This weekend Burning Down the House: A Feminist Appraisal of Space’s Cassidy Robinson, Ché Adams and I were invited to chat to Blown Away By Books’s Sarah Prince at Fish Hoek Library. Sarah has been a great champion of the book and its centering of powerful new voices. The recording is attached to this post, and we’d love you to listen. What follows is some of what we spoke about, and a bit of what I’ve been thinking about since. If you haven’t come across our book yet — it’s a collection of personal essays by South African feminist writers, each of whom took a room in the house as their way in. The bedroom, kitchen, bathroom, stoep, garden, the library, attic and maid’s room. The idea was to take the familiar architecture of home and start pulling apart the gendered, racial and cultural histories we keep in it. Part manifesto, part love letter, part act of resistance — we warmly invite yo to join seventeen arsonists under one roof. Thanks for reading Musings! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. The foundations Sarah began by asking how the book first mapped itself out. It grew quite organically, out of conversations we were already having in our Honours classroom at Stellenbosch University about feminism, visual culture and the politics of everyday life. The editors had already shared a panel on kitsch at Woordfees in 2023. In April 2024 we held a symposium and invited people to think about the house and its rooms as a way into questions of gender and power. More than twenty-five papers came in from emerging scholars, and the energy in that room was something else. What drew us was the chance to do feminist scholarship differently. We wanted to treat personal experience as a legitimate form of knowledge, and to leave room for the mess of actual lives, where our politics and our practices don’t always line up. We also wanted a book that someone outside the academy could pick up and recognise themselves in. Clever, yes, but also intimate, funny, angry and vulnerable. Feminist thinking doesn’t only happen in seminar rooms. It happens around kitchen tables, in bedrooms, and in the sometimes very uncomfortable business of living together. Why images matter Sarah asked me to explain what visual culture actually is. It’s the study of how images shape our understanding of the world. Films and art, of course, but also advertising, social media, family photographs, architecture, everything we take in through our hungry eyes. Images help us see that we’d otherwise walk straight past. A film can make something completely familiar suddenly look strange. I don’t think images automatically change anyone’s mind. But they can disturb our habits of looking, and they can make us feel something before we’ve found the words for it. That discomfort is often a very good place to start thinking. Many voices in one house Some of the essays in the book are deeply scholarly. Others are playful, poetic, confessional or confrontational. Sarah wanted to know how we held all of that together, and the answer is that the house did a lot of the work for us. Each writer chose a room, and that gave us a loose architecture inside which very different conversations could happen. The encouragement of our publisher Karina and the writing retreat at fellow editor Stella Viljoen’s house helped enormously. We read our drafts aloud to one another, sometimes through laughter and sometimes through tears, and we helped each other out of our comfort zones. One of the things I’ve come to love about feminist collaboration is that you don’t have to agree with everyone. The differences can be generative. We weren’t trying to produce one tidy feminist position, instead we wanted to make space for the tensions inside feminism itself. Cass and the things that live in the attic Cassidy’s essay, “Houses Aren’t Haunted, Women Are”, opens with her father warning her and her sister to be wary of horror films because “things could get inside” them. As she writes, what he didn’t know was that there were already things inside them he couldn’t understand. After watching Relic, I cried not only for the realisation of their fate but also for the realisation of my own grief, which I have forgotten to feel. I cried for my nana, who now lives alone, for my mom, who no longer has her dad, and for my dad, who no longer has a best friend. Perhaps even more profoundly, I cried because only my sister and I know what this particular feeling is and seeing it so beautifully portrayed by someone else, with no attic or basement to contain any of it, releases me from my own shadowy depths. Cassidy is a researcher and educator working where psychology, visual culture and art meet, she’s training in Play and Art Therapy, and her master’s research uses clay-based creative conversations with young men to explore the impact of #MenAreTrash rhetoric. Her essay ends with a line I keep returning to: “we women are all burning houses, our attics and basements blooming with embers.” Ché’s liberation on a budget Ché Adams describes herself as a ghetto feminist from Cloetesville, which she calls the Cape Flats of Stellenbosch, the place that raised her and still runs through everything she makes. Her essay, “Liberation on a Budget”, begins with a line Sarah rightly called brilliant: “I have been a feminist from a very young age. Feminism kept me safe when I thought being in community wasn’t meant for me.” Her room is the bedroom, and she traces it through three generations of her family. Sarah asked her what that room means to her now, and she read from page 160: I am aware that this sounds like a form of liberation, and it is, but it is liberation on a budget. To me, the bedroom is not a space where I get to disengage, it does not function as a space where I cede control. It is where I execute precision and agency, it is an intellectualised space. The bedroom, although hidden from an audience, always functions as a reflection of the outside. For me, the bedroom is a ritualistic space. Her essay closes with that ritual written out as a kind of protection spell. Skincare, ginger beer loaded with ice and stirred clockwise, a tarot deck, a playlist. “I remind myself that the colonial project failed,” she writes. Ché’s feminism rejects the mainstream and builds instead from community and the places that made her. To dala what you must, as she says. The holes in my shirts My essay, “Part of the Furniture”, started with something mundane. I kept finding holes in my shirts, always in the same place, just below the navel. Eventually I realised they were being worn through by my stomach rubbing against the kitchen counter as I cooked and cleaned, cooked and cleaned. That became my way into thinking about domestic labour, and in particular the contradictions of being a white South African feminist who employs a Black woman to do work I know is exhausting. I grew up during apartheid, and the people who first made me question that world were often the Black people working in our home. There is a terrible intimacy to that arrangement. People can become indispensable to a household while remaining almost invisible within its social order. I am keenly aware that nobody needs white tears, especially not in response to black pain. I own no land that I can return. In fact, I have never felt at home, not in my parent’s house, not in mine, not in this country that is nevertheless my only chosen home, not in this unchosen skin. It comes from recognising that my discomfort doesn’t absolve me of anything. White guilt can so easily become one more way of centring oneself. I wanted to acknowledge my own complicity without pretending there’s some simple act of personal redemption on offer. And belonging is difficult for me. South Africa is the only place I consider home, but I’m acutely aware of the history through which people like me came to occupy space here. I suppose the essay is an attempt to sit with those contradictions without rushing to resolve them. Home is not always a safe place Sarah asked how the book challenges our idea of home as a place of safety and comfort. I think we start from the uncomfortable recognition that it often isn’t. In South Africa especially, domestic space carries an enormous amount of historical baggage. These are profoundly political spaces, daily reminders of who belongs, who serves, who is protected and who is kept out. And home can also be a place of great tenderness, memory and belonging. Cass’s grief, Ché’s rituals and Ramsey’s head resting on her leg in front of the television all live in this book too. The essays hold that ambivalence beautifully. Burning down the house isn’t really about destroying our homes. It’s about asking which inherited arrangements of power have become so normal that we barely see them any more, and what might become possible if we start to question them. How do we burn it down without burning ourselves? Sarah’s last question was the one I’ve thought about most since: How do we burn down the house without burning ourselves down? We’re all implicated in the structures we’re trying to dismantle. We live in these houses and depend on them. Sometimes we love the people and things that have also hurt us. I don’t think anyone can sustain a politics of perpetual outrage or purity. We will contradict ourselves and we will fail one another. That’s part of being human. What I love about this collection is how much humour and pleasure sits alongside some very painful material. Feminism has to make room for joy, friendship, for the possibility of living differently. Perhaps burning down the house is less about one spectacular act of destruction and more about the slow, ongoing work of recognising what we’ve inherited, deciding what we’re no longer willing to reproduce, and finding the courage to make something
