at work on a short story anthology and her a second book.

Besides being a prolific and successful writer, she is many more things too – an addictions and general counsellor in private practice, a director of two companies, a lecturer, a postgraduate student at the University of Cape Town, a wife, full-time mother to an 11-year-old and a three-year-old, and a part-time warrior-woman. She is a recovering addict with 16 years of sobriety, dabbles in her own unpredictable mood disorder and is a vocal advocate for mental health issues as well as the destigmatization of this and other taboo issues.

In her piece in Living While Feminist, Desiree-Anne explores many of these parts of herself and her relationship to feminism. She says:

“I’ll be honest: I didn’t know what it meant to be a feminist for a long time. Not truly. It was a word I feared, influenced by those around me. However, like any words that are feared, they have power … I didn’t know I was a feminist until long after I had actually been one for a while. Because no one told me what feminism was or that I had a right to hold those sacred beliefs and ideologies.”

Indeed, Desiree-Anne’s words have power, she is a full-blown rights holder to feminism, as we all are, and it is her powerful writing and work that we’ll be exploring more of today. So welcome Desiree-Anne

Today on the podcast I talk with Shari Maluleke. Shari is a feminist writer who is committed to dismantling the patriarchy and fighting for the rights of black womxn and queer people.

Activism and writing are two things she is most passionate about, and she considers herself lucky to do both at the same time. Shari is 20 years old and is currently studying towards a Bachelor of Arts at Wits university. Taking things step by step, Shari hopes to not only leave a mark but change a few lives, even if it is just her own.

Shari’s piece in Living While Feminist is called ‘Understanding Myself’. In that piece she says:

Binaries felt more restrictive than eye-opening, for a long time in my life. Binaries made me feel like I must ask myself ‘who should I be’ rather than ‘who am I?’ Gender was always a matter of energies to me – masculine energy today and feminine energy tomorrow. I choose who I want to be today and I choose who I want to be tomorrow.

Today I’m going to be talking with Shari about her piece, about the power of language, and about what the future looks like for young feminists.

This week I'm talking to Kerry Hammerton about making your own way, and the power of poetry and feminist choices.

Kerry Hammerton is a Cape Town based writer who has published prose and poetry in various South African and international literary journals and anthologies. Kerry has an MA in creative writing and is a lecturer and supervisor for the Masters in Creative Writing at Rhodes University. She is also a PhD candidate at the University of the Western Cape.

Kerry has read her work at many literary festivals, and her prose work has recently appeared in The Looking Glass Anthology: Through the Single Gal’s Lens and Living While Feminist, which we’ll talk more about today. She has published three poetry collections - the Secret Keeper (2018), the Weather Report (2014), and These are the Lies I told You (2010). During the COVID-19 lockdown Imphepho press featured her as one of 21 poets for 21 days, and you can see a few of her poems in a creative mixed media format on her YouTube channel – links to all of these in the show notes.

On her website, her poetry manifesto says: “My poetic voice arises out of the roles that I play in life: woman, friend, lover, wife, daughter, godmother, aunt, writer, poet, carer, seeker…At times I wish I could hide behind the artifice of a deceiving and deceptive language, a soft language; but that is not who I am. My language is simple and unerring. I like to step cleanly into a poem and its meaning.”

Feminist, Activator and Strategic Rockstar.  Carla Watson thrives in collaborative spaces to strategically shape the future for the marginalised and often overlooked.

She was recognised as one of the Top 200 South Africans for her contribution in Education (2019)  and at just 31 years old she has just been recognised as one of 50 Most Powerful Women in the country by Mail and Guardian.

She is the Head of the Jakes Gerwel Graduate Teaching Fellowship which is focused on supporting and nurturing young people into high-impact high school teachers. Education and inclusivity are the pillars of her life’s work and vision and she strategically connects with individuals and organisations which resonate.

She is the founder of foryouandyours, an organisation focused on increasing visibility of LGBTIQ+ community and people of colour through greeting cards.

When she is not rocking a boat of social change, she is convincing her cat Thunder to become a lapcat.

Her piece in Living While Feminist is called ‘Scab’. In that piece she says:

“I am afraid of carrying the struggle … the struggle to either heal my pain or let it blind any glimpse of restorative justice in my country. I am afraid the very healing I work so hard for will mutate into justified anger, pain, revenge. How do I untangle all that I feel and experience every fucking day in South Africa, while remaining shackled to the responsibility of not flipping the fuck out and trending on Twitter.”

So today I’m talking with Carla about representation, inclusivity, and healing.

Welcome to the Living While Feminist podcast! How exciting!

Today I speak to Tiffany Kagure Mugo about many things, but mostly about Call Out Culture, Good Sex, and Feminist Kindness.

Tiffany is so many wonderful things it feels difficult to describe her but I’ll do my best. She is the (self-described) ‘intoxicatingly scary’ gatekeeper and co-founder of HOLAAfrica, a Pan African queer womanist digital community dealing with sex and sexuality. She is a TED and TEDX speaker with Siphumeze Khundayi, podcast, host, and Board Member of the FRIDA Fund.

Tiffany is a prolific writer of opinion pieces and useful blogs. She is the author of the book Quirky Quick Guide To Having Great Sex, launched in 2020, which sold out in many bookstores in the weekend it was published.

She's a media consultant and freelance journalist who tackles sex, politics and a huge range of other topics for the Mail and Guardian, the Huffington Post, the Citizen, This is Africa and others. In 2014 she attended the African Women Development Fund African Women Writers workshop in Uganda. Once upon a time she was an Open Society Youth Fellow and now has dreams of studying some new things. During weekends she is a wine bar philosopher and polymath for no pay.

In her TEDX talk titled ‘A history of coochie coversations’ she says: “So basically we live in a world that is so sexually powerful and electric but so sexually violent that you don’t know whether to masturbate or carry a machete.”

It is this ability to talk about serious, taboo, and sensitive topics with humour that is warm and inviting that makes Tiffany on of the foremost writers and thinkers on sexuality that we all have the pleasure of reading.

Living While Feminist is a weekly podcast where I speak to feminists about the ups and downs, ins and outs, and the emotional rollercoaster ride of living a feminist life.

I'm your host, feminist writer, researcher and author Jen Thorpe. Find out more about me here https://jen-thorpe.com/

Launching, mid-September 2020.