Things Left Unsaid

In South Africa issues of identity remain a pressing concern and
preoccupation. For some, the experience of feeling that one does not
belong in South Africa, especially among Africans and African
descendants, appears to be intensifying. In this first collection of
poems, Rosabelle Boswell speaks of the many places in which ordinary
Africans born outside of South Africa try to achieve belonging. They do
so in the family context, the backyard, language, the meeting, familiar
landscapes and dreams. The poems also foreground the tumult of emotions
that rise from the experience of exclusion and the results of pressure
when one must conform. There is panic and dislocation, desperation, fear
and sense of marginality when one’s work and achievements are reduced
to whether one is born in South Africa or not. According to the poet, in
such a context, one can only achieve open-access freedom from the tyranny of
belonging by psychologically walking away from the expectations of those
in power and putting oneself in a ‘clearing’ where flexibility,
openness and newness reside. The forest of expectations remains, but we
can achieve temporary respite from it by walking away now and again. The
collection spans two years of writing identity in a different form,
poetry.