Gabeba Baderoon’s most recent poetry collection is The History of Intimacy (Kwela Books, 2018). Her previous collections include The Dream in the Next Body (Kwela Books, 2005), A hundred silences (Kwela Books, 2006), and The Museum of Ordinary Life (DaimlerChrysler, 2005) and the monograph Regarding Muslims: From Slavery to Post-Apartheid. Her honors include the DaimlerChrysler Award for South African Poetry and a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship. Baderoon is the co-director of the African Feminist Initiative at Penn State University, where she is an associate professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies and African studies. She lives in State College, Pennsylvania.
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Old Photographs
On my desk is a photograph of you taken by the woman who loved you then. In some photos her shadow falls in the foreground. In this one, her body is not that far from yours. Did you hold your head that way because she loved it? She is not invisible, not my enemy, nor even the past. I think I love the things she loved. Of all your old photographs, I wanted this one for its becoming. I think you were starting to turn your head a little, your eyes looking slightly to the side. Was this the beginning of leaving?
From So Much Things To Say: 100 Calabash Poets. Copyright © 2010 by Gabeba Baderoon. Used with permisson of Calabash International Literary Trust and the author.
From So Much Things To Say: 100 Calabash Poets. Copyright © 2010 by Gabeba Baderoon. Used with permisson of Calabash International Literary Trust and the author.
Gabeba Baderoon
Gabeba Baderoon’s most recent poetry collection is The History of Intimacy (Kwela Books, 2018).