A Renegade Called Simphiwe. Pumla Dineo Gqola
when copied does not transmit properly.
I don’t mean substance. All human beings have substance, whether they let it show or not.
There is clearly a book in there somewhere about how artists like these, who are both incredibly talented and so unlike any other artist of their time, are able to negotiate the kinds of presence that these women have. This is not that book, although people interested in the minutiae of how to build brands would benefit from that book.
There is also no doubt much to be learnt about details of these artists’ own lives, and I look forward to reading biographies on all of them. If you picked up this book hoping to find a lot of details of Simphiwe’s private life, you will be somewhat disappointed because where there are private details of her life, I do not use them in the same kind of way as her biographer might find them useful.
What I am interested in here is thinking about Simphiwe out loud. I have many questions that have continued to plague me about her role and place in South African society. I have been fascinated by both what she achieves and what she elicits. On the one hand, she is utterly adored by many as her awards, reviews, sales and audience responses show. On the other, she is constantly told that she does not know her place.
Why is it so important for her to know her place?
What is this place?
And why is there only one appropriate one?
Even more importantly, why do those who attempt to remind her of her waywardness feel compelled to point this out since it clearly contrasts with her own sense of what her places are?
As a human being, she is full of contradictions. But she lives some of hers in the public glare without seeming to experience any real crisis. That there are people who want to see her brought down a notch every now and again is nothing special – even if it must be hurtful. Thato Mapule reminds us that a central aspect of celebrity culture is the adoration of famous people that is always haunted by the desire for their downfall. In other words, we want celebrities to be like gods and goddesses that we constantly look up to and stalk. Yet we want them to fall to confirm that they are mere mortals, like us. It is not just Schadenfreude, therefore, that led to the mean-spirited tweeting after Sunday Sun revealed details of Simphiwe’s relationship with a married former kwaito musician in 2013. As Grace Musila pointed out in private correspondence with me over this book, this duality in celebrity culture is also reminiscent of older Greek tragic theatre. In such theatre ‘man unlimited’ is celebrated as the embodiment of the greatest human accomplishment, on the one hand. On the other hand, ‘man limited’ is also welcomed as it shows the flaws of the gods/goddesses, thereby bringing them to the level of the ordinary human.
These women whose names I list provide some of the context through which I discuss Simphiwe Dana’s relevance in South Africa today. By this, I do not mean that Dana is the kind of woman that the above are, although this would be difficult to show too, given how different all of these women are among themselves. At the same time, as individual as Simphiwe is, she also speaks to a time where women who are daringly ground-breaking in their craft and chosen life are possible. This is one of South Africa’s contradictions because it also makes such women possible.
When I note that these are the women who form the community that Simphiwe Dana is part of, I do not mean friendships, although some of these exist. There are also marked ways in which Simphiwe is different from the women I mention above. All the others are very unapologetic feminists. Simphiwe has a more fluid relationship with feminism, as I discuss in more detail in ‘Desiring Simphiwe 2: The soft feminist’, later in this book. We know more about her private life because she sometimes speaks about it in interviews, revealing much more often than the others. Yet, as a mother, some of her decisions to keep her two children out of the spotlight are very similar to those adopted by Mashile and Mazwai.
Simphiwe Dana is one of a generation of creatives who have emerged with such a brilliant signature that they have presented a model scarcely seen before. I am fascinated by these artists and their art. It is important that many come from places that ‘celebrity’ does not ordinarily come from, or that they conduct themselves in ways less afraid of the implications of their political power.
One of the reasons I think Simphiwe Dana is so captivating is because she troubles many categories of belonging in the South African public imagination in the most remarkable ways. By public imagination, I mean the collective language we adopt and see reflected in the press, in popular culture, in political rhetoric, on the letters’ pages, that is repeated in what callers who comment on talk radio shows say. In some respects, it is the received wisdom. It is not that there is only one way of thinking in South Africa or that the public imagination is coherent and thinks consistently in the same way.
At the same time, there are some things that are more specifically in line with the spirit of the time. I could use language that mentions people like Jürgen Habermas’s public sphere, or Raymond Williams’s structures of feelings. And indeed, what I have in mind is linked to, and has aspects of, these conceptions of zeitgeist. All of them attempt to describe something about the spirit of a time: a collectively recognised set of values, assumptions and meanings that becomes a visible truth and is contested in a specific place. They become a truth because they are repeated so much that we find ourselves believing them to be ‘normal’ and we use them to navigate our lives without even thinking about them. They all pop to the surface when specific topics are explicitly discussed; they lie unspoken but influential the rest of the time.
This is why Simphiwe is both so passionately adored and needs to be taken down a notch in the public’s eye, to varying ends, as I discuss in the chapter ‘Uncontained: Simphiwe’s Africa’. Most people want to analyse Ms Dana’s public exchange with the Premier of South Africa’s Western Cape Province, Helen Zille as a moment on its own to make sense of it. Such an exercise makes sense, but when analysed alongside other moments of public critique more is clarified about Simphiwe Dana and South Africa’s failure to engage the imagination fully, especially within the public sphere.
I met varied responses when I mentioned that I am writing this book. Some of these comments perfectly resonated with Simphiwe’s place in the public imagination. Some people insisted that a biography on her would be more interesting than anything else. To these, I suggested that there is room to write more than one kind of book concerned with Simphiwe. A few people suggested that there was biography overload in South Africa right now. But most people with whom I had any kind of conversation about the book were quite happy to imagine the kind of book that they wanted this to be, unmoored to what I had in mind. I was tickled by this somewhat.
This, then, is a book that responds to the very significant invitation to the courage and imagination that Simphiwe Dana issues. In it I scrutinise the many ways in which her public work offers us an opportunity to collectively shift our senses of what is possible. I am convinced that both the content of her work – her lyrics, her acting, her columns, her blogs – and our varied responses to her, show us something about where such a shift is needed. Her vision is daring and prophetic, and this explains many public responses to her. She has her finger on several pulses even if we are not always listening to her on the requisite frequency.
We come from people who for millennia knew that art is the site of wisdom, even though we now pretend otherwise. There is wisdom in Simphiwe’s work. There is also invitation and inspiration. She is a human being, so there is also evidence of where she has not yet come to terms with her own wisdom. This is not reason to postpone this response. This book, then, tries to amplify aspects of Simphiwe’s public life and significance.
Some of what she points to needs urgent hearing, but prophets are often unheard in their own time. At the same time, her profundity is not only in her prophetic vision. There is much freedom for our individual selves if we allow ourselves some of the permissions she wrestles with.
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