Lebo Mashile’s rich voice transmits over her cellphone from a Cape Town hotel room. Technology pares her down to a stream of tumbling sentences and a husky laugh.
I’m calling her after a long shoot for her SABC show L’atitude. Her reduction to a voice complements a recent celebration of that very voice and the reason why I am phoning her.
Last week, the 27-year-old writer received the 2006 Noma Award for Publishing in Africa for her poetry anthology In a Ribbon of Rhythm. The award, presented under the auspices of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, is the continent’s most significant book prize awarded to African writers and scholars whose work is published in Africa.
‘This is a huge affirmation of my voice as an African voice,” Mashile says, likening it to a massive hug from the continent’s literary community.
She says she will use her $10 000 prize money on an upcoming book that comprises poems and journal entries that have come out of three years of travelling across the country with L’atitude.
Her smile is familiar to me so I do a Google search of her name together with that of my old high school, but nothing comes up. During our interview, however, Mashile unexpectedly reminds me that we debated together almost a decade ago, evoking memories of home-made cue cards and singsong public-speaking voices.
This now famous artist was indeed the more senior able debater I knew 10 years before, who hailed from Rhode Island and dated a boy who waited one day with a single red rose for her in the parking lot.
Since then, she has moved on quite a bit. She’s left her longtime home in Yeoville, Johannesburg, but will not hint at where she lives now, conjuring the possibility that someone might lie in wait by her highway off-ramp.
‘I’m a workaholic, I have no life,” she declares with a laugh. ‘I am forced by my family and friends to relax.”
Lupe Fiasco is playing in the background, and she’s also listening to Gnarls Barkley, Tlale Makhene and Billie Holiday.
Lebo says she prefers meeting friends for coffee, going to restaurants and movies, and hanging out with her ‘hilarious” eight-year-old cousin over the celebrity circuit of parties, which feels like work.
‘If I can clean my room by the end of the year, I’d be really happy,” she jokes.
For her, the Noma Award testifies to her true voice as a writer, shorn of the interpretations that people give her American-accented speech or her performer’s voice, captured on the CD Lebo Mashile Live.
‘Because of my story, I don’t fit comfortably into perceptions of an African writer,” she says, adding that most people know her work through spoken-word performances or L’atitude. ‘The board selecting me had no understanding of the other work that I do; it’s purely the material.”
And she does a lot of other work, according to her profile, which lists her ‘titles” as published author, executive producer, actress, poet, independent record producer, corporate and independent event MC, life-skills facilitator and television-series presenter.
A long pause follows a question about how she handles her multiple identities. ‘Hmmm, you know, out of all of my different personas and roles, I’m a writer first,” she responds. ‘I fell into performance as a way to get my writing out there. I see my poetry role as a messenger. When I’m speaking, I’m speaking to get my words across.”
After a bout of verbal grappling, she arrives at a formulation that affirms the Noma recognition: ‘It begins and ends with words.”
The jury citation says she merges her ‘feelings, experiences and expectations around the story of her life, which merges with the story of the struggle for freedom among South Africans”.
‘The great South African struggle is how do I fit into this box of South Africanness,” she responds, saying that few people seem to fit into that box.
This current ‘weird and wonderful” struggle to fit in that box is something that she relates to very strongly, making South Africa a fascinating place to be for a writer. ‘I don’t think that any other part of the world would allow me to have this voice.”
Historically, South African poets have provided social commentary and straddled spiritual, political, public and private realms, she says. But her challenge is to combat her poetry becoming a commodity in the entertainment industry.
‘I live in my happy little marshmallow world, where I want to live [my ideals] every day but I’m also a business at the same time and I need to protect the conditions that help me live in that marshmallow world,” she says. ‘It’s very, very difficult and it’s very easy to be corrupted.”
Style
It is the very liquid soul that oozes from these pores
To light the sidewalks with our magic beyond the distant shores
It is the joy from which the laughter of the dying is drawn
Style is in the essence of my people
We walk tall in every creed and shape and language known to man
We walk tall and touch the Gods with every step upon this land
We walk tall into our futures burning our memories into the sand
Because style is in the bodies of my people
And when we move to any groove we shake the earth around the sun
Ask for the tricks that dip our hips we’ll tell you rhythm makes blood run
Back to the source African booties know the answers and when I’m done
I’ll tell you style is in the movements of my people
And though we breathe in acid jazz our voices rise in melody
To sing through blues where sorrows ride the waves of tranquillity
In a house of music funky is the place we’re going to be
So be the bass in my mbaqanga be my tongue as a I ululate
Move the feet that move the world to kwaito beats at any rate
And trip not when hip-hop lifts you above mundane things
Because the birds have been singing that we’re too fly not to have wings
But they’ll tell you that we have no hope
Lazy bastards dying from HIV
That this bloody continent’s a joke
Destroyed by wars and apathy
That money rules the world
My people merely a casualty
To forces much more slick
And shadows with more power
To titans in the face of which we can only cower
But we know the force that rules the world
Derives its power from our dance
When my people express their beauty
The whole world goes into a trance
When we create we shape the planet
It’s only through voice that we have a chance
Because style is in the music of my people
So wear your colours with pride
Sing your spirits unplugged
We’ll use the hands that built our art
To build ourselves with love
Always remember that you carry your style in your blood
Because style is in the survival of my people