Capetown to Trieste

....by way of Udine and Duino.

Less than ten days.

Enough images, stories, experiences, encounters, to fill a lifetime.

In Capetown, I was on a plenary panel at AWID with Pregs Govender. Whose story of her decades in the ANC and the struggle for justice in South Africa: Love And Courage, should be compulsory reading on every high-school curriculum in Africa. When I approached her, like a nervous groupie, stumbling over my words of admiration and appreciation, she told me she had heard of me.

The audience response to my performance was phenomenal.

Many of us were in tears, said International Museum of Women curator, Masum Momaya, in her liveblog from AWID.

Driving in from the airport, the day I arrived, I saw a rainbow, fragile, shimmering, over Table Mountain. The next day, clouds were piled on the mountain's flat top, like whipped cream. They spilled and flowed over the sides.

The air along the shoreline was fragrant with something I couldn't identify. I sniffed so hard I got dizzy.

In Udine, I experienced groundbreaking genuine partnership between academia and the arts, in the 3 days of Azania Speaks. The first academic conference I've ever attended that gave artists equal speaking time in the main schedule, instead of scheduling them as "evening entertainment."

The first conference I've ever attended that made space for the actual voices of artists. As opposed to academics talking about artists and their work, with the artists themselves silent or absent.

The first conference that acknowledged art as knowledge, as scholarship, in its own right. As opposed to the false dichotomy of traditional academia, which separates the making of creative work from "arts scholarship" i.e. writing and thinking about creative work.

In Duino, I slept in the castle where Rilke stayed. Walked the Rilke Path along the cliffs, looked out at the unutterable beauty of the Adriatic sea under an endless sky. Inhaled joy and exhilaration when the students and faculty of the United World College rocked the auditorium with a prolonged standing ovation for my performance.

In Trieste, I took five bows for my Iperporti Festival reading. Watched a sunrise over the city's rooftops from the skylight of the oak-beam-ceiling baroque attic I was housed in. Laughed aloud at the sheer improbability of where my work takes me. The outrageous wonder of the riches it lays at my feet.