CW: this interview contains mention of queer sexual assault.

 Maneo Mohale

Award-winning Poet / Writer/ Editor & Activist

Pronouns: They / Them

I know you were born in Benoni in 1992, but I couldn’t find much else about your childhood. What can you tell me about your early family life and what are some of your earliest memories?

I grew up between two worlds, so to speak, both in the East Rand. One in Benoni where I lived with my parents & older sister, and another in Katlehong, where I stayed with my grandparents.

I was born in the early nineties when my family had reached a significant crossroads, and when the country was fast approaching a rubicon of its own. When my older sister was born in the early eighties, my parents were both students at the University of the Witwatersrand, forming part of one of the first cohorts of Black students permitted to study at Wits.

My father studied medicine under Prof. Phillip Tobias, before leaving after four years. My mother studied social work. They were both very young, meeting and falling in love in high school in Katlehong. They were both the first in their families to attend varsity, after petitioning the State to allow them to study at a white university. 

By the time I was born, my father had pivoted into business, and my mother was working full time as a social worker. The rapid (and frankly astonishing) class ascension that accompanied their growing careers as young parents meant that they could move and change the world under our feet. First to Daveyton from Katlehong, and then to Benoni, where I was born and grew up. 

I still spent a lot of time with my grandparents in Katlehong, and grew up in that liminal space between suburban Benoni (where I played kissing catchers, swam & had Melrose cheese sandwiches at my school friends’ houses after school) and Katlehong (where I played m’gusha and bathi with my best friends and cousins, coming home dusty and gloriously scratched up from playing all day in the street). 

I remember reading my father’s medical textbooks and dictionaries at five or six years old (a habit of mine that delighted him), and picking up anything my grandfather would read, just to be close to him, wishing that a little of his gravely, graceful intelligence would rub off on me. My grandparents sold beer to get by, and I remember learning how to count under my grandmother’s soft-steely tutelage, growing up in fragments, in their three-roomed house on Shai Street.

You’ve mentioned that your parents and older sister strongly encouraged you to enter the world of words and storytelling. But is there a particular story you remember your grandparents telling you, and why do you think it resonated with you?

My grandmother used to sing me Tšelane, a myth about a little girl being pursued by a giant. The giant swallows hot pieces of coal to change his voice to make it sweeter and more melodic, like her mother’s, fooling Tšelane into opening the door while staying home alone. While telling the story, my grandmother would change her voice too, which would thrill me. I loved the story’s suspense, its lilting songs, its threat of violence  It was so scary at the time, but I adored scary stories, especially the one’s my grandmother told. It felt like magic, that a few words strung together just right could make my heart beat faster and my breath jittery. I loved it. 

If I’m not mistaken, you said you “sensed poetry” in those stories, particularly because of the “colour and cadence” in Sesotho. Can you elaborate on that?

Sesotho’s a very poetic language, though I don’t speak my mother tongue nearly as well as I’d like. Like so many of us, too many of us, I learned that assimilation afforded me some protection and (the illusion of) safety at the predominantly, stubbornly white private schools I attended. The price of learning English (and loving English), was a deep distance from my own tongue. 

I’m very grateful to my parents and grandparents for exposing me to what little literature in Sesotho they could give me and show me. Whether it was songs, or stories, or anecdotes, I learned best by listening. Lithoko tsa Mohale are my favourite, this long, loose collection of praise containing my family’s clan names and migration history. My father recites it like a prayer often, and I’m still deciphering its long curving linearity, its complex metaphors, its loose, musical precision. 

When did the listening turn into creating for you? Is there a piece of writing secreted away somewhere that you consider your first poem? Or did your creativity manifest in other ways when you were young?

Oh, phew. I think I really started writing seriously around 11 or 12? I found my diary from then, and there’s this weird little half-poem in there called “The Fifth”. I was obsessed with the number five, and I had all these sad, gay little feelings that I tried trapping inside of this verbose little halfling code of a poem. It’s so verbose, and already so gay. Shame, I try my best to hold baby Maneo with tenderness, and these little poems help me meet them again. 

I’m always curious about what high school experiences were like for queer people because it’s usually quite a revelatory time. Was that true for you, and what would you say in the most poignant or surprising thing you discovered about yourself?

