Home Is Where You Make It, Khosi Xaba Tells Andie Miller

December 2nd, 2009 by Adele

Former resistance fighter, qualified nurse, women’s health specialist and, perhaps most off all, poet and a writer Makhosazana Xaba speaks to Andie Miller in a walk through history, poetry and places of inspiration:

In the title poem of her first anthology, These Hands, Makhosazana (Khosi) Xaba wrote: “These hands remember / the metallic feel / of numerous guns / when the telling click / was heard. / They recall / the rumbling palm embrace / over grenades, / ready for the release of destruction. … These hands / have felt pulsating hearts / over-extended abdomens, / they know the depths of vaginas, / the open mouths of wombs, / they know the grasp / of minute, minute-old clenched fists.”
I ask her if she would consider writing a similar homage to her feet. She answers with a belly laugh. Perhaps, because her early experiences of walking were anything but poetic. “When I was young we walked because there was no transport.” Growing up in Ndaleni, a rural area close to Richmond in what was then Natal, “we walked everywhere, including to town, which was over an hour [away]. We only got a bus in our area when I was 13. And that was a big thing — ‘Oh, a bus, there’s a bus!’ And if you missed the bus you walked, because it came once in the morning and once in the afternoon. So walking was a way of life, it wasn’t a choice I took actively.”