Poetry from Out of the Rubble
By S. A. Arleyn | Posted: Monday Apr 28, 2025
An Evening of Resilience, Word, and Song.
Tawona Ganyamatopé Sitholé, relaxed in a cape of fabric striped with zebra patterning, stands at the podium of the library’s conference room. Tawona is the current UNESCO artist-in-residence at the University of Glasgow, and addresses the audience with a quiet wisdom, tempered with good humour. He teaches us how to say a Shona word for affirmation. “Hekani!”
“Hekani,” we reply. Tawona laughs.
“That was poor.”
We laugh, too.
“Let’s say it like no-one owns it. Pretend you’ve been saying it all your lives. Hekani!”
“Hekani!” We chant, with much more enthusiasm.
Tawona is leading us into the ‘Poetry From Out of the Rubble’ event, hosted at the Dunedin Public Library by the UNESCO City of Literature Dunedin team. Alongside his distinguished colleague, Professor Alison Phipps, Tawona embarks us on a meditation of resilience through hardship - and the importance of camaraderie, selflessness, and joy. In his poem Daydreaming in Darkness, we ruminate on our cognitive dissonance to the news that reaches us about evercycling systems of injustice. “Who shouted liberty / in the middle of oppression? That was just me … daydreaming in darkness. When I am awake, I see mixed messages from the mixed-up messenger.” Originally from Zimbabwe, Tawona met Alison after performing at the same festival.
A professor of social sciences, she had been searching for a way to “break open academic research” within her classroom; she invited Tawona and his poetry back to Edinburgh to work with her, and he became their artist and playwright in residence. Sure enough, his spirit injected “the lens of creativity … playfulness and mischief into the work”.
Alison Phipps self-identifies as someone who, despite being inherently indigenous to her native land of Scotland, is nonetheless part of White systems of oppression. “I am a recovering racist”, she admits, in a tone of wavering strength. “Because my ancestors were White / and the country I am from grew fat in every imperial fight … I do not have to worry when my skin is in a room.”
Alison exudes a smiling approachability, but has built an extremely illustrious academic career tackling some of the harshest ordeals the human experience has to offer. The ambassador for the Scottish Refugee Council and UNESCO Chair on Refugee Integration through Education, Professor Phipps is an academic, activist, educator, essayist and a published poet, with honorary doctorates from the University of Edinburgh and the University of Waterloo in Canada. In 2012, she became an Officer of the Order of the British Empire. From all this, you might imagine a plush office lined with leather and bookshelves, but Alison has never been afraid to delve right into the heart of the areas those she helps are escaping from.
Well, ‘never afraid’ might be an oversimplification. For those who reside in Gaza, fear is a constant shadow. She tells that her collaboration with Khawla Badwan, Keep Telling of Gaza, was born out of a dark necessity — that “people wanted a resource book of stuff to read at vigils.
They were running out of words that were outraged enough.” One of Khawla’s pieces reads, “… heavy orange nights and loud deafening bombs, scenes of unimaginable horror, pieces in boxes, bags and buckets. It's been a year struggling with words, breathing out sounds to break the dark silence.” But Alison also tells of the resilience of her colleagues there, who she speaks of highly.
One of these, the renowned Dr. Refaat Alareer, was killed in an Israeli airstrike in December 2023 shortly after writing the viral verse “If I Must Die, Let It Be a Tale.” Another is Nathmi Al-Masri, Professor of Applied Languages and at the Islamic University of Gaza. “He just always has plan A, plan B, plan C, plan D. He can make anything happen … [he’s] committed to his students. And we've now gone through five aggressions on the Gaza Strip through the different projects we've worked on over the years, including one when I was in Gaza. We've just built up a way of working.”
These are heavy discussions, and the atmosphere in the room has tensed perceptibly. But Alison and Tawona are poets, and poetry is inherently healing - whether by kindness or catharsis.
Tawona, Alison says, is a poet in a “tradition of healers”. Describing a time in her life when she lost her speech due to a verbal attack, she credits Tawona - working for her as a poetry teacher at the time - for giving her back her own voice. He gently instructed her to write every day, even just a little. This recovery from voicelessness marked the start of the Keep Telling of Gaza collection: “when I realised how paralyzing the genocidal activities were in the Gaza Strip of everyone's speech,” Alison ruminates, “I needed to find the words both for myself and for other people of this live streaming of death and destruction, on a scale that most of us have not seen in our lifetimes.” She goes on to discuss Victor Klemperer, a diarist who recorded everyday events during the Holocaust. Inherent in writing, she reminds us, is the vital importance of bearing witness: not only is poetry a form of emotional catharsis, it can also be an analytic tool and a mode of documentation.
From this, the conversation turns to the importance of the library as a humanitarian resource. To Tawona, libraries are “magical places. You walk through the door and it's as if you're walking into new worlds through reading.” But further to that, they are also places of refuge. “People who are, you know, seeking asylum — they can sit quietly, get information and someone who maybe can help them … libraries have become a haven.” As we are incidentally in a library, this statement resonates. Standing vigilant in the corner of the room is Ali Boyne, the Dunedin Public Library events coordinator; introducing the speakers and facilitating the discussion is Dr. Neil Vallelly. A lecturer in the Sociology, Gender Studies and Criminology Programme at the University of Otago, Neil’s extensive research on social theory under neoliberalism provides a worldly energy that counterbalances Alison’s raw emotion and Tawona’s centred calm.
This event also would not have happened without Nicky Page, who works for the UNESCO City of Literature program. In Alison’s words, she “tickles lions every day, pinches sharks, nudges wasps and all of those things.” I myself, watching how this event has been organized and constructed —from the library in which it is held, to the tone and presence of the speakers— can see a crucial synthesis of difficult works by an audience who is welcomed into the headspace necessary to receive them. We indeed must keep telling of Gaza. Occasions like this are just the way to do it.
At the end of the session, Tawona pulls out a small instrument made of bent metal spokes latched to a wooden board: a mbira, in his family for six generations. He strikes up a slow, meandering tune, sweet enough for children. Alison’s voice rides over the top in cathartic hypnosis. “The hunters are here: the warriors who do not fight, the arrows in the fire, the scars made on the skin, the moko and the markings, the words of all languages, the kisses of all lovers, the skins of creatures white and black, the songs of all separations, all celebrations, every fire tendered.” Two dozen people relax. My formal Western education taught me that Aristotle, two millennia ago, emphasized the importance of catharsis at the end of stage tragedies; my indigenous upbringing brought me to powwows that showed the same. Music relieves tension, brings us back to a place of unity. In a few minutes, all will gather outside for cake - supplied by Botanical Kitchen - and coffee. But for a final few minutes, we drift.
“Wine is here, and cool water … and somewhere deep inside, if you listen in closely, comes the start of a dance. This music, this music is meat and meal and maize and madness. This tune brings trance and trembling, treasures and terror.”
Poetry From Out of the Rubble was a free event that took place on Friday, the 7th of March, at the Dunedin City Library’s 4th floor conference room. For information about upcoming events like this one, go to https://www.cityofliterature.co.nz/whats-on.