We talk to two powerful poets and performers who work across and beyond a range of narrative and performative forms and traditions.
Unladylike caught up with Natalia Molebatsi and Phillippa Yaa de Villiers on a recent visit to South Africa.
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Our guests
Natalia Molebatsi is a writer and poet who has appeared throughout Africa, Europe and
the USA. Her performances and recordings, often with her band The Soul Making, combine poetry with with jazz, funk and hip hop.
the USA. Her performances and recordings, often with her band The Soul Making, combine poetry with with jazz, funk and hip hop.
Her first collection was Sardo Dance (Ge’ko Publishing, 2012), and her work appears in anthologies such as Letter to South Africa: Poets Calling the State to Order, Happiness the Delight-Tree: An Anthology of Contemporary International Poetry, New Coin, and the Anthology of World Poetry, and in academic journals. Nathalia edited We Are: A Poetry Anthology published by Penguin, and has run creative writing workshops all over the world.
Her performances available on CD include Come as you are: Poems for Four Strings (also on Spotify) and Natalia Molebatsi & The Soul Making.
You can read and hear some of Natalia’s poetry on Badilisha Poetry Exchange or watch her in performance on YouTube.
Phillippa Yaa de Villiers is a writer and performance artist. She has written for television and the stage, and in 2014 was the Commonwealth Poet, performing at Westminster Abbey in the presence of 2000 representatives of the Commonwealth and the Royal Family.
Her collections of poetry are Taller than Buildings (Centre for the Book, 2006) and The Everyday Wife (Modjadji Books, 2010). She edited No Serenity Here, an anthology of African poetry, and her writing has been widely published in journals and anthologies. Her plays include Where the Children Live, and the autobiographical one-woman show, Original Skin, which toured in South Africa and abroad.
Like much of her work, Original Skin centres on Phillippa’s negotiation of her identity. The daughter of an Australian mother and a Ghanaian father, she was given up for adoption at nine months of age, and brought up by her adoptive parents, a white family in apartheid South Africa. She didn’t discover she was adopted until she was 20 years old. Since then she has lived and studied in France and England, returning to South Africa to teach creative writing.
You can read and hear some of Phillippa’s work on Badilisha Poetry Exchange or the Poetry Archive. There’s an extract from her performance of Original Skin on YouTube.
Be warned: Bad music alert
The fusion of sound and words in these interviews is unintentional – we recorded one interview in a pub, so please forgive the background noise (including the worst song ever written). It does improve as it goes on. We promise to never record near cutlery again.
Our thanks to Professor Deirdre Byrne of the University of South Africa’s Institute for Gender Studies for arranging the interviews, asking a question or two of Phillippa, and taking Kelly to see giraffes.
Unladylike 