For centuries, artists have been inspired by the dream world to craft mesmerising work from what might seem like nonsensical and supernatural realms.
About half of the 15 short stories in Flying Cows and Other Traumas were drawn from the dream state to bring to life a collection traversing magical realism, speculative fiction and fantasy.
“I would not have been able to imagine the collection this way if it were not a dream state,” Philisiwe Twijnstra explains during our virtual interview. The South African-born author and playwright admits that, initially, the stories in her dreams made no sense. But she loved the bravery and obscurity in them, despite their weirdness.
“I listened and I spent some time on them. I believe that I am able to emulate those stories with a wakeful mind. But I will never write these stories like this again. No wine or coffee would help me do that … only dreams.”
From the first story, the collection takes the reader on a celestial, yet ominous ride, with bone-hungry fathers, warrior grannies and gifted children ostracised by their communities. It is a collection layered with metaphysical eeriness that had my heart racing with excitement as I peeled through the pages.
The protagonists, mostly black women, at the centre of each story fight injustice and oppression, amid spellbinding worlds, to emerge triumphant. The collection is nostalgic but futuristic, surreal and unsettling, a pulling of the mind from slumber to consciousness in attempting to explain our reality.
For years, Twijnstra has preferred to write at night and in the mornings, a routine she has stuck to since moving to Rotterdam, Netherlands, where she lives with her husband and 12-year-old daughter, in 2023. After taking their dog Benjo for a walk at around 5:30 a.m., the author retreats to her writing room, armed with a pot of coffee. This happens to be her favourite space in the house. She has filled it with books, candles, sunflowers “and all the little things that make me want to write”. Some homegrown sounds, such as singer Thando Zide playing in the background, charmingly add to the writing ritual. When not writing, Twijnstra spends her days as a writing coach and development producer.
… and other traumas
Twijnstra’s collection is not mere nocturnal inspirations – it draws from real, lived experiences. To avoid her grandfather’s unresolved wrath from yesteryears in apartheid South Africa, young Twijnstra sought refuge in writing and imagination. Even as a child, the author understood she had a powerful mind capable of creating the worlds she believed she deserved.
“I would get lost in the worlds in my head; always me as the main character. I would make up characters that would never hurt me. I would narrate the story I wanted or how I envisioned it to be for me. In those stories, I was always a girl child, happy and fighting back.”
The book’s title, Flying Cows and Other Traumas, captures that imagination, while stirring curiosity. It was the “and other traumas”, which made me wonder if the monsters and bizarre events in the book were metaphors for our unnamed and unresolved traumas.
“Yes, absolutely,” the author responds emphatically. “It is a book that touches on the unresolved traumas that black people have lived through, specifically black women and black girls.”
Like living with elephants in the room, constantly ignoring important issues, the author argues that we are “often taught to live harmoniously with things that were never resolved and we tend to do that so well”.
“We grow up with the belief that some wounds simply cannot be healed, that this is just the way things are, the way they are supposed to be. We should bekezela [endure] and then we go on to start our own families with unresolved things and the pattern continues,” she adds.
Another layer to the title is about healing and humour, says the author, referring to the Zulu saying kuyahlekwa noma kufiwe (we laugh even in the face of pain and loss). She wanted to show that “our mothers and sisters can be carrying something heavy in their hearts and still appear strong, capable and resilient. They can continue moving through the world with grace but that does not mean the wound inside them is no longer there”.
As such, the title pays homage “to black women’s bodies — the ways they hold so much, carry so much and are expected to give so much throughout their lives and existence”.
“The whole collection is an en-couragement to release whatever we are holding and the interesting thing is that the release could be chaotic, could be rage, could be delusion, could be obsession,” Twijnstra explains.
The release of rage and the finding of resilience is seen in all the stories in the collection.
Set in South African townships and imagined African kingdoms, the stories follow each protagonist’s quest for justice and restoration.
Uncomplicated by the super-natural, compared to the other stories in the collection, The Battle of the AK-47s, for instance, we witness machine gun-wielding grandmothers defending women against toxic masculinity.
In So Neighbourly, we find feminist grannies carrying the wounds and desire for justice for oppressed black people. Female warriors and queens in The Moon-Eyed Maiden also show the use of divine gifts and power through female leadership.
“In this collection, I wanted to explore rage as strength, ambition as strength, weakness as strength and surviving as strength. I aimed to challenge the notion that only silence represents strength. I believe that showing exhaustion and the ability to leave a challenging situation also embody strength.”
The desire to explore the themes was inspired by Twijnstra’s grandmother and the women in her family. Many of the women, particularly in fatherless households, become fathers and mothers to their grandchildren — a brutal reality for many African households.
To be young, gifted but an outcast
Be it the spiritually gifted, wild creative thinkers or queer heroes, the collection has several overriding themes and characters who are different and are outcasts from society because of their uniqueness, thus questioning if being young and gifted is a curse rather than a blessing.
Twijnstra too was seen as different by her peers when she was growing up hence, through the collection, she wanted to explore this beauty in our differences as human beings.
In The Mlotswa Way and The Girl Named Ukupha/za/mi/se/ka, for instance, the author explores the pain of being rejected and misunderstood. Many of the stories highlight the old problem of people being terrified of what they don’t understand, instead of asking and listening to prompt a quest towards social cohesion and empathy.
The advice from good friend and mentor, the South African writer Kobus Moolman, to pursue short stories instead of a novel, certainly paid off for Twijnstra. It was during her MA in creative writing from Rhodes University that she began compiling the collection.
Although she is living in a foreign country, where she could feel like an outcast, this has not affected Twijnstra’s love for storytelling. “That’s the beauty of being a writer. You can write anywhere. It’s about carrying stories within your body and spirit. The stories persist. They don’t care if you’re stuck, lost or unnoticed.
“I am still writing, dreaming and creating.”
Essentially, Flying Cows and Other Traumas asks if dreams are the subconscious needing expression, divine spiritual intervention or just absurd fantasies which we tend to forget immediately when we wake up and start checking Instagram notifications.
It questions if the monsters in our minds are real or merely unresolved traumas we are afraid to interrogate. Where such fears become illusive and hyperbolic anxieties filtering our everyday decision-making and engagement with the world, skewing our view of past and present, robbing us of presence and the freedom to move with clarity.
Flying Cows and Other Traumas is published by Jacana, R240.