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“In exploring the breakdown of language due to trauma, a journey to ‘the far places’ of human experience, I want to examine the idea of love and desire, and how eros shapes this transformative process,” says writer Mishka Hoosen. “In looking at Call it a Difficult Night and other works, I want to examine the role of love in shaping and transforming language and understanding, and consider what that might say about our current state of transformation as a wounded country.”
Today we live in a society scarred by history, crippled by a lack of transformation, subjugated by the spectacle of global capitalism, marked by inequality and alienation. “The question for me as a writer, is can we find a way to write that is equal to this moment” Stacy Hardy asks. “A writing that captures and confronts the present, with its new urgencies and particular forms of violence, including violence done to the body and to language?”
Why do some men hurt the women they claim to love? Professor Kopano Ratele’s lecture explores this question. Written in part as a response to a character in Pumeza Rashe-Matoti’s play, Unbroken Silence – which will be staged during the lecture – Ratele also considers why some women love the men who hurt them. “My interest,” Ratele says,“is in a certain play of affects connected to the desire to hurt others, to being hurt, to forgiving, to both affection and hatred, so as not to offer explanations that easily snap into place.”
Award-winning novelist Claire Robertson offers a short history of imagining and mis-imagining ourselves, and thoughts on using the tools and gifts of fiction to choose and understand the framework of those “things that are no longer and things that are not yet.”