“The most hidden open secret”: Interview with Uhuru Phalafala on Mine Mine Mine (University of Nebraska Press, 2023), conducted by Helene Strauss

abstract

In this interview, we hope to take up this Special Issue’s concern with the intersections between gender activism, climate justice, and artistic practice. As a work that charts the poet’s deeply personal connection with the climate crisis through the toxic burdens placed on her family by South African histories of mining and migrant labour, Mine Mine Mine offers an exemplary instantiation of Black feminist artistic praxis as climate activism. Crucially, the poet challenges concepts and framings that have been utilised to speak to climate and racialised issues, often separated if not entirely erasing the latter issue. Her epic poem and reflections in this interview reveal intricate and inextricable imbrications of social justice and environmental justice with colonial race-making as foundation. The poet clearly demonstrates that the same mechanisms that extracted and exploited the environment engineered racism, racialised and mechanised particular bodies to serve those purposes, resulting in their mutual spiritual and embodied extraction. Discourses on climate or environmental justice continue to fall in the traps of thinking through these issues without centring colonial capitalism and geopolitical gendered race politics. This interview brings these intersections to the fore, offering textualities and vocabularies to reframe and language their coalescence. In positing the “Black eco”, the poet offers a cosmology that pre-existed colonial cosmology, one teeming with life, spirit, reciprocity, care, and relation with others and the living world, human and non-human, pushing us to enrich our conceptualisation from climate justice towards the “Eco”: ecological justice. Climate justice singles out the weather as phenomena that, while causal to human activity in the making of modernity, is outside of ourselves. “Eco” suggests a web of life that was ostensibly wrecked by environmental and human destruction, but that is operative and upheld by some indigenous societies and their cosmologies. In offering us “geopoetics”, the poet grapples with grammars of the geopolitical as intertwined with spiritual and embodied extraction in the making of modernity and its ongoing violence. The interview enriches some of the many questions raised by the volume about racial capitalism’s destructive environmental legacies through considering their impact on black sociality, reproduction, and the capacity to breathe.

keywords:

• Mine Mine Mine
• Black feminist praxis
• climate justice
• geopoetics
• Black eco

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Interview conducted via email during March 2023.

2 In Wretched of the Earth (1961/2004, p. 145), Fanon poses the following, “Each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it, in relative opacity.”

3 In her A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (2018).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Uhuru Portia Phalafala

UHURU PORTIA PHALAFALA is a senior lecturer of English literature at the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa. She is the author of Keorapetse Kgositsile and the Black Arts Movement: Poetics of Possibility (James Currey 2024) and co-editor of Keorapetse Kgositsile: Collected Poems, 1969-2018 (Nebraska 2023). Email: [email protected]

Helene Strauss

HELENE STRAUSS is a professor in the Department of English at the University of the Free State, South Africa. Her recent publications include the book Wayward Feeling: Audio-visual Culture and Aesthetic Activism in Post-Rainbow South Africa (University of Toronto Press); co-edited special issues of the journals Studies in Social Justice (in progress), Interventions, and Critical Arts; and a book titled Contemporary African Mediations of Affect and Access (Routledge), co-edited with Jessie Forsyth and Sarah Olutola. Email: [email protected]