Thami Hector Manekehla : How to save you from yourself
This is a body, a body named Soweto: this body is/it's also a place, this place is/it’s a forced settlement.
This settlement is/it’s a community and this community is/it’s not of its own arrangement. This arrangement is/it’s given a name. Its name does not come from its own image, its identity is not of its own nature. This body is/it’s a monument, this monument is tattooed with scars of colonial terror, embroidered with bitter history carried on to generations. Grief is the everyday mantra of this body, brutality is the meditation practice of this community, their land of origin has been irrigated with their own blood. The scent of chaos can be felt far away from their land. This body is a corpse used to decorate the landscape with fear of any resistance. Death is the close friend of this body, identity and community. Love, imagination, relaxation, are faraway concepts of the reality of this body of a people of a community that does not know what privilege is.
This is the other body, the other body is/it’s named imagination. Imagination is/it’s a new place, this place is a community. A new reality of a community where this body can live without any history. In this settlement of imagination, this body can name itself by its power and give itself its own identity from its point of view. In this reality, there lives a community full of love that this body never experienced in the other reality. In the land of imagination, this other body is poetic, harmonic and rhythmic. This community of a body sings without pain, dances without memory and praises with a new language not of colonial vocabulary.
How to save you from yourself: the fact that you are already dead, the event has not taken place yet: either with the remaining breath of your life you stand for something or die for nothing. How to surrender your life in a vessel of your body to the continuation of a better life for your own people, your own tribe, your community?
Your body is encrypted with the history of every encounter your people have experienced in their lifetime passed on to you. Your body must allow itself to play out all the remaining experiences in your DNA - to unlock new life.
How to continue to share ways of healing, how to support the other, how to teach the other, how to resist and stand for the delayed future.
Credits
Bio Thami Hector Mamekehla
, 10. - 13. November 2022