Pieter Madibuseng Odendaal
BREAKING SILENCE
Poetry has always provided one of the few safe spaces from which to explore one’s identity and find one’s own voice.
No-one knows this better than Pieter Madibuseng Odendaal, an award-winning poet, musician and lecturer with two Afrikaans collections, asof geen berge ooit hier gewoon het nie and Ontaard, under his belt. In 2025, uHlanga published a corpse is also a garden, which contains English translations from both these collections. As we celebrate World Mental Health Day, The AVBOB Poetry Project celebrates his vision of how poetry can transform our lives.
Odendaal describes the English-language anthology as a labour of love. “I wanted to open the poems up to a larger audience, and to my partner, Jorge Alejandro Ccoyllurpuma, who doesn’t understand Afrikaans all that well. The English translation enabled him to translate the poems further into Spanish, leading to the publication of a Spanish version in Peru.”
Several searingly beautiful poems chronicle his coming of age as a queer man in a country still coming to terms with its racially unequal past and its ill-treatment of marginalised people. In ‘we who remain’, he describes two young men on the brink of self-discovery, invisible to themselves as well as to each other. Odendaal’s work is committed to making people visible to themselves and others, breaking taboos and silences in the process.
“My poems are often born out of registering a silence, sitting with it and teasing out what the quiet wants to say or be. I go towards the awkwardness, the wound, the erasure. Enough of the Protestant tendency to sweep things under the rug and keep on keeping on! No, I wipe the floor clean and wonder at all the dust and titbits my sweeping statements have gathered. Writing poetry has become a way to hold up a mirror and reveal a version of me. I can only hope that my work will do the same for others.”
Some poems hold up the possibility of joy and redemption in the face of mental illness and loss. One of these, addressed to a friend no longer within reach, reimagines a particular moment as follows:
we laugh like we’ll never lose the plot
like peace is a word
our skulls will know one day…
In other words, we might lose the plot, but the vision of joy and peace remains.
What does celebrating World Mental Health Day mean to him? Can poetry help us feel more at home in the world?
“For me, World Mental Health Day means remembering the friends I have lost to mental health struggles, checking in on the ones I know are going through tough times now, and relentlessly creating the kind of world I want to live in – one that doesn’t sideline differently-wired people by suffocating their creativity, but instead creates spaces for visionaries to make their dreams concrete. Can poetry save us from mental health struggles? Probably not on its own, but poetry can be an outlet, a guardrail, a protective spell, a small act of care for each of our numbered days on this planet.”
Does he have advice for aspiring poets of all ages?
“Respect your craft and practice it regularly. The more you make time for poetry, the more it will allow you to make of it whatever you want.”
In the next few days, write a poem of encouragement addressed to yourself at a time when you were struggling to see yourself clearly.
The annual AVBOB Poetry Competition is open for submissions until 30 November 2026. Visit www.avbobpoetry.co.za today and find out how to enter.