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Africa legacySPACE
Nadine Aisha Jassat Award-winning writer and poet Nadine Aisha Jassat’s work has been published and performed widely. Her family has roots in Zimbabwe and South Africa, and she lives and works in Scotland. Let Me Tell You This (404 Ink), her debut anthology, deals with racism, gender- based violence
and the bonds between women.
Found, felt, home
40 | ISSUE 1 2021
By Nadine Aisha Jassat
WHEN READING THE INVITATION to write this piece, there were three words which jumped
out from the brief: found, felt and home.
As a poet by nature and by profession (one of which involves stopping in my tracks to observe the light through the trees, the other spending hours trying to capture it in writing) these words each represent
a mountain. Like the table-top guardian which watches over Cape Town, my relationship to what is found, what is felt, and what is home has at times felt clear, and at others clouded in fog which can come on at a moment’s notice.
Travelling and writing can both amplify this shifting relationship, and my Outriders journey took me to Cape Town, from where my great-grandmother’s people hailed, and Zimbabwe, where my father’s family are from. I spent almost every summer there as a child,
and as an adult journeyed to Cape Town often to visit family. Returning to both as a writer, my mission was to find out about the matriarchs in my family.
I journeyed through places which are homes of heart, history and family, but also homes heavy with distance: visits separated by years, and longings communicated through phone calls. I cannot smell my aunt’s cooking through a telephone, nor
feel her touch. To see each other, requires a plane journey, money, visas.
And home in Scotland, one I dearly love, still also contains the presence of an absence: the quiet in the place of her laugh.
And yet in February 2020, I stepped off a plane, notebook in hand, and there I was.
So, what did I find, and what did I feel, and what did I learn about home? I would need whole volumes to tell it all. Instead, I’ll say that I learnt that some of
my most familiar areas
in Cape Town, areas that
I’d been called to through family or fate for years,
were in fact areas that my ancestors had lived in over
a hundred or more years ago. Found. Felt. Home. I’ll tell you about praying side by side with my father in a mosque in Claremont, the peace there. Found. Felt. Home. I’ll show you how
I hugged my aunt tightly,
feet firmly planted on the floor of the airport in Harare, inhaling her scent deeply as she said, ‘Welcome home.’ Lastly, I’ll tell you that I learnt that these three words are
all about connection. And, despite the challenges which were to come – countries closing borders due to Covid, returning early to
the UK, the world being turned on its head – I was reminded as I journeyed
that that connection was something I have always had and can never lose. It will only grow as I do. It is found and felt and home. M
COMPILED BY SIOBHAN CLARK AND ERLA RABE. PHOTOS: NADINE AISHA JASSAT AND SUPPLIED