Beiruth walks beneath a flattened light in the industrial yellow and concrete of the taxi rank. Or she stalks it, haunting the hollow luminescence in white fishnet stockings crisscrossing borders on her legs. The camera holds tight at her flank – in its frame we see a hand swinging at its sides – and next to it, the partial view of a red onesie stretched over her ass, a sign in white and blue above it: Atlantis. Something covers her head, her face, in tandem with the onesie rigged to shimmer with the colours of the spectrum. A man in a white wife-beater leans toward her, cocks his head to one side, and holds his arm out to get attention. Another stops in his tracks, stares animatedly, looking so we can see him looking. A woman in black appears in the frame, shimmies for Beiruth, or the camera. From somewhere, an external diegetic voice asks, “You tryna fuck me?”

With the onesie belted around the waist, she stands, splayed hard against the wall of the Universal Church, back and palms flat under the blue of the crucifix hanging above her, bouncing off her helmet. She moves slow and horizontal as if navigating the face of a cliff. Her hand feels the wall tentatively, and then reaches for the white gating that secures the entrance of the church. She extends a stilettoed leg out, finds footing, and spins her body, pirouetting into position. Then she climbs, her helmet obscuring her path. She stays ready for the eventually of having a man try to crack her skull in one day. She has a hole in the top of her head, or she is avoiding one.

2008. Johannesburg. Athi-Patra Ruga weaves loose threads into the warp and weft of a fabric. The governing party recalls the president of the republic. From his apartment downtown, Ruga has a window view of both the xenophobic attacks that would set the city on fire and of the girl stripped naked at the taxi rank because of her mini-skirt. Beiruth was born here. The bastard child of Joburg Clubland’s strobe lights; the fluorescence and violence of the time. Against ideas of women and femininity. Against the notions of nationhood

Hilton Als in White Girls:

“We were Barbara Smith and her twin sister, Beverly, and their feminism and socialism, and we understood every word of what Barbara meant when she and her co-editors titled their 1982 anthology All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies.”

Athi-Patra Ruga is not a black woman, but his avatars are. Or rather, they present femme and subsequently draw the attention a black woman’s body does. They wear heels and helmets. They walk past glares and jeers. Are you trying to fuck [with] me?

Ruga says, “My work is very femme-centric. I want to bring femme queer dreams into the world, into art. This is a legacy of the imagination, imagination as affirmation.”

Miss Congo is in a bleached denim number, red bandana furled around the top of her crown, her on her back. She lays on a raised concrete platform, against the hardness of a wall of the same material. In her hand is a block of cloth. She crunches her abdomen, screaming at intervals.

She’s flat again, another hard wall, another raised heap of dirt and broken things, red and white miniature aeroplanes.

These are altars of her making, blood lust and body as a sacrifice.

Who wants a tired sacrifice? We fatten our beasts before the slaughter. Feed them whole and keep them hydrated. Here, Ruga’s altar lies in wait; too tired to be a sacrifice and baptised in things too hard, too heavy to allow for flight.

The women in the The Future White Women of Azania, a performance series, are loud to the point of garishness. They are the arms and legs of delicate, petaled things, hues of pink and amber, crimson, whites and blues. Their torsos expand into amorphous spectrums of helium, extending upwards and buoyant. The things the rainbow nation absorbed. Spat out. They are pretty, but not beautiful, and even in the colours they parade; nothing about them says they are white.

Athi-Patra Ruga laughs when I ask about that. He responds with the kind of flippancy that familiarity can breed. “I mean, come on, white can mean many things. It can be white as in mhlophe, msulwa. Pure of the past and the future. And it could also be white women. White like the kids who are being told, ‘Ukuthi benza izinto zabelungu,’ when they want a particular kind of safety or beauty or even luxury. Right? Aren’t we told that those are white-woman things?

“Balls to us is as close to reality as we’re gonna get to all of that fame and fortune and stardom and spotlights.”- Pepper LaBeija

In the seminal documentary Paris is Burning, ‘Paris’ is one of the imaginary in the same way that Azania is the product of hope and myth. A few minutes into the film, Pepper LaBeija, the legendary mother of the House of LaBeija, flips through a magazine: Beautiful White Woman after Beautiful White Woman. Their two-dimensional selves the epoch of humanity, vulnerability, freedom. “Why is it that they could have that and I didn’t?” she asks. “And I always felt cheated. I always felt cheated.”

