One day last year, my plug brought a delivery for me. It was my second time getting from him, the first time, he had asked if I wanted him to roll for me. This time, he hadn’t asked and I didn’t think to specify, assuming he would remember my preference or that he usually rolled for people. He handed it to me and I was like oh no, I have nothing to roll with, I thought you rolled usually. I watched him see the rage in his own eyes, as though he had just walked past a mirror and caught a glimpse of the rage that could have taken over him. But he walked away from the reflection almost as quickly as it appeared. Then he looked at me plainly for a little more than a second and said “In this life, it’s important to hold your anger”, or something like that. And we both laughed. As we were laughing, he said, “This business has taught me… it’s not every invitation to fight that you honour, the things I’ve seen...” The encounter reminded me of what my CT experience taught me: that it’s not every meat you chew that you have to swallow… you get to choose what eyes you want to live your day through.

not trying to get by, trying to get free

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 Styles’s studio to get a passport photograph. Sizwe had come to the city of Port Elizabeth from his rural hometown looking for work, but his search was unsuccessful. Right before he was due to leave Port Elizabeth, he stumbled upon a dead man’s body and saw the man’s work permit, the very thing that Sizwe needs to be able to stay in the city so he can get a job and feed his family. Sizwe decides to take the man’s identity Robert Zwelinzima, and so Sizwe Bansi has to die so that Robert Zwelinzima continues to live, albeit in another body. Another face. The very face and body 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.