Kopano Matlwa

Kopano Matlwa Mabaso at Spotlight Health Aspen Ideas Festival 2015

Kopano Matlwa (born 1985) is a South African writer and doctor, known for her novel Spilt Milk, which focuses on the South Africa's "Born Free" generation, and Coconut, her debut novel, which addresses issues of race, class, and colonization in modern Johannesburg. Coconut was awarded the European Union Literary Award in 2006/2007 and also won the Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa in 2010. Spilt Milk was on the longlist for the 2011 Sunday Times Literary Awards.

Quotes

• “Tshepo reckons that it is inevitable that one’s circle of friends will become smaller as one grows older. He reasons that when we begin we are similar, like two glasses of water sitting side by side on a clean tray. There is very little that differentiates us. We are simple beings whose interests do not extend beyond playing touch and kicking balls.

However, like the two glasses of water forgotten on a tray in the reading room, we start to collect bits. Bits of fluff, bits of a broken beetle wing, bits of bread, bits of pollen, bits of shed epithelial cells, bits of hair, bits of toilet paper, bits of airborne fungal organisms, bits of bits. All sorts of bits. No two combinations the same. Just like with the glasses of water, Environment, jealous of our fundamentality, bombards our basic minds with complexity. So we become frighteningly dissimilar, until there is very little that holds us together.”[1]

• “Uncle wanted to eat his pie and then have us feel sorry for him because it was making him fat.”[2]
• “You will find, Ofilwe, that the people you strive so hard to be like will one day reject you because as much as you may pretend, you are not one of their own. Then you will turn back, but there too you will find no acceptance, for those you once rejected will no longer recognize the thing you have become. So far, too far to return. So much, too much you have changed. Stuck between two worlds, shunned by both.”[3]
• “I am not used to hating. Hate sits heavy on my heart. It reeks. I can smell it rotting my insides and I taste it on my tongue.”[4]
• “I do not know why people here have taken upon themselves the duty of making attempts at speaking to me. I work hard to keep the ‘don’t speak to me’ look on my face and yet it seems they read it as ‘please speak to me’….It really is very inconsiderate. Sometimes one just wants to be alone with one’s thoughts and not have to deal with bad breath and body odour so early in the morning.[5]
• “You are the backstage crew in the drama of their lives. If they need you, they do not know it and do not care. Open your eyes.”[6]
• “Being alive is the most dangerous thing in the world. Anything can happen at any time. It's safer to be dead.”[7]
• “She had shouted at me to be quiet. But I think after I fainted into Rakgadi Tebogo's pool at Dineo's traditional wedding, Ma stopped caring about the life I'd never be able to bring into the world and started worrying more about the life she'd brought into it.”[8]
• “Of course I'm ashamed. But it's not our fault. It's the white people's fault, Lord. Everything is. They taught us to hate ourselves. They made us like this. We weren't like this before they came. This is not the way we would have been if they hadn't come and messed everything up for everyone.”[9]
• “I tell her how appalling it is that we've become the very thing we fought so long and hard to destroy.”[10]
• “Who said we had to enjoy caring for the ill? I mean one ought to do it, it's morally right to do it, but do you have an obligation to enjoy it? Would it make you a bad person if you said you detested it? Hated every minute o fit? Did it, but deplored it?”[11]
• “How viscous our blood must be. It carries so much in it. Stories are swirling round and round our veins, up into our hearts at least a zillion times a day. Stories of men going into cities, men in men, men in women, women in men, children in women, men in children. Strangers living in each other's arteries, sharing intimacies, sharing pain, sharing anger, sharing hatred, sharing resentment, sharing loss.

Who are these terrorists that have invaded my blood, taken over my body?”[12]

• “Is it because I worked on Sundays and didn't keep the Sabbath holy? Broke one of Your ten commandments? I had no choice. The call roster was drawn, the calls had to be done. Who was I not to work on a Sunday when everyone else does? Jesus' disciples picked wheat on the Sabbath, and He defended them. Why didn't He defend me? Is it because I'm not good enough? You say You love us all the same, but You don't, You love others differently, You love others more. Why didn't You defend me, Jesus?”[13]
• “Sometimes I forget. I get lost in the bassline of a song or the smell of lemongrass. At those times I'm just like everyone else. Then my mind asks, 'Why are you so happy? Isn't there something you're forgetting?' And then I search and search and search, and I remember, oh yes, I was raped.”[14]
• “If anything, it's taught me humility. I think I had a big head. I thought I was special, immune, exceptional. That these sorts of things wouldn't happen to me. But I'm not. I'm just another South African rape statistic. There's nothing extraordinary about my story, it happens everywhere, every day. It doesn't matter that I'm highly educated, a doctor, that I started a petition that made the newspapers.

I have a vagina. That's all that matters.”[15]

• “What is the point of us being here on earth if everything's all about heaven? If You don't want to/don't care/can't change anything here on earth, what's the point really? If it's all completely random and just about struggling through to the end that will eventually come, why do we bother?”[16]
• “Late at night you learn many things: that if you cry while urinating with your head between your legs, the tears accumulate on your eyelashes, so that when you return to the emergency room you don't have grooves on your cheeks, but stars before your eyes. ”[17]
• “Is it possible to love them [the patients] and leave them there? Is it possible to love them without them staining our hearts? Does the heart have room for all their pain (and ours), for their broken bones (and our broken soul), for their discomfort (and our shame)?[18]
• ""I've been raped".

Dr. Phakama wants me to say it. She says she will help me. She says if I put it in past tense I will be able to overcome it. But when it comes to our own life and we are living it, the distinction is never so clear. They continue to rape me even now, even though they are not raping me. I don't know when one stopped and the other started. “They rape me.”[19]

• “How thick our blood must be. It contains so many things! Stories run through our veins and rise to our hearts countless times a day.”[20]
• “How do you expect me not to lose my mind? They tear you apart again and again, penetrate you again and again. They transmit diseases, warts, worms, pimples, pain, blood and rot that comes out of your body. Of my body! Because? For the gold mines, they tell you, for the Dutch, because at some point someone robbed them, because they had no father, for Zimbabwe and Shaka and the government, for xenophobia, unemployment, apartheid, colonialism, for history , for the serpent, for Adam and Eve. For everything and nothing. Because they can.

Just because."[21]

• “I write self-indulgently, I write for my own sake.”[22]
• “I believe that good writing is honest writing, it’s the kind of stuff that you are too embarrassed to share publicly.”[23]
• “My writing is living, it’s sort of a dance with the reader and together we unpack things.”[24]
• “We [society] allow a white girl to have all sorts of complexities, but at my time, there was only one way to be black.”[25]
• “What does it mean to be black and who decides?”[26]
• “I think it’s still a legacy of the colonial project where it’s a binary thing, you either are or not, and I think we are much more than whatever sort of description or boxes that we can put our people.”[27]
• “Coconut spoke about identity and I think young people should be able to decide that for themselves.”[28]
• “’Coconut was an appeal to celebrate who we are and not be afraid and ashamed of that.”[29]
• “For my daughter, I hope to not raise her with the idea that there is either this right or this wrong or that there’s this way and there’s that way. I hope that she will be comfortable to explore and live the questions that even I can’t predict or foresee.”[30]