i have been well inspired by my new friend Original Dante who has an exceptional gift at writing Micropoetry to try put together some of my own. i have no idea how he manages to fit SO MUCH into so few words which has clearly always been a problem of mine and so maybe tackling some Micropoetry will help me in general to write more using less. So here goes - these are the Micropoems [...]
her voice whispers yes but it's the sadness i see behind her eyes that reveals the honest no [For some more of the poems i have come up with in 2015, click here]
Close to 13 years of doing Improv with Megan Furniss and differing amounts of years with the rest of this crazy bunch i usually get to hang with on a Monday evening. Making stuff up. And to be absolutely honest, i had been getting a little tired of the same old formula, week in, week out, and so when i was about to leave for a month to go overseas again, in one sense i [...]
i have decided to resume the series on 'How to be One bit Less Racist' with this piece by my friend, Andy Vaughn. The interruption and focus on some of the bigger questions i though was completely important and necessary, but i also still see these seemingly tinier aspects as crucial to us starting to retrain our minds and thoughts and become less racist in the day to day interactions we have with people, while keeping in [...]
i received two sets of comments after the last post in this series and felt that both were worth sharing. The first was from Sabrina and was really helpful in reminding me that racism can be localised. One strong example we came against when we were in the States is that the term 'coloured' there when referring to a person of colour, is very strongly racist, whereas in South Africa, for the most part, it [...]
Another passage from the chapter titled 'Some African Cultural Concepts': 'Yet it is difficult to kill the African heritage. There remains, in spite of the superficial cultural similarities between the detribalised and the Westerner, a number of cultural characteristics that mark out the detribalised as an African. I am not here making a case for separation on the basis of cultural differences. I am sufficiently proud to believe that under a normal situation, Africans can [...]
One of the areas of racist behaviour that grates me the most is when a white person refers to the person working in their garden or looking after the upkeep of their house or perhaps watching their children as 'boy' or 'girl'. Especially when the person they are referring to is often older then them, but i think it should be a standard rule that once someone hits what 20? 18? they are no longer [...]
i am still slowly making my way through Steve Biko's 'I write what I like' and here is a passage that i marked a while ago from Chapter 8: Some African Cultural Concepts: One of the most fundamental aspects of our culture is the importance we attach to Man [by which i think he is referring to people as opposed to individual - brett] . Ours has always been a Man-centered society. Westerners have on [...]
This one will no doubt surprise and shock a few South Africans, but one of the highlights of my life was being a Spur waiter for five years, back when we didn’t know how offensive the logo potentially was: […]
My friend, Megan Furniss had these questions to help us get thinking and self-examining on this... If you are worried that you might be a little bit racist there are a few things you can do to check: # Do you have a natural (and unreasonable) expectation that everyone should be able to communicate with you in English? # Do you get irritated with Africa Time, because you haven’t taken public transport in a while [...]