In another scene, Octavia St. Laurent points to a poster pasted on the wall, red-tipped fingers running their way down it. “This is my idol Paulina.” She rubs her hands over the flat white woman. “Someday I hope to be up there with her. If that could be me, I think I would be the happiest person in the world.”

The Versatile Queen Ivy appears from the darkness. We see her from the back. The little light here moves in small ways. Ways that require words like shimmer, like glitter, like glint. She walks and the eye cuts between her and other things of shine and pearl, of dark and iridescence. A voice gives instruction, the intended recipients of which are unclear.

“Khululeka”.

“Sebenzisa amehlo enqondo.”.

“Ncuma.”.

“Ubhale iblessings zakho.”.

“Manginibuza ukuba ubani inkululeko emagameni akho.”.

“Ewe. Yes. Please. Thank you.”

“Now keep the picture in mind,” the voice commands in English as the Versatile Queen Ivy holds in her gold-gloved hands what appears to be a dompas, “to refer to from time to time.” The pass is placed on a vanity table. The Versatile Queen Ivy is seated at a dressing mirror bordered in lights. This is another altar for the Alters. It is jarring in its illumination, in its blindingly gaudy gold. A robotic recitation of Brenda Fassie’s ‘Weekend Special’ is captured in the air. A small porcelain minstrel figure sits on the table. A crystal vase, too. A gold jewelry case is perched atop a hardcover copy of ‘Valley of The Dolls’. Versatile Queen Ivy glares at the mirror as the juxtaposition of these objects on display bleeds away a myth. The passbook on the table belongs to the grandmother of Athi-Patra Ruga, but the other items, I assume, belong to the Versatile Queen Ivy. In the construction of this universe, this future Azania, the performer and the performance couple in a way that mystifies, storifies.

The Versatile Queen Ivy gets up from the stool and begins to dance. Something of a desperate celebration; ritual with a purpose I am not yet privy to. Soon she is joined by other avatars—other inhabitants of this cosmos—who parade themselves in colour. Here, the Makubenjalo refrain dropped from the National Anthem is inserted. The faces of Feral Benga, Steve Biko, Simon Nkoli, Felicia Mabuza-Suttle, Winnie Mandela and Brenda Fassie are superimposed onto that of the Queen. The other avatars surround the bandaged Walking Wound, undressing her, tending to her. Or is it Ruga they tend to, now stripped of the Queen’s gold and glitter. In the end, she is naked, on display. A Versatile Queen Ivy Venus Hottentot. A wound undressed without redress.

Fred Moten in In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition:

“Between looking and being looked at, spectacle and spectatorship, enjoyment and being enjoyed, lies and moves the economy of what [Saidiya] Hartman calls ‘hypervisibility’. She allows and demands an investigation of this hypervisibility in its relation to a certain musical obscurity and opens us to the problematics of everyday ritual, the stagedness of the violently (and sometimes amelioratively) quotidian, the essential drama of black life, as Zora Neale Hurston might say.

Hartman shows how narrative always echoes and redoubles the dramatic inter-enactment of ‘contentment and abjection,’ and she explores the massive discourse of the cut, of rememberment and redress, that we always hear in narratives where blackness marks simultaneously both the performance of the object and the performance of humanity. She allows us to ask: what have objectification and humanization, both of which we can think of in relation to a certain notion of subjection, to do with the essential historicity, the quintessential modernity, of black performance?”

There are things that bleed here. That diffuses with unchecked ease between fact, feeling and fantasy. Athi-Patra Ruga is himself a creation. Born Athenkosi Luphele Ruga, he adopted what would become his professional moniker at a young age, borrowed from his love for musician Patra.

In an interview on Contemporary And with writer and arts coordinator Pamella Dlungwana, he elaborates: “It’s a construct; it’s a very deliberate, very telling construct. I think that it is a character in itself; it is me dealing with such a damned long name. It’s a testament to my need for constantly re-inventing myself. I think there is a need for my generation and for me to constantly re-invent the self. That’s why I call it a brand because it represents those things. There’s a moment where one can live with how they are defined by others and a moment where that needs to stop and the definition needs to come from the self. I think that’s why I keep it on and I think it’s also quite evident in the constant invention of the characters. I find it interesting that you brought that out, the construction of my name and the characters I perform.”

So here, we have Athenkosi Luphelele Ruga performing Athi-Patra Ruga performing the Versatile Queen Ivy, or the Walking Wound, or the Future White Woman of Azania, or Ilulwane. In the last frame, no gowns nor luminescence, no rings nor pomp, and bandages undressed, one cannot tell who they are looking at.

