NEW VALLEY by Nkcubeko Balani

BLACK CATS DON'T BITE !

“Everytime we work together it’s an evolution.” - Ib Kamara

Contents

“So it is better to speak remembering we were never meant to survive.” - Audre Lorde

Blood Orange, Timelessness, and the Value of Tongues Which Speak: What Blood Orange Means To Me by Nkcubeko Balani [@freetownnoir] Still from Blood Orange's video for 'Jewellery' - Youtube

“Balance in my hair, I’m pretty as fuck.” - ‘Smoke’, Negro Swan The first video I see there is a group of black men, shirtless and clad only in their uniqueness from the next. He stands in the middle of them, his dreadlocks drooping to his shoulders. The men swerve slowly, romantically, maybe playfully, in an embrace to the start of the early released songs from Negro Swan. I accept the embrace they put themselves - and inadvertently me - into. When Blood Orange resurfed with a release of his new work, I welcomed that I would be in conversation - even intersubjectivity - with voices I knew well: each of them present in my past, present and future lives as a black, queer and sensitive person. In essence, the magic Blood Orange carries in his discography and performativity is a time-traveling nest of my various subjectivities carefully recorded, gently encoded and reiffied in a manner that reminds me of the beauty of an embrace of the self and family. If you would allow me to consider time as sisterly to history - and as a keeper of our sanity and stability as human beings - Blood Orange’s transgression of time is an intervention in the erasure of queer histories and, further, a transformative act of creating a future of and for queer subjectivities. Through his music, he has been able to dive into the archive and excavate queer histories for our present and future. This is a radical intrusion on history’s erasure of queer communities and the relations queer and non-queer communities have been able to forge. Such an interference is important in a time where knowledge from queer communities has and continues to be appropriated to suppress them and awaken other forms of bigotry.

“Shuffle the cards. Masculine? Feminine? It depends on the situation. Neuter is the only gender that always suits me.” - Claude Cahun

Blood Orange’s music as a radical act of interference - or merely being - is, therefore, a wonderland: a stroke on my cheek and reassurance of my existence today, yesterday, tomorrow. I have also come to understand and appreciate Blood Orange as a possessor and intercessor of a language I can relate to through storytelling. In Freetown Sound, I find myself lunged into history and future as voices from the 80s documentary Paris is Burning attempt to envision a future which belongs in my time and beyond: they speak! And with ferocity, with love, with caution, with deliberateness, among vibrations that act as a vacuum for a future-imaginable history. If speech is to announce, and to let be; if it is an action and an assumption of power, Blood Orange’s use of tongues which speak is a dynamic imagination of what I could be or could have been everytime I enter into conversation with him as a listener. My position as listener creates a connection to the present and the past, presenting to me possibilities in being and becoming. His music provides a transformative community in which I to refuse to shy away from myself, where I am, instead, in jubilee and constant discovery. In his music I am gathered and form a community I might otherwise find impossible to create realistically (but of course what I hear is realistic, and has already been, if it isn’t the present). I find myself in a community of intersubjectivity with him, (the artist), the voices (who are and who have been) and by completion, with queer-erasure undone.

“Pop that pop that, jiggle that fat /Don’t stop, get it til your clothes get wet.” - Missy Elliot

Why don't you ...

“I see both sides like Chanel /See on both sides like Chanel.” - Frank Ocean

Dear Mr Frank Ocean? Frank Ocean by Siwe Magadla

I was thinking about you during my writing class. I was thinking you deserve a Nobel Literature Prize and I know that validation from such institutions shouldn’t be our main priorities but it was just a thought. This letter isn’t about that though. This letter started off as a review for channel ORANGE so let’s start there. 2012 and 2013 was a strange year for music for me. I didn’t listen to most of the music that came out that year. Our old decoder was probably the reason but living in hostel and not having access to a tv contributed to my never knowing the songs that came out and connecting with them. I hope you don’t think, “who the fuck does the girl/boy/ whatever think they are” but i was struggling with the falsetto in thinkin bout you which is haunting me now because it’s one of my favourite tracks from channel ORANGE. I listened to channel ORANGE properly for the first time this holiday. A friend told me to listen to Dissect by Cole Cuchna and I confessed to her that I’d never listened to your channel ORANGE . She encouraged me to first listen to channel ORANGE before listening to the podcast and I did. I wasn’t really concentrating on my first listen. I was reading and using it as background music. Then i listened to it again and for the third time and I hate comparing bodies of work but BLONDE remains a favourite. Frank...may I call you that? I used to hate YouTube comments but once when I was listening to white ferrari and I read this comment this man wrote about driving with his wife, I think it was at dusk, and I’m going to make the case that “I'm sure we're taller in another dimension. You say we're smaller and not worth the mention” was playing when the wife turned to her husband and said, “don’t you ever leave me. I don’t want to ever feel the

“I thought Nik Jonas was gay?” - Nkcubeko

way he does” and the rawness of the moment captures your music, Frank. I know that you didn’t experience all that you write about which is the beauty of your artistry. How well you storytell. How and where do you find the words, Frank? Anyway, I ended up listening to Dissect, it was a few weeks ago. I remember having a shit day. Those “is this really happening?” kind of shit days. You know, those fuck I’m tired sigh shitty days. Cole was talking about your journey and I was cleaning my room and he played strawberry swing and something happened with my knees. It felt as if I was sinking in the middle of my room and this lump appeared in my throat. Frank, I love Chris Martin and Coldplay a lot and I love your song and Nostalgia, ULTRA is the best. You did so well. I hope you’re well. I’ve forgotten how to write letters ever since I escaped high school English. I suppose I should have asked how you’re feeling good. Yolanda would probably want me to say hi, so hi Frank (from Yolanda).

