You’ve seen these words before, but because we don’t stop dying and bleeding, these words won’t either. They will mutate. They will shift. They bleed out. They will erase themselves.
This version was for a publication that eventually rejected it. From the comments, I guess they found it too violent. Black womanhood is violent here. This is my body. Let me show you on the doll where they hurt me.
How to speak about the continuous violent acts against women? There is no justice in statistics. These words are a resistance of silence.
These stories should be told with kinder words. Words that allow the tongue to curl and unfurl around the contagion of history.
I want to hold my poisoned lips to yours and shove my rotting tongue into the chasm of your mouth. But kinder words.
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Nokuthula Simelane, an underground ANC operative disappeared in September 1983, abducted by the apartheid government’s Soweto Special Branch. She was tortured somewhere between South Africa and Swaziland, and killed.
From the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearing:
Chairperson: So it was a repeated assault?
Coetzee: Chairperson, a person had to be broken first in order to rebuild them thereafter in order to establish a situation of trust between the parties.
Chairperson: I am asking you what her reaction was when you had her on the farm, in the middle of nowhere, in a single room, with a whole big group of you. Did she not cooperate?
Coetzee: No. She cooperated. She cooperated to such an extent that we gave her the pen and paper to write with.
Chairperson: Very well. Regardless of that these assaults took place consistently during the first week?
Coetzee: Yes.
Chairperson: And they were serious?
Coetzee: Upon various occasions in the first week of her presence on the farm, yes.
Chairperson: And serious enough that you would be prepared to describe it as torture?
Coetzee: I would put it that way.
Chairperson: So, you tortured her for a week?
Coetzee: Yes. It boils to that.
Nokuthula Simelane. Missing since September 1983. Declared dead in June 2019.
*
Yes, it boils down to that. I would put it that way. That is an accurate description. We had to break her. She had to be broken in order to rebuild. Yes, I would call it torture. Yes. Torture. She cooperated with us to such an extent that we gave her the pen and paper to write with.
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These words then, a microscope to the universe of death and undoing that is being femme in South Africa.
There is no justice in statistics, but this is what we have. Femicide in South Africa is five times higher than the global average. Every three hours, a woman is murdered. One in four women will be sexually assaulted and raped.
Speaking to the recent outcry and protest, President Cyril Ramaphosa said, "This is a very dark period for us as a country. The assaults, rapes and murders of South African women are a stain on our national conscience.”
Stains on hands and in graves and on the ground on to which we bleed. These stories should be told with kinder words.
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In an alleyway in Tsakane in Johannesburg, in shallow ditch close to KwaThema Taxi Rank and down the road from Bar Lounge. Sunday morning, of floral dresses and Bibles, hair buns and stewed meat with cinnamon pumpkin, and Noxolo, with your head knocked out of shape, your eye sockets empty and your brain, puzzle pieces. A bottle of beer, brown forced into your ... and a used condom found in your … and a brick on the pavement, used to break you down.
Noxolo Nogwaza. Murdered. April 2011.
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“I’m not sorry,” says Themba Mvumbu after being arrested for his participation in the gang rape and murder of Banyana Banyana footballer Eudy Simelane. Gang raped repeatedly, stabbed 12 times before she died, succumbing to her injuries. Taking turns, they say, like they waited politely in line to force obliteration into her and then drain it out through 12 uneven puncture points.
“I’m not sorry.”
Eudy Simelane. Murdered. April 2008.
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In one of the pictures circulating on social media, she has her hair in cornrows with a braided ponytail, sunglasses resting on top of her head. Her eyes look down, to a phone, to a book, away from scrutiny.
Former Lover says he disposed of her body. Not kill, he says, just dispose. Former Lover says he burnt her using a tyre and petrol and pool acid. Former Lover says, “I was not thinking straight at the time.”
Smoke. Black rubber melting. Fibre catching alight, burning holes in … until a passerby discovers her charred remains in a ditch in Bramley.
Karabo Mokoena. Murdered. April 2017.
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Tladi, Soweto. Obscured partly by a large rock, a woman half-naked and dead in an open veld, discovered by those gathered to cut the long, overgrown grass sprouting along the railway line. Three weeping gashes in her neck. Three large stones near her head. A gown, a patterned thing in red, black, blue.
Lerato Moloi. Murdered. May 2016.
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Also Tladi, Soweto. A man, 37, turns gun on self, puts nozzle to temple, pulls trigger, smattering brains, after holding 31-year-old girlfriend hostage for hours, wounded by fist, by bullet. Residents, police officers, ambulances piled up outside.
Unnamed Woman. Held hostage after laying domestic violence charges. March 2017.
*
At the Springs power station of a government parastatal, a woman is found dead in her office after friends and family report her missing. For two weeks, they look. Her car is still parked in the lot outside Eskom.
Thembisile Yende. Murdered. May 2017.
*
Farm labourers on their way to work in the early hours of the morning. The body of a woman between the ages of 25 and 35 lying on the side of a road near the Kameeldrift Plot in Tshwane. The _______ woman has two gunshot ______ to her upper ____, ripping holes bordered in red through a black shirt and a blue jacket.
Unnamed woman. Murdered. June 2017.
