There are endless beautiful things, all of them having their good time, most of them separate from me. I can know of very many animals in the air, land, and sea, but I cannot know them all, and only a sliver of them I will ever meet.

I am learning, with many failures in tow, how to make a body and life spacious and fenced enough for the voracious appetite in it.

The gist of the play is that Sizwe Bansi comes to his studio to get a passport photograph. He had come to town looking for work but his search was unsuccessful, and right before he was due to leave town, he stumbled on a dead man’s body and finds a work-seeker’s permit, the very thing that Sizwe needs to be able to stay in town so he can feed his family. He decides to take the man’s identity, so Sizwe Bansi has to die so that Robert Zwelinzima continues to live, albeit in another body. With another face, the very face Styles has now been tasked to photograph.

When I speak and think of Sweet Medicine as a library and public education centre, it is because I’m treating it as an ecology for a particular mode of relationship. It exists to create the conditions under which people can encounter one another through a reciprocal-attention kind of shared inquiry, whatever the inquiry is on—themselves, their communities, their histories, the world around them. Companionship in the presence of—and with—reality. Communion.