Take care, Love Kind regards, siwe.

“I drink Hansa. I fuck.” - Brenda Fassie

bell hooks on ‘being the subject of art’: reflections on becoming by transgressing by Nkcubeko Balani [@freetownnoir]

In an essay on being the subject of art, bell hooks considers the act of transgression and what it holds when one is posed as the subject of art. hooks’ observations are a special memento for artists who may view art as investing a portion of yourself in it. They give flesh and bone to James Baldwin’s assertion that “you think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.” hooks’ essay is an important reflection for those who often transgress across lines of sexuality. Reflecting on the need for transgression for those who find themselves in these bodies, she arrests notions of shame which manifest at instances of transgressive behaviour. She writes, “To refuse denial is to transgress. The politics of denial, like the culture of shame, keeps us in our place. Without fear of exposure, transgression might become an everyday action. Every moment someone might be willing to change something about themselves, the world they live in, if they were not so afraid of loss, of being confined to states of ongoing aloneness, states of nonrecognition.”

“The only queer people are those who don't love anybody.” - Rita Mae Brown For hooks, this state of nonrecognition is a condition of impasse - of non-movement and of refusing ourselves the pleasure of evolving in ourselves. In a sentiment that calls to mind Audre Lorde writing on the erotic as “the nurturer or nursemaid of all our deepest knowledge,” she writes:

“To recognize is to transgress. Withholding recognition strips us of our power to interrogate, to intervene on, to act. We are afraid of not being seen. We do not know the truth that to be seen and not known is the ultimate abandonment. We refuse to know each other. In pain there is also the possibility of connection. It is easy to dominate that which you see and never know. To want to know is to transgress.” Lorde, in the same vein, first defines her use of ‘erotic’ as stemming from the Greek word eros and meaning, “an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.” She goes on to write on the potential that evoking the erotic has for the meaning and quality of our lives: “The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves.”

“Culture is a huge factor when it comes to governing [people's] bodies.” - Desire Marea hooks expands on the notion of transgression to gather both its negative and positive potentialities. She notes that transgression holds “the possibility of pleasure and [the] danger, of redemption and violation.” But she holds the reader’s head above water and asserts that to transgress is “to claim the right to choose” - a blameless act, empty of regret, one where one finds themselves “moving gainst to move forward.” Later on in the essay hooks returns to consider how the notion of shame can dilipitate the desire to transgress, more so when the act of transgression must disrupt the boundaries of public and private. hooks is invited to be a disembodied voice on the phone discussing desire, with the freedom to say whatever she wishes to. She chooses to read a letter to a past lover. Yet when she has to speak the letter to life - the ‘I’ not as the maker of the art or its discussant, but its subject - she trembles: “I am not ready to share these feelings [as reflected in the art] without shame. I am not ready to cross the boundaries of public and private: I fear no one will understand these words. We stop the taping. We begin again. I want to resist this self-imposed shame. It is not natural. It is the product of public and private pain - the outcome of separation.” hooks’ observations on the boundaries of the public and private are immensely relevant in my everyday negotiation of myself in the public terrain as a queer black person. I view my positive conduct as an act of transgression yet the question of the boundaries imposed by the private and public divide often presses my acts of transgression. Often I find that my act of transgression becomes a unification of ‘I’ in the public and private sphere. But the shame, both self-imposed and impressed on me, is often an inhibitor of this act of transgression. In closing the essay, hooks offers words of balm on being the subject of art (and therefore, transgressing). She pushes for the reader to understand the documented self - the ‘I’ as the subject of the art - as a being one which will not in future be familiar. Every ebild moment is fleeting. The past will rebuild itself if you allow it, but it remainds gone - a figment of the history that has become us. It has “its own destiny … moves in a history of its own making.”

meet the team them meet the team themmeet the team meet the team them themmeet the team Nkcubeko Balani (or user: @freetownnoir) is from Cape Town and currently a student at Rhodes University. They also make art, and write. They prefer their pants high-waisted and their tea without milk. They use they/them pronouns.

siwe wants to be from cape town because it has a beach but they are from grahamstown. they like the sun streaming through the window and landing on surfaces. they like cold weather and winter. siwe is a multimedia artist. she/he/they have a special focus on video and photography and is obsessed with wong kar-wai's films. once in a while she has a burst of inspiration at night and decides to write. i write well if there are deadlines. siwe uses all pronouns