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Nlovu
The dreadful alarm goes off; the slow rising disquietude of going to work had already woke you.
You pick up your phone to turn off the alarm. You keep it in your hand, scrolling, maybe, the next video will give you enough of a dopamine hit to get you started.
Something quick, you tell yourself, and it starts with someone in their car, so you spin, you’re sure you’ll get a jackpot soon. It's a cutie pie questioning her mum on the lack of kisses. You see, Bisan, she’s exhausted, you’re relieved, she’s alive. Some discount holiday advert, an AH asks AITAH, and you see the turned-up rug corner exposing the maggot-infested underbelly of our systems and structures of power, but you also see the resistance. Just like that its been 20 minutes, you’re late and numb.
You’re hunched over, and it's not because of the dreary, cold, wet, dark weather, although it doesn’t help. It's not because you spend so much time operating your palm-sized slot machine. The hunch is a dull depression that concaves in on itself and changes your centre of gravity. You’re sombre and numb.
You float through the day dazed, disengaged,disconnected; you don’t trust that your body will hold together if you utter the truth.
You question truth, you question its place in a world where large language models have a say on the finicky idiosyncrasies that make up human relating, for a more sterile, convenient alternative. You’re tired and numb.
You punish your body; it's subtle and hides behind the pursuit of fitness. Every map of your body was conceived, produced and feigned in the hands of Cartographers who used your terrain as escapism. You try to sleep it away, you try to sex it away, you try to drink it away, but nothing seems to touch the chasm.
You question if you’re allowed to experience joy, pleasure, if you’re allowed to feel at home in your body, just because your geography gives you some semblance of safety, you feel guilt when you feel good, so you brace. You’re frustrated and numb.
You’re numb. You mask and perform engagement, but really, you’re numb. You question whether anyone else feels the numbness with the intensity that you do. Food tastes beige, music like you’re hearing it from a distant place, senses dulled, your connections heighten the loneliness that haunts your waking.
Nlovu is not born out of a vacuum; it is born in conversation. In response, reaction, to everyday life, and yet a subversion of it. It,is born out of the premise that our bodies are the vessel through which we get to explore, experience and witness this vast delight-filled universe.
Nlovu asks what if we embraced feeling and found meaning in it? What if we dared to tend to our gardens, to rest and bask in the goodness of what grows in it’s soils and the herbs and fruits it bears..
What if we imagined more than pain for ourselves?
What if we trusted pleasure?
What if we could have a loving relationship with Earth, and see ourselves through her loving eyes?
Observing something changes it; judgment is not observation.
What would you find if you observed yourself?
All of it happens on the body, to the body, by bodies, while also having been long evicted from our bodies, from nature.
Nlovu is an invitation for an open heart, an alert mind and a body in dialogue with its environment, one that is inextricable with nature. It's an invitation for liberation from the illusion of separation, the body of sin and the degenerate perversity of patriarchy.
How have you been changed by this experience? Has it found language in your mouth or flow in your movement? Can you see yourself more clearly?
