Salimah Valiani

Award-winning poet Sarah Lubala interviews award-winning Salimah Valiani on her new book, IGoli EGoli (Botsotso Publishing).

Sarah Lubala: Your book IGoli EGoli navigates through the diverse and contrasting elements of Johannesburg. What inspired you to chart the city like a map in your poetry, and how did you decide which locations and elements to include?

Salimah Valiani: I am someone who thrives on journeying and walking. I tend to snap mental and camera photos in the different places where I work, live, and walk. IGoli is a city where my footsteps are more calculated than other cities, so in putting together this collection, I tried to capture what I feel is at the essence of Johannesburg, without being able to cover all, or even most of its constituent parts. I see inequality and inimba/love at the essence of the City of Gold, a place that is rich with languages, peoples, and meaning. In IGoli EGoli, I celebrate Jozi as a world city that is entirely different to more typically lauded world cities like London, Cape Town, New York.

The juxtaposition of poorer neighbourhoods and suburban affluence in your poetry is striking. How do you approach writing about such stark contrasts, and what do you hope readers take away from these depictions?

I once lived in a shrinking, de-industrialised town where I first developed my writing practice. There I realised that in a small town one can look out and feel the world, while in a big city, one looks in to create a village, something manageable. In Jozi we build the world we want, cutting out the less desired, the blunt, the dangerous. With this collection, I want to jolt readers, especially in Johannesburg, Africa’s most unequal city. I want to bring to the fore what is blocked out but fundamentally linked to the coziness that the privileged create. Only when we stop the denial can we envision and enact transformative change.

Music and musicians such as Miriam Makeba, Salif Keita, Brenda Fassie, and Tu Nokwe feature heavily in your book. Can you discuss the impact of these and other musicians on your work and the cultural fabric of Johannesburg?

I began listening to Mama Miriam in the early 1980s, when my dad went to Nairobi and brought home a pirated cassette of a Miriam Makeba concert in the Republic of Guinea. In Johannesburg I learned of her life in Soweto and Sophiatown. I found myself living streets away from the Sophiatown Cultural Centre and going there for concerts and hearing greats like Dorothy Mazuku and Tu Nokwe. Salif Keita is an instance of Johannesburg’s West African strand that is rarely mentioned beyond the commodified world of fancy jazz festivals. All of these songs, spirits, and places feature in this collection, because poetry for me is about place, rhythm, and the weaving of unity. 

Your exploration of healthcare highlights a crucial aspect of urban life. What drove you to include this in your poetry, and how do you believe it reflects the broader social and political landscape of Johannesburg?

In my other life, I am a researcher, and I have written a book and several articles about the political economy of healthcare. In South Africa, and around the world, public healthcare is crucial to survival for the majority of people. Globally, public healthcare is being dismantled to make yet more space for profit-driven healthcare. In this collection, I wanted to capture some of this phenomenon through poetry via the lenses of different classes of people in need. I illustrate the uneven allocation of resources by juxtaposing public healthcare in a historically white area of Johannesburg, with private healthcare in a white-dominated suburb, with public healthcare in a black township that has historically fed labour to Joburg.

Your poems often feature a distinctive rhythm and structure, with a mix of short, staccato phrases and longer, flowing lines that seem to mirror the movement and pace of Johannesburg. How did you develop this rhythmic style, and what do you hope it conveys about the urban landscape and the experiences within the city?

I see poetry as a form of song. Music moves me, as do poems. They tap incisively into the emotive, without being verbose. Johannesburg and its many faces also tap like this. I have said elsewhere that it is al jinn that writes me. In ancient intellectual traditions of West Asia—elements of which can be found in Johannesburg—writers are moved by jinn, or spirits. So if these poems reflect the movement and pace of Johannesburg, I take it as a great compliment, but I give thanks to the jinns of Jozi.

The people of Johannesburg are central to your narrative. How do their stories and experiences shape the overall themes of IGoli EGoli and what challenges did you face in authentically representing their voices?

I wanted to feature some of the voices of Johannesburg with which I have engaged, particularly those of strangers. Voices we rarely hear. The italicised words and lines in the collection are direct quotes, used with consent. More than anything I am aiming to transcribe a small cross section of the city’s people, not represent them. Via individual experiences and beings, I am also proposing aspects of ‘the larger love’. The numbered ‘On love’ poems in this collection form part of a suite that began in my second poetry collection, Letter Out: Letter In, which was also inspired by South Africa. When I moved to Johannesburg nine years ago, I decided to gather my love poems in a single collection, which was to become 29 Leads to Love. The collection was released by Inanna Publications during the height of COVID-19, and then named the 2022 Winner of the International Book Award for Contemporary Poetry. I believe one of the reasons 29 leads to love won this recognition is that it resonated with the global search for healing, and the collective practice of care particularly pronounced during the pandemic. With IGoli EGoli, I am proposing that as a dynamic place and composite persona, Joburg also inspires like this.

Salimah Valiani is a poet, activist and researcher. 29 Leads to Love, her fifth poetry collection, won the 2022 International Book Award for Contemporary Poetry. Love Pandemic, Salimah’s first audiobook (also in print) was released by Daraja Press in 2022. Salimah's book IGoli EGoli is available from ABC.

Sarah Lubala is a Congolese-born award-winning poet, currently living in Johannesburg. Sarah has been twice shortlisted for the Gerald Kraak Award, and once for The Brittle Paper Poetry Award as well as longlisted for the Sol Plaatje EU Poetry Award. She is also the winner of the Castello Di Duino XIV Prize and the 2023 National Institute of the Humanities and Social Sciences Award: Poetry category, for A History of Disappearance - her debut.

Botsotso Publishing is made up of a group of poets, writers, and artists who wish to create art and to generate the means for its public communication and appreciation. They speak particularly of art that is of and about the varied cultures and life experiences of people in South Africa – as expressed in all languages. To find out more, take a look at their publisher page. 

Photograph copyright: David Mann.