High school was so many things: tough, clumsy, agonising, flashy, and so strange. I threw myself into my academics, because my nerdiness felt safe for me. I convinced myself that the closet could be so cozy, if I just kept my head down and dazzled the teachers and peers I cared about. I was a full-colours, prefect (though we called them “execs” – lol), top 10, teacher’s pet gay. I felt most expansive in drama, English and history (no surprises there), and was so privileged to have teachers who really gave a shit about challenging us. I remember being so desperate to impress. 

High school was a wildly revelatory time, in so many directions. I fell hopelessly in love there, with my best friend at the time, and it unlocked an entire oeuvre of queer bildungsroman feels in me. I wrote such terrible poetry, it was perfect. I learned how to keep secrets, and how to share them. I was already deeply depressed, anxious, dysphoric. All against this rapidly changing, über-glam, weird-kid, alternative-ish Joburg Northern Suburbs backdrop, of excess and access. We were so dramatic. 

How did your writing or creative expression manifest during that time?

I kept journals, filled to the brim with secrets. Writing didn’t feel like a refuge or anything at the time, I just liked the act of withdrawal, the keeping. Creatively though, I was starving. I consumed books, movies, plays, music, anything, really. I read voraciously and omnivorously. I had really worldly, curious friends and we’d swap books and watch plays and go to gigs all over Joburg. I slipped myself into such a strange little scene. I learned that I had an appetite, and that an appetite was a really important part of cultivating a creative sense of wonder. 

I know Tsitsi Dangarembga’s extraordinary book Nervous Conditions made quite the impact on your life, particularly because you were “shocked to recognise unacknowledged facets of myself”.

So, this question is two-fold: 

1- What did it feel like to see pieces of yourself reflected on those pages?

Honestly? Really terrifying. It’s difficult to describe the sensation of being and feeling seen. Beyond the sticky politics of representation, reading Nervous Conditions felt like I was reading something dangerous, like I wasn’t supposed to know what Tsitsi Dangarembga was showing me. It felt forbidden. And because I recognised aspects of myself within it, I felt forbidden. 

2- Did you ever return the novel to your sister’s bookshelf?

Oh, immediately. After I was done, I put it right back.

While you were completing your Honours degree in History and International Relations at the University of British Columbia (UBC), you were part of the 2014/15 editorial collective of The Talon- an anti-oppressive platform that recognises the fact the UBC occupies ancestral territories of Indigenous peoples.  

What did that experience teach you about being a useful ally without hijacking the narrative?

I shrink away a little from the word “ally”, especially in its use as an identity (even scarier, as a self-given title), and this is also something I learned while working with the incredible brains and hearts that formed The Talon. I learned so, so much with them, building a horizontally structured editorial board, learning my politics by practicing them, failing and trying, all while building something that had a mouth. 

It’s there that I learned of a provocation, first written by Indigenous Action, called Accomplices not Allies: Abolishing the Ally Industrial Complex, in zine form. It shook my shit in the best way, called me to reckon with my relationship with choosing (and having the sheer privilege to choose) a settler colonial state as my temporary home, led me to recognise the settler colony to which I belonged, and helped me begin to develop a way to engage with Indigenous people on Turtle Island in a way that made solidarity possible. 

It’s also how I fell in love with being an editor. Alongside the brilliant hearts at The Talon, I learned that I did my best work when I stepped out of the way, when I made space, when I learned when and how to speak. I learned the grammar and power of amplification.

Did that experience change the way you thought about the ongoing issue of land expropriation in South Africa?

Absolutely. It got me hooked on history, and how a state could weaponise and distort the past, what we know of it, and what we tell of it. I arrived on Turtle Island in 2011, just as an Indigenous social movement called #IdleNoMore reignited centuries of Indigenous resistance against the canadian government. It was the first time I’d heard people openly and repeatedly acknowledge the nations, custodians and people on whose land we were standing. It was how I became sensitised to the violent erasure inherent in canada’s story of itself. 

I was also seated in the PNE in 2013 when survivors of canada’s genocidal residential school system shared their sacred, depthlessly painful testimonies at a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It was horrifyingly familiar. How a State could use a spectacle of pain to further obscure its past and present crimes. How it gets to define the parameters around “truth”, and who gets to tell it, to further justify ongoing land theft. That entire experience was wildly triggering, and awfully, intimately familiar. 

During this time, you were also in a band called Laydyjams, right? How would you describe the band and is there a memorable gig that sticks out for you?

