With photographer Kali van der Merwe

When one goes public with a memoir – the non-fiction exposé of an intimate yet political life – the cover design becomes crucial. It would best reflect the true nature of the writing. In my book A Political Love, the often unthinkable – yet lived – inner turmoil and emerging realisations of what it means to be in a relationship with a freedom fighter demanded an extraordinary visual representation.

I sought an image that could hold the re-embodiment of post-colonial constructs as knowledge, and the testimony that love is also a form of political activity. Yet the internal embodiment of my experience – as a white woman in relationship with a black freedom fighter and former political prisoner during apartheid – had no existing language. What was required was testimony: boundless, tumultuous, troubled, and yet driven by an emerging impulse of love.

This love had three landings:

• the man who was to be the father of our child,
• the spirit-child of my pregnancy,
• and my love for a future South Africa.

None of these were stable forces in 1993. My survival depended on inner resources, embodied responses to disruptive experience, my ardent journaling practice, and an imaginary dialogue with the unborn child. At the same time, I was making a conscious departure from my blood family—acknowledging my parents' role in the apartheid home front, often through the form of letters: small constructed cameos of love that I either carried forward or set aside in order to unfold as a mother.

No image of figure, landscape, or object would suffice. The cosmos of an inner life, made volatile by politics and emboldened by love, could only be held by an image of no clear distinctions.

By the time of publication, my friend Kali van der Merwe came to my rescue. Kali's interdisciplinary artistry spans sculpture, photography, film, sound, poetry, and land-based practice. Her work merges art with science, biology, astronomy, and taxidermy—evoking curiosity and wonder through installations, soundscapes, and image.

Our collaboration, as artist and writer-dancer, spans many years: an ongoing exploration of human ecologies, ancestral resonance, and the unseen terrain where art, spirit, ecology, and politics converge. As friends and creative witnesses, we have remained devoted to shaping difference—on the trembling horizon of the unknown.

For her series Sphere of No Thingness, Kali photographed thousands of images of mud in a dam. From this series, one image—lava-like in form—was chosen for the cover of A Political Love. She writes:

“The light within darkness itself is known as the lumen naturae in alchemical terms. This is the inner light of primordial, ever-present, expansive consciousness—the light of nature illuminating the whole of creation in this and every moment.”

Kali has also photographed many of my dance performances—always exhibitions of the soul in transition. She is the photographer who comes closest to images I can humbly claim as true: affective, visceral, intra-acting with a more-than-performer existence, always connected to the unknown.

For this contents, I offer:

• An excerpt of the dance performed during the book launch at BETRAG Gallery, Stanford.
• Selected images from Sphere of No Thingness, including the one chosen for the book cover.
• A selection from The Dog in the Road, a performance that carries our shared concern for the precarious terrain of life on the edge—where the living reach into death and its cosmic reality during the end-times of mass extinction.

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