Genna Gardini
Genna Gardini was born in 1986 and went to school in Durban. She has a PhD in Drama from Queen Mary University of London, and an MA in theatre-making from the University of Cape Town. In 2013, she was named one of the Top 200 Young South Africans by The Mail & Guardian. Genna co-founded the queer theatre company Horses’ Heads productions with Gary Hartley. Her plays WinterSweet (2012) and Scrape (2013) won Standard Bank Ovation awards. Her debut collection of poems, Matric Rage, was published by uHlanga in 2015 and was commended for the 2016 Ingrid Jonker Prize. She is also the winner of the 2020 CASA Award for Playwriting.
Selected Work
Extract from Whale Watching’ (Matric Rage 2015)
In ‘Whale Watching’, she is almost scientific in her observations – repositioning a fat-shaming comment into a different context:
The concept of size can never exist for a whale
because the sea will always scale to accommodate it
[…]
This is why when you say, “Don’t you think – hey!
Don’t you think so-and-so looks like a beached whale?”
what you’re actually blurting out isn’t blubber
burnt to bone, but a lament against context:
recognizing that something larger than you,
and outside of your language, rose in tandem
without tongue, an absence used as if a blade
in a suicidal pact against place. <
br> Not so in the later poem ‘Fat’ which begins strongly with ‘You cannot be liked’ before laying on hurtful after hurtful expression (all heard by Gardini at some point). It ends in this storm:
You cannot fit into this skin I made for
You cannot wear that swimsuit because
You cannot cut your hair so short, what will distract them from
You cannot have a problem that is not caused by
You cannot understand that you’d be much happier if you’d just lose
You cannot still be so unhappy, after all that, maybe you just need to
You cannot talk about the things you thought you couldn’t have and couldn’t do like it was
such a big deal You managed to work your way through (you are the big deal, literally), like
it took you till now, from when You were only a kid to realize I was the weight you needed to be rid of. Honestly.
You cannot be so sensitive when we all know that this isn’t what I mean everytime I call you fat.
From: https://sabotagereviews.com/2016/05/30/matric-rage-by-genna-gardini/
Sharks Board (Matric Rage 2015)
Even in 1996,
this blonde marine biologist
says the words “Great White”
like he is introducing himself.
I am in Grade 4.
My class has been shuttled off
to the Sharks Board,
clutching indemnity forms
that fumble the term
“excursion”
as if they know an “outing”,
which to our parents could only mean
metal through the wrong lobe
glinting off a strobe light;
is, for a child, a foefie-slide ride
past the exit sign
and out the fire escape.
We scaled towards and down
those days like ants
from a fog of fumigation.
The marine biologist, flexing,
feels at and flops loose a shark,
dead,for us to see,
its body making noises against the slab
like wet vegetables on a counter.
I think of the fish’s mouth
as that of a woman in a portrait,
resigned. The man pries at it
with one unkind, prophylactic digit,
demonstrating that it can’t contract
or choose, the way that art does,
but must be revealed forcibly,
against context.
He jimmies out a tooth,
holds it up
like a jeweler would a diamond.
We are dismayed
at the black hole he’s arranged
in the glove of the shark’s head,
where once, like a hangnail,
intention had snatched and bit.
We press our own small fingers into it
Publications
Plays
2012. WinterSweet
2013. Scrape
Poetry Collection
2015. Matric Rage uHlanga
Extract from Whale Watching’ (Matric Rage 2015)
In ‘Whale Watching’, she is almost scientific in her observations – repositioning a fat-shaming comment into a different context:
The concept of size can never exist for a whale
because the sea will always scale to accommodate it
[…]
This is why when you say, “Don’t you think – hey!
Don’t you think so-and-so looks like a beached whale?”
what you’re actually blurting out isn’t blubber
burnt to bone, but a lament against context:
recognizing that something larger than you,
and outside of your language, rose in tandem
without tongue, an absence used as if a blade
in a suicidal pact against place. <
br> Not so in the later poem ‘Fat’ which begins strongly with ‘You cannot be liked’ before laying on hurtful after hurtful expression (all heard by Gardini at some point). It ends in this storm:
You cannot fit into this skin I made for
You cannot wear that swimsuit because
You cannot cut your hair so short, what will distract them from
You cannot have a problem that is not caused by
You cannot understand that you’d be much happier if you’d just lose
You cannot still be so unhappy, after all that, maybe you just need to
You cannot talk about the things you thought you couldn’t have and couldn’t do like it was
such a big deal You managed to work your way through (you are the big deal, literally), like
it took you till now, from when You were only a kid to realize I was the weight you needed to be rid of. Honestly.
You cannot be so sensitive when we all know that this isn’t what I mean everytime I call you fat.
From: https://sabotagereviews.com/2016/05/30/matric-rage-by-genna-gardini/
Sharks Board (Matric Rage 2015)
Even in 1996,
this blonde marine biologist
says the words “Great White”
like he is introducing himself.
I am in Grade 4.
My class has been shuttled off
to the Sharks Board,
clutching indemnity forms
that fumble the term
“excursion”
as if they know an “outing”,
which to our parents could only mean
metal through the wrong lobe
glinting off a strobe light;
is, for a child, a foefie-slide ride
past the exit sign
and out the fire escape.
We scaled towards and down
those days like ants
from a fog of fumigation.
The marine biologist, flexing,
feels at and flops loose a shark,
dead,for us to see,
its body making noises against the slab
like wet vegetables on a counter.
I think of the fish’s mouth
as that of a woman in a portrait,
resigned. The man pries at it
with one unkind, prophylactic digit,
demonstrating that it can’t contract
or choose, the way that art does,
but must be revealed forcibly,
against context.
He jimmies out a tooth,
holds it up
like a jeweler would a diamond.
We are dismayed
at the black hole he’s arranged
in the glove of the shark’s head,
where once, like a hangnail,
intention had snatched and bit.
We press our own small fingers into it
Publications
Plays
2012. WinterSweet
2013. Scrape
Poetry Collection
2015. Matric Rage uHlanga