Salimah Valiani’s beautiful, insightful anthology explores Johannesburg and its inhabitants
Going for gold: Salimah Valiani’s anthology of poetry iGoli eGoli is a socio-political examination of the city. Photo: Delwyn Verasamyrecently moved from Pretoria to Johannesburg. But it does not feel like I have moved less than 60km, within the same province. Perhaps the same gulf would be experienced by a Ugandan shifting homes from Entebbe to Kampala.
It is about migrancy; the precariousness and mundaneness of black labour; the invisibility of black women’s pains hung out in public.It draws us closer to how iGoli-Jozi’s globalising is active and fulfilling in many ways, going against the common understanding that Global South cities are as not as globalising as their Global North counterparts.
Memory and belonging to a place that was yours, or you thought was yours, comes out strong in the poem: “I drive to the shop/ buy a bouquet/ and throw the flowers to the street/ I grew up thinking the house was ours/ The shop where I buy the flowers was owned by the Greeks/ I used to eat snacks there pastries roll/ the pastries are still there/ now the shop is run by Somalis/people who look more like me.
And then, most spine-chillingly, told in a blow-by-blow account, is the misery of the poor black woman. InThe shock is in the layout of the sentence. It does not pause and separate the losses and the pains, counting them isolated from each other. iGoli-Jozi as a place of pain and loss comes out in how the city, as part of Africa, loses and collects hauntingly its diaspora. , male members of a family are tossed about and lost in various travels and adventures in pursuit of life.
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