This project is about interesting people, from interesting places, doing interesting things today in Northern Ireland. It is funded by the Shared History Fund.
Did you know there’s a South African-Northern Irish woman creating some of Northern Ireland’s best poetry today? Neither did we – until now!
Meet Anesu Mtowa, full-time nursing student at Queen’s University and long-time poet who does know it. I say ‘long time’ within the context of just how much she has accomplished at only 19-years old!
At the ripe age of 15, she became Terra Nova Production’s Youth Advisor after already making headway as a poet and activist. Her poetry has since been featured in prominent theatres like The Mac Belfast, local and island-wide festivals like Reclaim the Night and Letters with Wings, and across local media and YouTube. Plenty more of her content can be viewed here.
Her mother is originally from South Africa and immigrated to NI in 2001, finally settling in Portadown. Anesu was born shortly after in 2003. Though thoroughly and proudly Northern Irish, her African heritage rings true, and it is an integral part of her poetry.
Because I was born and raised ‘here’, I’ve never really felt that African. However, I do certainly understand the experience of being black ‘abroad’, and the focus of my writing is majorly centred on the African experience of diaspora.
She says that her voice began to take shape as she became increasingly aware of growing social and racial justice and inequality issues at home and abroad. She was already spending much of her time listening to and immersing herself in African-American poetry before the heinous murder of George Floyd in 2020, in which the revamped ‘Black Lives Matter‘ movement has fuelled the fire behind many of her projects and poems since.
She said emphatically that racism ‘is not an American thing’ and is experienced all over. The issue of identity in NI is difficult because the country is still trying to find its own. It’s difficult to broach topics such as immigration or diversity when the local population itself is not ‘settled’. This at times leaves little space for wider discussion in a more diverse NI in 2022. However, she’s encouraged by her generation’s desire to move forward and seek a new and brighter future, and she knows poetry is one of the tools available to help society continue to move forward:
Poetry helps people find experiences that transcend difference
Generally speaking, she’s never really struggled with her own identity the way others do when attempting to identify her. When I asked her what’s it like being a poet in Northern Ireland today, she said simply:
I live in Northern Ireland, and I am a poet
With her family’s history growing up in Apartheid South Africa and moving to divided Northern Ireland, it’s understandable that, as she’s coming of age, she’s grown tired of labels. She’s proud to be here; she’s proud to be Northern Irish; and she’s proud of where her family comes from.
She said, too, that the poetry scene is changing and seems to be shedding some of its historical characteristics. Speaking of her work on the recent ‘21 Artists for the 21st Century‘ project marking NI’s Centenary, amazingly none of her young colleagues even mentioned the centenary and the issue of the conflict just purely wasn’t interesting to them. Anesu feels this is a shift in the historical perspective of ‘what NI is’ – and what it can become.
Her talent shouldn’t come as a surprise by the way – it runs in the family. Her aforementioned mother is prominent Northern Irish Poet, Nandi Jola, who has certainly joined the ranks of this island’s rich poetic canon. Nandi recently became Co. Armagh’s first Poet in Residence. The two are regularly seen performing together.
Anesu and Nandi both feel that poetry is what ties their ‘dual’ identities together as a family in diaspora and is something that both South Africans and Northern Irish people have used in trying times, but also in times of happiness and societal progress. As countries still firmly in peace processes, there is a lot that binds.
I usually come up with some cliche ‘one-liner’ to end an article, but I don’t think I’m going to best Anesu here. So, I’ll let her conclude this in her own words and prose, after saying briefly:
Anesu, we are tremendously lucky to have you ‘here’!
“As a minority growing up in Northern Ireland, I have always been the one expected to explain race to people. If someone says something racist, I am expected as a black person to call that person out and then have a long discussion with them about their actions. It gets tiring. Especially when you are doing it from a young age and looking around at the world and nothing seems to be changing. It’s really a poem explaining how painful it is to be black in a world full of systems designed to destroy you, and it asks the question, how much more do I need to do for things to change?”
Anesu in interview with Shelley Tracey
You do not believe me
when I say that I hold the weight of every black body on my back;
water-logged corpses and shattered bone.
I have shown them to you before, hidden under the shadow of my smile.
You say you can’t see them;
tell me that they must be ghosts of my own imagination.
tell me that the guilt isn’t something you should have to carry.
But aren’t you listening?
When I open my mouth to speak, can you not hear them screaming?
They want to explain that your silence is holding me in chains.
They want to explain that your denial is a lynching.
I have spent so long engulfed by the waves of history,
sometimes I forget
that it wasn’t my sin that set off the flood.
I don’t need you to save me,
but at least don’t watch me drown.
I envy your ignorance, I crave your bliss,
all while knowing that to turn my back to truth would be to have it impaled.
I have been bleeding trauma for centuries.
You never told me that we were playing a game of hide and seek;
all this time I’ve been searching, not even knowing that the prize was something stolen.
I am yet to win back my dignity.
I am slowly learning that it is impossible to decolonise a soul,
I cannot reverse this genocide of self-hatred you started in me.
There will be no resurrection.
How powerful you must feel;
to pull of the greatest heist of all time.
To steal an entire people from themselves
and walk away, flicking the blood from your hands.
I never seem to believe myself when I sing of freedom.
I was born into a chorus of voices,
straining for the sweet liberation lullaby,
reaching for that lucid dream for so long
I have grown tired.
Now I just want to rest.
I simply have no wish to change the world.
I cannot fight these battles anymore,
we both know who’s going to win the war. My weapons are blunt,
my army is slaughtered, my allies are unseen.
Accept my scars as surrender,
I have nothing white to give.
I do not want victory,
you refuse to give me peace.
So I am left with nothing.
I see your hands, hidden behind your back so you don’t have to look,
Look!
You hold everything,
But I guess you still can not see it.
How privileged you are to be so blind.
