Mine Mine Mine
Uhuru Portia Phalafala’s Mine Mine Mine enters not only the South African mines where her grandfather worked but also the lungs of the miners, and even the mind of the industry, the greed of its white owners and their new slavery (“mine mine mine / ownership paradigm exported / from the auction block”). The latest collection in Kwame Dawes’s always invigorating African Poetry Book Series is highly psychological and intellectual, but its concern is ultimately the way racial structures and subjugations impact the Black body. The book is breathless at points, mirroring the grandfather’s respiratory system “contaminated by history / brimming full with mine dust”; at others, its notes are consonant:
I hit a fit of hell
Unhome my house of hunger
Hollowed by heinous history
Unhinged,
I hunt your hurt
And hurt your heart
Turn the hate
Chantlike stanzas are organized in musical terms, “[a]n incalculable catastrophe explored in six movements” and a coda in the first section. Johannesburg’s notoriously terrorizing industry is contextualized within other systems of “white lies” and “Black life”—from the preventable deaths of Black mothers around pregnancy and childbirth, to the imprisonment of Black men (“Profitable men in chains / prisons bolstering GDP”). Phalafala addresses the way racism and misogyny intersect to target Black women—“White women call us whores / Black men call us whores”—and invokes “the wayward Black women / who refuse the destiny of their lives” in a nod to Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments:
Likers of things, wayward and extra
they dared to imagine
the city of lights
strolls down Sophiatown streets,
choreography was their art,
a practice of moving even
when there’s nowhere to go,
no place left to run.
The sense of absolute geographical loss is carried through generations (“braiding the raiding / of my grandmother’s body / with the fibroid of my daughter”), reinforcing mining’s impact on Black families, bodies, and livelihoods over time:
When state colludes with capital
when the capital you built
with your lungs humanity and dignity
renders you a wasted life
Like mine slopes, “caverns of history” can only be imagined from the outside, but they also collapse and, for those inside, kill.