Natalia Molebasti

Natalia is a spoken word poet and activist from Johannesburg, South Africa. Natalia was only with the Donne di Pace tour during the 2-day conference at Udine, but in that brief amount of time, her strong character left a lasting impression on me. Natalia performed her poetry to John Coltrane and to a South African female singer’s work. When she performed “In the name of time,” the music was perfectly aligned, the chorus repeating the words “time, time, time,” as Natalia spoke them. During the second day of the Anam Cara conference, Natalia instigated a moment of silence for those suffering from AIDS, particularly in Africa, and Costanzo added also a moment of silence for the death of the children in the terrorist attack in Beslan, for an indigenous poet who recently passed on, and for the innocent civilians and the soldiers who have died in the war in Iraq.

“Even though I pray,” Natalia writes, “I’m going to keep on working.” I was apprehensive about the interfaith aspect of the Donne di Pace tour, and the potential religious under-tone of the whole tour, but these fears were assuaged by the excellent balance of ceremony and clear political agenda in this group of women. These women make politics personal and bring political discourse out of the White House and other lofty, distant, and unreachable places and back into the house and the neighborhood and the heart. Natalia’s line of poetry really addresses this—yes we pray, and also we keep on going with our work in this life. Natalia has another line that I really like: “I would like to hear the children say…that they are bright and colorful…and that above all they want freedom.” Her poems are online at http://web.uniud.it/all/simplegadi/index.html.