Maletšema Ruth Emsley
THE VILLAGE MUST COME BACK
For thousands of years, poets and artists have laboured to identify what was worthy of praise and celebration.
As we prepare to celebrate Africa Day on 25 May, the AVBOB Poetry Project asked Maletšema Ruth Emsley, poet, teacher and academic, to share what celebrating this day means to her. Emsley’s debut poetry collection, My Silver Stripes and Other Poems, was published by Staging Post, a division of Jacana Media (www.jacana.co.za/shop/), in 2023.
“Celebrating Africa Day shouldn’t be only about the traditional attire and eulogies to show respect for African culture and history. It is vital to consider that an African is a member of a community. That African philosophy is based on principles of communalism and, most importantly, Ubuntu. I celebrate the value of collaboration, caring and sharing amid all challenges that are hostile to the communal solidarity. Now, more than ever, Africans should harness their cultural heritage to demonstrate empathy and humanity and to establish and maintain Ubuntu.”
My Silver Stripes and Other Poems is a generous, wide-ranging anthology, as finely balanced as one of the black pots Emsley describes in one of these poems, carried on the “trained, independent necks” of rural women. It is a record of personal struggle and progress in the face of racial and gender inequality, culminating in the writing of this book as part of creative output writing for the Department of Higher Education and Training at the University of Limpopo. At the same time, many of the poems celebrate compassionate, communal values and lament their neglect in the contemporary world. In the anthology, this lament is perhaps expressed most beautifully at the end of the poem ‘A Lost Boy in the Roving World’:
“Our boys are slipping away,
like calves from amniotic sacs,
ejected onto a dry world that does not receive them.
The village must come back
to raise the child.”
Emsley remembers how poetry came into her life when she was young and spoke to her. “Poetry first entered my life through recitations during my primary school education. I am still able to say and sense the rhymes and metres of those verses we were memorising!”
She wrote her first poem to enter a poetry magazine competition, little imagining that it would lead to an anthology of her own one day.
Although the collection was started years back, she put it together during the COVID-19 lockdowns. Emsley, who lost her husband to the pandemic, notes, “I felt I had so many words inside of me. I felt they would help me share the many emotions I felt: the memories, fear, isolation.”
About the anthology, she is grateful that academic departments are beginning to recognise creative writing as a form of scholarly research. She adds, “The viewpoints of all academics, including the black women academics who have been socially, culturally and educationally excluded, can now contribute as we write and share.”
Her most memorable evocation of such shared work is probably from ‘We Waited for No Aid’, a poem that celebrates the resilience and independence of the rural women of her childhood. It ends:
“In a line, on a faithful path
that greets us at dawn
and bids us farewell at dusk, we traipsed,
humming in harmony,
quieting the dawn roads with our bare feet.”
In the next few days, write a poem about the courage and resilience of the African dream for someone you do not know.
The AVBOB Poetry Competition reopens its doors on 1 August 2024. Visit www.avbob.co.za and familiarise yourself with the competition rules as you prepare to find and share your best words.