Great Texts/Big Questions with Yewande Omotoso
Yewande Omotoso (credit: Victor Dlamini)
Join us this Wednesday 19 May @ 1pm for the second instalment in our 2021 Great Texts / Big Questions Online Lecture Series, presented by award-winning writer Yewande Omotoso!
Omotoso explains: In this lecture I will contemplate the necessity (familiarity) of death coupled with its abiding experience as a stranger, foreign, almost alien – not of our world. How to be with this conundrum, how to wait upon death, but remain present? Even in this time when it has become common to hear of loss after loss after loss, I still carry surprise -- something that was there is no longer; how can this be? I feel embarrassed at my shock and want to bolster myself, to train my body to expect and anticipate loss. But can we? Should we?
The event will be facilitated by writer Bongani Kona, and the lecture will be followed by a Q&A with online viewers. Join at 1pm this Wednesday! Access the Zoom link here.
About
Yewande Omotoso is an architect, with a Masters in creative writing from the University of Cape Town. Her debut novel Bomboy (2011 Modjaji Books) won the South African Literary Award First Time Author Prize. Yewande was a 2015 Miles Morland Scholar. Her second novel The Woman Next Door (2016 Chatto and Windus) was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award and longlisted for the Baileys Women’s Literature Prize. Her third novel An Unusual Grief (Cassava Republic) is forthcoming.
Bongani Kona
Theme for the Series
The 2021 Great Texts/Big Questions Lecture Series – Loss upon loss – responds to the complexity of grief and grieving in South Africa and across the continent in the time of Covid-19, with a particular focus on the role and response of artists.
The most critical months of the pandemic have been defined by a near disintegration of cultural and familial rituals for mourning, gathering and coming to terms with death – individually, but especially collectively. A period in which, in so many communities, the deaths of loved ones have followed in such quick succession that there is no ordinary time or proper space to mark their passing. There have been other losses too – jobs, careers, financial security – equally without closure or the promise of resolution. And in the wake of both, a new vocabulary has quickly become part of our everyday speech: Zoom memorials, virtual funerals followed with alarming speed, deep cleaning, lockdowns, social distancing, masks.
The vision for the series draws from the concept of ‘ambiguous loss’ – a term that academic and therapist Pauline Boss coined in the 1970s to name and describe a rupturing of human relationships without closure or clear understanding. Ambiguous loss has since been applied widely across the world in approaching forms of grief that cannot be resolved. In the context of the pandemic, the term provides a possible starting point of collective recognition and reckoning, and opens pathways to healing.
Schedule for the Series
- Wed 12 May @ 1pm: Zukiswa Wanner, Creativity in the face of crisis
- Wed 19 May @ 1pm: Yewande Omotoso, Death: unfathomable, inevitable
- Wed 26 May @ 1pm: Athambile Masola, Grieving: surviving imiphanga through a black aesthetic
- Wed 2 June @ 1pm: Lebo Mashile, Crisis catalysing creativity as rituals and as resistance
- Wed 9 June @ 1pm: Percy Mabandu, A Call to artistry: Catharsis, and creative grammars against grief
- Thursday 17 June @ 6pm: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Title to be announced
Join us this Wednesday 19 May at 1pm!