James Baldwin in Stranger in the Village:

“The rage of the disesteemed is personally fruitless, but it is also absolutely inevitable: the rage, so generally discounted, so little understood even among the people whose daily bread it is, is one of the things that makes history. Rage can only with difficulty, and never entirely, be brought under the domination of the intelligence and is therefore not susceptible to any arguments whatever. This is a fact which ordinary representatives of the Herrenvolk, having never felt this rage and being unable to imagine, quite fail to understand. Also, rage cannot be hidden, it can only be dissembled. This dissembling deludes the thoughtless, and strengthens rage and adds, to rage, contempt.

There are, no doubt, as many ways of coping with the resulting complex of tensions as there are black men in the world, but no black man can hope ever to be entirely liberated from this internal warfare-rage, dissembling, and contempt having inevitably accompanied his first realization of the power of white men. What is crucial here is that since white men represent in the black man's world so heavy a weight, white men have for black men a reality which is far from being reciprocal; and hence all black men have toward all white men an attitude which is designed, really, either to rob the white man of the jewel of his naiveté, or else to make it cost him dear.”

The women in The Future White Women of Azania are dying. In place of the pomp of colours and feathers and flowers are large-scale tapestries in dimmer hues.

In ‘The Pledge/ Young Queen’, the Versatile Queen Ivy hovers in between/ above a crowd of young children in grey and green school uniform. The Queen wears a crown that resembles a human sternum. The children have their arms folded over their chests, their heads bowed down in supplication. The skyline hints at a rainbow we have seen before. The Queen watches over them, protects them. The Queen keeps her eyes pried open as they lower theirs in prayer.

In Iphupha, ikhamanga nobulungu bolwandle, the artist peddles with the multiplicity of meaning. The tapestry is cartography of collisions. The crash of waves, pelagic curves breaking angles into each other. In the waves: the head of a bull, the acute sharpness of birds-of-paradise.

A note the artist sends to me reads in the following:

Ubulungu: Ocean foam/Breakers
Ubulungu: Whiteness [race]
Umlungu: Those who came with the sea foam/White Person.
Ilunga: Member / Body Part

Ruga explains the confrontations as “a conglomeration of water-based visions.” Not just the waves and lines and colours, but a conglomeration of certain key visions visited upon Ntsikana, Mlanjeni and Nonthetha that shaped Xhosa cosmology and mythology. Again, here he alludes to exile. To displacement and dismemberment. He maps the dispersion, marks it with symbols of the former: flowers, cranes, emblems of elsewhere.

In my first Skype call with the artist, we talk about precarity and vulnerability. About the idea of safety, safe spaces, and exile as ideation of both hope and hopelessness. The ‘thing’ and the ‘negation of the thing’ simultaneously.

“I’m looking at exile in all its forms, all the things it can mean. Physical exile. Displacement. Leaving the homeland. Also, the memory of the homeland, the exile from memory, from belonging. An exile of the mind… Exile as captivity but, also, not… a temporary freedom.” He speaks fast, an assault of verbosity. Then, suddenly, he stops, not so much to think as to let the listener absorb it.

For close to a year I have been living in the student town of Rhini, reading towards a Masters of Arts degree. A city girl, I looked at this move as a self-imposed exile. An escape from the tyrannies of my former lives. An opportunity to sit in stillness, to listen, to work single-mindedly. I imagined my exile to feel uncomfortable in its newness, but to be mine. To form itself from its many pieces, it requires the physicality of my body – my form – to mend them. To be safe. Exile, not as a utopia, but as a way to configure one in my imagination.

I expected too much.

Exile Lindokuhle will wake up at the first shrill of the alarm. Exile Lindokuhle will go for runs. Exile Lindokuhle runs all right. She runs out of her home. She runs from men with knives, men in uniforms, men with guns.

I listen on repeat to Hugh Masekela. I’m in jail out there / I’m in jail in here. I sleep with a knife under my pillow. Concerned friends and family members tell me how brave I am. How brave and woman and black. Ruga says that sometimes Utopia is the radical re-imagination of exile. Other times, they offer the possibility of being the same. In his myth and myth making, there is no absence of fear. He speaks about water as a flood that cleanses and purges. Water is death. It is only after several looks that I notice something in Iphupha, ikhamanga nobulungu bolwandle. The head of a bull floating or drowning.

I want to tell him about a dream I had, where my father was fleeing some unseen threat.

We lead our oxen to water, sacrificing them, drowning them, or teaching them to swim.