Warm evening in Melville as poet Busisiwe Mahalngu takes charge as wine flowed and food sumptuous
By Edward Tsumele, CITYLIFE/ARTS Editor
And as is usually the case during Spilt Milk Social Café’s Poetry Tuesday sessions, the atmosphere was intimate and company great. Guests who attended the event were greeted by a glass of wine. Van Loveren Sauvignon Blanc’s Gauteng Ambassador Judith Lee was in the room dishing out a glass of wine to guests on arrival.
That is before she went on an informative educational journey of wines produced by her company in the Robertson area of the Western Cape. When Lee completed her information session, we room all in the felt that we were now wine conoissiers.
Even my rusted knowledge of wine gained from the years when I dabbled in wine reviewing on a regular basis when I worked for Sowetan, was stimulated. I was again connected to the grapes in a different context, a poetry reading and performance.
Food was also served to the guests. Good wine, sumptuous food and poetry collided, leaving us with an altered state of perception about the art of wine tasting, as well as what areas of our emotional and psychological lives poetry could take us to.
It was a hilarious feeling worth repeating. Certainly a combination of wine, food, poetry and good company on a Tuesday evening was not a bad idea for some of us who braved the rather mean weather to attend this session right in the heart of Melville, corner 7th and 1st Avenue.
That is the address to remember for the next time Poetry Tuesday will take place, particularly for those who get mental stimulation from listening to well thought out and well delivered poetry text on an elevated podium in an intimate atmosphere. For that is the experience that Spilt Milk Social Café offers during the Tuesday Poetry Sessions. It is a space to network within the literati community in a safe space that is relaxed.
On Tuesday, May 30, 2023, the audience was introduced to the poetry of young spoken word writer Busisiwe Mahlangu who was the Featured Poet. If you have not yet come across her name yet, you better look out for it right now for she is indeed destined for a bigger space in the poetry space.
She told me that she has just graduated from UNISA, with a BA in Creative Writing, and will in August this year leave for a three month Writers’ retreat in the US. If the likes of celebrated novelist, playwright and painter of the stature of Zakes Mda has been touched by her poetry text, you can be assured therefore that Busisiwe’s literary future is bright. “Yes, he likes my work,” she told me.
But who is this young wordsmith
Busisiwe Veronica Mahlangu is a writer, performer and TEDx Speaker from Mamelodi, Pretoria. Poetry is how she is learning to be brave and fearless. Her work is hard hitting and raw, holding space for conversations around poverty, mental health, education, violence and healing. She is the founder of the Lwazilubanzi Project, a Non-Profit Organisation that focuses on literature and creating learning spaces in townships and public schools.
Busisiwe is the winner of the Tshwane Speak Out Loud Youth Poetry Competition 2016/2017 and National Library of South Africa Poetry 2017.
Her work is long-listed for the Sol Plaatje European Poetry Award and has been published in New Coin, Kalahari Review, Best New African Poets Anthology and Atlanta Review.
Her debut collection Surviving Loss was published late in 2018 (Impepho Press) and adapted and produced for theatre as part of the South African Sate Theatre’s incubator programme 2018.2019.
And when we left in some kind of drunk state of both poetry and wine, you can excuse us for indeed what we experienced on Tuesday was one of the warming experiences on a coldish winter evening in Johannesburg.