Oh wow, wow please. I fell in love with my best friends, Diane Mutabaruka, Roya Bennett and Sejal Narsey one day at an open mic at the Irving K. Barber Library at UBC. At the time, I was already in a hip-hop/jazz band called FunkDirty (lol.) with my brother Francis Arevalo, (I sang). We were messing about with Diane one afternoon, she was rapping over these cute little jazz riffs Francis was making with friends, when a Persian cutie called Roya grabbed the mic and shook the air with her voice. Sejal came soon after, with her violin, and we were inseparable after that. 

I think my favourite gig was at the Railway Club (vancouver’s longest operating nightclub), or when we opened for a band called Animal Atlas at the now-closed Electric Owl. I miss those babes, we did so much!

In 2016, you became Bitch Media’s first Global Feminism Writing Fellow. What do you say to people who think feminism is reductive?

I’d invite them to get curious. If I could, I’d point them to books and art and people and histories and music that challenge and open and poke at what their idea of what feminism “is”, or could be. My own ideas about feminism shift almost constantly—it’s how I know I’m growing. 

The following year, you served as a Managing Editor (for Platform Media) and an Acting Arts Editor (for Mail and Guardian). How did those roles influence how you manage your own writing and processes?

Oh, hugely! I’m really grateful to Ian McNair, who brought me on as ME of Platform when I was just starting to dip my toe into music journalism. Through Platform, I was able to immerse myself into genre-expansive, experimental, daring local music and art. We have such incredible artists here, and Platform gave me the chance to meet them and amplify their incredible work. We grew and nurtured a pool of Southern African writers—all writing about the scenes and cultures to which they belonged. I had so much fun at Platform.  

And filling in for Milisuthando Bongela at the Mail & Guardian was so instructive and propulsive for me. I took care of four editions of Friday, which felt like a dream. I hold the mistakes I made and the writers & artists I was able to edit with such pride. I love Mili with everything, she’s my lighthouse. Her work as an editor and writer informs so much of what I try to do. Mili is one of the people I’d love to be when I grow up.

Speaking of writing processes, what can you tell me about “The Sleeping”?

“The Sleeping” is a map. I made it as a way to ferry myself through the work of writing Everything is a Deathly Flower, a kind of half-syllabus, half-spell. Writing is lonely work, so it was a way of gathering poets and poems around me, models that made me feel possible. It helped unstick me when I got lost.

Upon announcing the publication of your debut collection, Everything Is A Deathly Flower, your publisher, uHlanga, says your “unapologetic and disarming voice carries through a budding and blooming garden of poetics, rooted in a contemporary southern African tradition, but springing forth in queer and radical new directions”. 

Do you think there is an inherent radicalness to being queer?

I shy away from the idea that anything is inherent. If queerness is anything, it isn’t permanent, or monolithic. Not all queer people share a desire to expose the rot and root, not all queer people want and work towards freedom, justice or liberation. We’re not all kin. Also, I narrow my eyes a little at words like “radical”. It’s a funhouse mirror of a word (much like the word “queer”), it looks different and takes on different meanings, depending on where you stand along the margins. I guess I’m trying to talk about power. 

My favourite framing of what it means to be queer is from Muñoz. Queerness as not-yet-hereness, an ideality. I’m a slut for José Esteban Muñoz. He writes that, “queerness is a longing that propels us onward, beyond romances of the negative and toiling in the present.” He reminds me that my work is to continue the work done by my elders, while imagining & remembering new ways of being in the world, so that new worlds can be possible. 

In an interview with City Press, you said “the borders of being unapologetic started to dissolve for me”. As queer people, we are often told to be less visible in order to be palatable, so how and why did those borders fall away for you?

What I was trying to gesture at with that is how being visible is dangerous. It’s costly. Trans and queer people shouldn’t have to be visible in order to be believed, cared for, protected, loved. And the terms and (often scant) rewards of visibility are often dictated and apportioned to us by these capitalist and kaleidoscopically oppressive structures and institutions. 

Right at the beginning of my career, when I was vulnerable to the pressure of respectability and palatability, I felt myself shrink and hide so much of myself. I started to apologise for the space I was taking up. 

I’m only now beginning to shake some of that off, but it’s tough and sore work. Slow work. I’m shaking off and working through shame, trying to balance witnessing violence and injustice with action, I’m trying to see myself first, all while thinking about safety.

Last year, in conversation with Globala Torget, while discussing the subject matter of your debut collection, I got the impression that you were very intentional about calling your experience “queer sexual assault”. Personally, I don’t think we talk about abuse and assault in the queer community enough, and queer abusers often hide behind this misconception that abuse is only abuse if a cis-het man is the perpetrator. 

