“The most hidden open secret”: Interview with Uhuru Phalafala on Mine Mine Mine (University of Nebraska Press, 2023), conducted by Helene Strauss

Abstract

abstract In this interview, we hope to take up this Special Issue’s concern with the intersections between gender activism, climate justice, and artistic practice. As a work that charts the poet’s deeply personal connection with the climate crisis through the toxic burdens placed on her family by South African histories of mining and migrant labour, Mine Mine Mine offers an exemplary instantiation of Black feminist artistic praxis as climate activism. Crucially, the poet challenges concepts and framings that have been utilised to speak to climate and racialised issues, often separated if not entirely erasing the latter issue. Her epic poem and reflections in this interview reveal intricate and inextricable imbrications of social justice and environmental justice with colonial race-making as foundation. The poet clearly demonstrates that the same mechanisms that extracted and exploited the environment engineered racism, racialised and mechanised particular bodies to serve those purposes, resulting in their mutual spiritual and embodied extraction. Discourses on climate or environmental justice continue to fall in the traps of thinking through these issues without centring colonial capitalism and geopolitical gendered race politics. This interview brings these intersections to the fore, offering textualities and vocabularies to reframe and language their coalescence. In positing the “Black eco”, the poet offers a cosmology that pre-existed colonial cosmology, one teeming with life, spirit, reciprocity, care, and relation with others and the living world, human and non-human, pushing us to enrich our conceptualisation from climate justice towards the “Eco”: ecological justice. Climate justice singles out the weather as phenomena that, while causal to human activity in the making of modernity, is outside of ourselves. “Eco” suggests a web of life that was ostensibly wrecked by environmental and human destruction, but that is operative and upheld by some indigenous societies and their cosmologies. In offering us “geopoetics”, the poet grapples with grammars of the geopolitical as intertwined with spiritual and embodied extraction in the making of modernity and its ongoing violence. The interview enriches some of the many questions raised by the volume about racial capitalism’s destructive environmental legacies through considering their impact on black sociality, reproduction, and the capacity to breathe.