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"After growing up black in white South Africa, internalising so many negative truths of what black people are like, I needed to reclaim my humanity and myself from the toxic dance of objectification."
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Phillippa Yaa de VilliersPhillippa Yaa de Villiers
Phillippa Yaa de Villiers
Phillippa Yaa de Villiers is a South African writer and performance artist who performs her work nationally and internationally.
"After growing up black in white South Africa, internalising so many negative truths of what black people are like, I needed to reclaim my humanity and myself from the toxic dance of objectification."
"Because I wasnt told that I was adopted until I was twenty, I lacked a vocabulary to describe who I am and where I come from, so performing and writing became ways to make myself up."
"I started writing poetry when I was a child, my first published poem was when I was 11. I was brought up in a home that loved poetry and literature, especially the English language. But it was only when I was older that I realised that writing is so much more than words playing on a page."
"Writing contains the writer, their concerns, their social context and their history. My own history became a block to my creativity as I started to explore my identity as a black woman adopted by a white family in apartheid South Africa."
"I felt like the colonised and the coloniser were fighting each other inside my brain. Writing continued to be important to me but I was convinced that it was simply a therapeutic process, of no value to anyone else."
"As a mixed-race African and adoptee I feel, paradoxically, oppressed and completely free....My adult life has been largely devoted to healing this rift. The freedom of my paradoxical position, is in fact that I dont have the constraints of a traditional role and I have access to the world."