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Tjawangwa Dema Quotes
Botswana
Tjwangwa Dema, famously known as TJ Dema, is a Motswana poet, educator, literary events and project producer. She is currently an honorary senior research associate at the University of Bristol.
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15 quotes
"This process of refining is everything is the goal is to write a good (read necessary, urgent) poem".
"I remember seeing the sky as it scrunched its face, filling its cheeks with smoke hurling rage at every mans' door".
"Here is a line between mana and man
"My clay begins elesewhere where Okavango pours into Boteti & re appears here to watch this other water from a distance".
"When my chapbook, Mandible, got published I don't believe I thought about curation very much".
"My sister works well at the daily chore of keeping everyone alive"
"Do not ask me what I good poem is, I only know one when I see or smell it, hear it coming, or sense it scrambling off the stage or page".
"I studied in Botswana and in the classroom it was the reading of stories that drew me to language, not poetry specifically".
I am interested in what moves us, what makes us human, and how we negotiate the spaces we occupy—physically, emotionally, and politically.
I'm a communal creature but some of that community has to do with being silent and observing. Language and imagination suit me because I like people but like my space too.
When you write you are engaged in a process of discovery, you are trying to work out what it is you think, feel, or know about a subject.
May he never know that a crossing does not mean better, safer... I make a bridge of blood and bone, of sinew and lung, for him.
"One of the things I was afraid I would miss out on with a digital residency was the very local and human voice but thankfully through technology we can approximate some of what a conversation in person accomplishes".
Who amongst us knows whether our mothers truly favour silence, or whether the price of asking a man where he has been is far greater than the shame of knowing?”
I suppose writing is revising and editing and hoping you know just when to stop. It's always serious work for me, it just happens to be work whose reward is worth staying with the trouble for.
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