Original Date: December 1, 2021
“The History of Intimacy” is a tender, tangled account of the heavy days in South Africa following Nelson Mandela’s release from prison. This award-wining poetry collection portrays the innovative forms of music, kinship, and even self in “the new intricate county we understood was impossible.” Gazing at black-and-white photos from back home, a woman who has moved to the United States realizes, “Memory doesn’t come to me straight.”
You can read a Penn State News story about Dr. Baderoon’s book!
About Gabeba Baderoon
Gabeba Baderoon is a poet and scholar. She is the author of the poetry collections, The Dream in the Next Body, A hundred silences and The History of Intimacy, and the monograph Regarding Muslims: from Slavery to Post-Apartheid. Baderoon serves on the editorial board of the African Poetry Book Fund, which has published over 60 collections by African poets since 2012. She has co-edited three journal special issues, most recently on “African Feminisms: Cartographies for the Twenty-First Century” with Alicia Decker in Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism. Baderoon is an Extraordinary Professor of English at Stellenbosch University and a Fellow of the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study. She is an Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies and African Studies at Pennsylvania State University, where she co-directs the African Feminist Initiative.