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Mpumalanga. A young cattle herder leading his cows through the open veld at Manyeveni Trust, Kabokweni, detects a smell, putrid, putrefying. His cows refuse to come any closer and he sees what appear to be human body parts protruding from the ground.
Thembelihle Base is 24 years old when she is reported missing. She wears a brown and yellow school uniform in the news photos, standing in front of a fence of logs and stones. After her boyfriend is arrested, his house is torched and the roof collapses and the walls fall and crumble until…
Thembelihle Base. Murdered. April 2017.
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One early reader of this piece says it is “too violent” and “hard to get through … your stuff is heartbreaking. Do you set it out to be this way? How do we soften this?”
Kinder words.
Another says she wouldn’t soften it.
Artist Gabrielle Goliath is “constantly grappling with ... the problematic of the representation of violence in art”.
I write the world the way it whispers itself into my ear. Or shouts. Here I am transcribing a scream on to the sharp edge of a knife. Memory is violent and forgetting is unjust. I have no more softness for this and no desire to make poetry. I want to be an honest witness. To commit with the rigour of a court stenographer every name and place. Every violation and crime. Yes, there will be blood here, because there already is.
*
In one version of this piece there are no names, to protect these women with obscurity. But we are always invisible.
In another, there are only the names of the perpetrators. But there are no violators in this country, only crimes.
In another, all the crimes are crossed out. But our injustice system does this already.
The concern is not aesthetic, it is ethical. If this feels too violent, it is because it is.
I am writing to tell you how these men touched me. And I want it to feel like rape, so you can call it by no other name. In writing about the problem of violence, this text becomes part of the problem.
Lindokuhle Nkosi. Raped. 2005.
Lindokuhle Nkosi. Beaten. 2015.
Lindokuhle Nkosi. ________. ________.
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Nokuphila Kumalo, whose name means life. Murdered. April 2013.
Aviwe Jam Jam. Eudy Simelane. Janika Mallo. Jesse Hess. Leah Merchant. Sinoxolo Mafevuka, whose surname means to die as you rise. Nombuyiselo Nombewu, who after leaving home to borrow R50 for electricity is found, charred and lifeless, recognisable only by one earring and the umbrella she was carrying.
And the friends. After boarding a taxi on a Friday evening, Bongeka and Popi disappear, only to be discovered _____, one woman in Tladi and the other in Naledi. Both appear to have been raped and the _________ gunshot wound to _____ parts of the body.
Tladi residents claim to have witnessed a suspicious _____ following a woman and the blasting of a _____ being fired. In a photo published by a news website, a woman in blue skinny jeans and a green top lies face down. Avuyile, half her body in a ditch, long black hair obscuring the ______ her head.
Lindokuhle Nkosi, who was asked, “If you did not want it, then why are you here?”
Police are still in search of the killers of Zandile Sandlana, who was found _____ in a field in the TR Section of Khayelitsha. Stripped down to her bra and one shoe, a broken bottle lodged in her mouth.
In Sedibeng, Vaal. The body of a 34-year-old woman is found wrapped in plastic bags and stashed under_____. Evaton, a 22-year-old man is arrested for the murder of a 16-year-old girl after he is caught with a heater and a tyre, attempting to burn down the shack where _____. Police investigating the missing person’s case of Carmelitta Baadjies found her body under a _____ in the home ________ husband in King William’s Town.
A principal and _____ teachers have been arrested after gang-raping _____ learners in the coastal province of KwaZulu-Natal after a video of the rape went viral. Bothithong High School, 30 learners _____ impregnated by their educators. A 17-year-old schoolgirl found deceased, drenched in blood from multiple stab wounds to her upper ____ in her home in Mchoncho Village, outside Libode in the Eastern Cape. Lekita Moore, 19, _____ along Tuna Road in Nooitgedacht. Stabbed several times in the stomach and throat. _____ nipples and parts of vagina had been cut off. Qondile Mhlanga, 21, missing from kaMdladla near Tonga in April. _____ body found covered with tree branches and dumped in a _____ a week later. British woman has died after burglars broke into a house in the fishing village of Dullstroom and _____ her with a blowtorch _____ shooting her _____ plastic bag down her throat. South African athlete _____ arrested _____ shooting her through a closed bathroom door.
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Appendix of missing words:
joy, mutilated, sharp, foreign object, birds of paradise, with a blunt object, stolen, woman, women, drugged, bed, fractured and haemorrhaging, alive, asphyxiation, trachea, meridian response, hacked into pieces and set alight, gagged, married and pregnant, mother of three, acquitted of all charges, terminal lucidity, bleeding out, neighbour heard the screaming, exsanguinate, teenager, public, dead, broken bottle shoved, rupture, gunshot wound, smiling, mutilated and disfigured, dislocated, missing, lost, exuberance, amputated, sanguine, vagina, bliss, cavity, for more than three weeks, decaying and decomposing, beautiful, screaming in the night, side of the road, ditch, dam, damning, three large rocks, spinning on the tip of a candle flame, a piece of skull and hair...
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In words, too, there is little justice. They are violent with sharp edges that cut and scrape. But this is what we have. The absence of silence.