Natalia brings the room to a hush. With words in a tumble, characters with a magnetic charm dressed by music (and boy can she sing.) In fact, in her opening piece she speaks of bodies singing, listening to eulogies, dissolving the winds breath… She says, “… these bodies release the truth to what the soul had shelled. Bodies who love and are loved, bodies who pray and are prayed for, bodies who play and are played…” Tel me you can’t picture her words in your head and I’ll tell you that you probably lost contact with your imagination when you stopped telling stories using stones; this is if you are a girl of course. If you are a boy, you stopped painting your dreams in the clouds with kites as mobile paintbrushes. Natalia possesses a rhythm only the god’s can dance to, sing to, and live to.
Now, for the answer to the question no one wanted to respond to. ‘Who was your favorite poet?’ Not that it is by any means easy to respond to such a question, especially considering the generation of poets the likes of me hails from. Not that it prides me to say this after attending this show. I hail from a generation of verbal stone throwers, ones born amidst the massacre of apartheid. These, children of soon to be free women trapped in abusive relationships, became ignorant to the paramount role to be played by the ‘Children of Freedom of Expression.’ So all we do is write based on slam scores numbered “10.” Words saturated in meaningless punchlines and diluted by pale, ghostly metaphors; but to be fair, some of my contemporaries are seekers of light, truth and poetic discipline. So, my favorite TWO poets of the evening were one Makhosazana Xaba and Phillippa Yaa de Villiers.