May I ask why being that specific is important to you?

When I was assaulted, I didn’t have any words for what happened to me because my abuser is queer. I was covered in a very thick, terrifying silence that twisted me up into such terrible shapes. My body reached for words, and needed words, so I could believe myself, and ask for belief and protection and healing and care. 

It was only when I volunteered with the Sexual Assault Support Centre at my varsity that I found words for what happened, what my abuser had done. The SASC was this incredibly vital space for so many trans and queer survivors, Ashley Bentley and her incredible team of sexual assault counsellors saved my life. 

I also picked up Leah Horlick’s incredible book of poems For Your Own Good around the same time. Leah renders her experience healing from queer sexual assault in such exquisite, excruciating, tender, powerful, and intimate detail. Leah gave me words too, and opened me up to the work poetry could do. My deliberateness in language is nudged on by a thread of work before me and beyond me. I’m trying to puncture silences as much as I can, so I breathe a little easier. 

The titles of your poems in the collection draw from the scientific names of flora and botanicals, which can be very alienating. This is then immediately contrasted by your beautiful, personal, organic writing. My reading of this compelling contrast is that it is a reclamation of sorts. Is there some accuracy in that assessment?

I think I’m doing quite a bit with my titles, or at least trying to. In some cases, by using this classic Latin binomial nomenclature, I’m poking fun at empire, at this imperial desire to taxonomise and classify everything, while also poking at my own need to name things and find names for things. In other cases, I’m trying to do a subversive move by finding indigenous names for plants, but ironically much of my knowledge of indigenous plant names is mediated by books written by white naturalists. 

In other cases, I’m telling a secret about a secret. Like “Phalaenopsis (Moth Orchid)”. Apparently, Phalaenopsis get their common name from a weird colonial encounter in the mid-1750s. While approaching Java by ship, a Swedish student of Charles Linnaeus (considered to be “the father of modern biological taxonomy”) mistook a growth of orchids for a cloud of moths. 

“Phalaenopsis” is a poem about the day I met my abuser on my way to class. It’s a nervous poem, ending in a foreshadowing. Years later, along the same stretch, I met a love of mine, carrying a moth orchid. The title is a double-wink, because the poem does something similar, though a little darkly. 

Another motif I find compelling is the renaming and reinvention of yourself within the poems. Did these iterations or versions of yourself help you to write about your experience at more of a distance when you needed to?

Oh yes, but sometimes I needed to eliminate distance so I could draw closer to a feeling or set of memories. Names also helped me do that. They helped a little with the dissociation. As you can already tell, I’m drawn to names. What they can do, who gets to give something a name, what gets to have a name, what changing a name transmutes and transforms in the named thing, and in the act of naming itself.

I’m really fond of “16 Days of Atavism”, a poem where I give myself 16 names, other than “victim”. It’s a sacred poem, and a cheeky poem. It’s a little hand-mirror with a blade in its handle.  

I also think we don’t talk about how important a good editor is. While working with Francine Simon, was there a particular revelation you had about any component of your collection?

Francine is such a badass, she’s a genius. She held my work with both hands, and pushed it further into and beyond meaning. I appreciated her playfulness with such tough subject matter, and really loved her focus on innovation in form. Francine was the one who split “Baroma 1:26–28” into two columns like Biblical verse, and pushed for “Hell & Peonies” to be read by turning the book landscape. She took early drafts of my poems, lasered away platitudes, cut away anything that didn’t resonate like a bell in a chamber hall, and often asked: “How can we make this yours?”. 

What advice do you have for a queer writer navigating the industry?

Trust your voice, cutie.

I also read somewhere that a future project of yours is working on your own imprint- what can you tell me about that?

I really, really love editing. And I’d love to build a space and platform that explodes with queer Southern African writing, a space to publish dangerous and daring work, and for now, I’m dreaming of an imprint to do some of that work and help facilitate it. I’m always thinking about how Toni Morrison said that “the function of freedom is to free someone else.” So I’m dreaming of a space that can contribute to that work. 

Lastly, what would you like your legacy to be?

That’s really, really tough. I’m not sure. 

Work that has changed my life is work that makes me feel possible. I think I want someone to pick up my work, and feel like they’re possible too.

For more information on Maneo Mohale, be sure to visit their website.

Follow them on Instagram and Twitter.

Research and interview by Gary Hartley

This publication was made possible with the support of the Other Foundation. The views  expressed herein do not necessarily represent those of the Other Foundation.