TJ Dema scripts An/ Other Pastoral
Poet, educator, and Arts Administrator, Tjawangwa Dema is releasing her latest literary work. The book titled An/ Other Pastoral came out of the wider Another Pastoral project, which is an unconventional collaboration between TJ and No Bindings director, Lily Green. Three years ago,
TJ approached Green with an offer to explore poetry, ethnicity and the environment. From that first meeting, they collaboratively expanded that concept to see what kind of critical and creative approaches they might explore to develop, and centre global majority of voices, histories and practices in the narrative around nature, environment climate and land justice. Dema is a poet and educator. The Careless Seamstress, her first fulllength collection, won the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets. Cranwell is a Motswana artist, based in Botswana, whose work explores beauty, femininity, sensuality and intimacy. She is known for using light and dark to bring a subtle, modern, minimalist aesthetic to portraiture. The foreword was penned by none other than Chris Abani, an acclaimed novelist and poet.
Abani’s most recent books are The Secret History of Las Vegas, The Face: Cartography of the Void and Smoking the Bible. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the PEN/ Hemingway Award and a Ford USA Artists Fellowship. The author photograph was captured by none other than Petra Rolinec, a Botswana based photographer. The book will be out on April 22nd, is available on pre- orders. Literary experts are hailing this treasure for its depth, and how it is intricately composed from the first to the last page. Craig Santos Perez, hails it for its powerful expression of a diasporic African
Eco poetics.
“With an intense vision and unique voice, Tjawangwa Dema poignantly addresses the themes of racial, environmental, food, animal and climate justice,” Santos who is an Essayist, university professor, American publisher from the Chamorrro people ( born in the Guam Island). Jessica J Lee, a British and Canadian author, environmental historian, simply said that the book is, ‘ Precise and unforgettable.’ In an interview with this publication, TJ who is based in the USA, explains that part of collaborative projects between the two include an audio piece which was broadcast on BBC Sounds in December 2020, and an archive of that can be accessed through the illustrations in the An/ Other Pastoral book. Asked on why
this particular title for the book, she explains that the pastoral is a convention, genre - an old form of poetry. She explains that it would take long to speak to it properly but that historically, it is often written by white males. She is obviously* neither of these things but what she has written in this collection isn’t a pastoral except in the very loose sense of literature that thinks about land. “I certainly am not idealizing landscapes and rural life. Rather, what I have done is complicate the idea of what we mean by ‘ shepherd, and what it means to write landscapes while thinking expansively about which places and which people are free to occupy those spaces,” she highlights. This approach, she says begins to move the poems towards environmentalist and ecological orientations all the way through to Black eco- poetics.
“So I supposed I could’ve called the book something like that but ‘ pastoral’ is a clear shorthand of what I’m troubling - not what I’m doing. The full title hints at ideas around ‘ othering’ and offering up alternative ways of being so there is that too,” says TJ. Is there a particular message in the book that she wants her readers to take? As a poet, she is more concerned with asking questions more than answering them through her writing. So essentially, it is not so much of a message as it is an invitation to think about, amongst other things race, language, climate justice to mention a few, she points out. “I think that Batswana will appreciate the use of proverbs, artistically translated within a number of poems,” explains TJ.
She highlights that in one of the poems, she explores what has been called praise poetry in order to think about language, culture and a cow. “Again, I think while that may strike non Batswana as strange, we are very much cattle people and that is obviously reflected in our language and poetry. So I hope readers see something in my worldview through the poems in An/ Other Pastoral.”
One of her biggest lessons that she got from embarking on writing this book, she says, happens to be that she is reminded of the same lesson over and over with each book. The lessons are many, but she points out that writing An/ Other Pastoral certainly reminded her that one should read widely, revise and then revise some more and always work with experienced editors and copy editors. “It is also important to be courageous, take calculated risks in order to write the kind of book you want to write and that’s what I have tried to do with An/ Other Pastoral.”
Writing and creating works during a pandemic, she notes, differs from one person to the next. As much as the pandemic has troubled a whole lot of us, it was a different story for her. She had the privilege of being fed, and safe and warm.
“So for most parts, writing was simply as difficult as it always is. Carrying out research could have been tricky but so much exists online now that there are always ways to read and ask without having to travel,” says TJ.