Lethokuhle Msimang GR and Veronika Yadukha GR worked together to create “Rantau,” combining their respective prowess in poetry and ceramics. The exhibition, which was on view at the Black Family Visual Arts Center from April 9-18, explores migration, cultural liminality, loss and resilience.
Their experiences as migrants to New England and the global legacy of colonialism informed the project: Msimang is from Durban in the South African province of KwaZulu-Natal and Yadukha is from Ukraine.
“As we’ve stressed in the concept, we feel as migrants that we are constantly engaged in the act of translation,” said Msimang. “I’ve always felt particularly in spaces like New England that my experience is untranslatable, which is why the illegibility of the Zee font became essential to the concept. We present the audience with the task of translating the font but not without effort. The exhibition was as much an experiment to see the lengths people will go to understand something foreign to them.”
The visitors of the exhibition were asked to remove their shoes to better immerse themselves before entering a room with glass walls on three sides. After crossing the doorway’s threshold, “Rantau” situated visitors in a space between Yadukha’s undulating, tan and black vases and Msimang’s poem “To Hug a Maple Tree.”
In the exhibition, Mismang’s poem was printed on a large, white cloth in a font her brother created and called “Zee font.” It was a font he created to “conceal his love letters.”
“My brother, like most young men, was embarrassed by his unfiltered emotions and perhaps his vulnerability,” Msimang said. “[Creating Zee font] was a way for him to get out what he was feeling without exposing himself. In keeping with this, I felt the vulnerability of my poetry was best veiled with this font.”Alongside the central poem and pottery displays, Msimang and Yadukha provided visitors with a “Rosetta Stone” — a sheet of paper with another of Msimang’s poems in English, Zee font and Ukrainian — to help visitors translate the central poem.
Transmedial translation is the act of translating a written text into a different medium. For the exhibition, Yadukha translated Msimang’s poem into pottery.
“I think the most essential point to start with is that transmedial translation is still translation,” Yadukha said. “Its aim remains the same: to carry as much as possible from the original text into another form — faithfully, attentively and thoughtfully. The difference is that instead of moving between languages, I’m moving between media — transposing a written poem into a physical object.”
Yadukha recalled that the idea for “Rantau” first came about when Msimang was completing her master’s program in May of 2024. When she read Msimang’s poetry, she could immediately visualize how to translate it into pottery, something she had similarly done for her M.A. essay the previous year.
Although Yadukha and Msimang are from different cultures and geographical regions, the two bonded over having similar feelings about living in New Hampshire.
“‘Rantau’ is a Malaysian word that means ‘to be in-between’ or ‘to wander away from home,’” Msimang said. “The word and its etymology encapsulated our experience and concept so succinctly.”
For the exhibition, Msimang has adopted Zee font to represent Zulu — a Bantu language spoken in South Africa and Msimang’s native tongue. Zulu has a strong oral tradition but lacks written records. Colonization has threatened to erase Zulu and its culture, knowledge and histories. The Zee font is an imaginative reconstruction of cultural memory and lost historical knowledge.
According to the exhibition pamphlet, Msimang’s work with poetry in this display “reflects the fragility of the black body and its unregistered precarity,” while Veronika’s pots “demonstrate a tactile embodiment of these concepts.”
Yadukha used two variations of durable clay called stoneware that appear earthy brown before firing. After firing, one clay turns tan while the other becomes closer to black. Yadukha worked with the clay’s imperfections and defined its weaknesses to symbolize how the body holds onto repeated experiences — traumatic, joyful or something in between. Yadukha described the process of working with clay as both “beautiful and humbling” as it collaborates with the artist and provides its own silent wisdom, memory and knowledge.
The exhibition’s visitors could also listen to Msimang’s “To Hug a Maple Tree” in English. Through a set of headphones adjacent to the central poem, visitors could hear Msimang read her poem aloud. A monitor beside the headphones placed images of Yadukha’s pottery in visitors’ fields of vision as they listened.
Msimang explained that she wanted visitors to be able to hear the poem, even if they could not decode or interpret the poem’s meaning with the Rosetta Stone. However, she left one stanza out of the recording to avoid providing the audience with the entire poem in English. With the absence of this stanza, some visitors may have found that the poem became partially untranslatable.
In “To Hug a Maple Tree,” Msimang discussed her experience being from South Africa. She was inspired by the feeling that she was becoming a part of “an invisible class” in her home country.
“I often described my home as having tentacles,” Msimang said. “Everything seems conspired to keep you from reaching. And I could feel the danger encroaching, most notably in the burglary I describe in the poem.”
Msimang also makes direct references to New Hampshire and maple trees, which are often associated with New England. However, she said that she associates maple trees with the entire western hemisphere.
“I was trying to relate how I was grabbing onto the promise of a different world despite all the elements which conspired to keep me stranded,” Msimang said. “I would say it’s the environment of my country that inspired my poem, [while] New Hampshire is more of a promise, a dream so to speak.”
Yadukha was inspired by the image of maple trees as she shaped the clay which often folded and revealed cracks that gave the appearance of tree bark.
“One of my first impulses was to pay closer attention to the trees themselves — the shape of the maple, the color and texture of its bark — the way some trees grow not in the idealized straight forms but in ways that are twisted, vivid, imperfect. Trees with character,” Yadukha said.
Comparative literature master’s student Inci Çetin GR admired the poem’s translation into pottery.
“Thinking on ‘to hug’ [in the title “To Hug a Maple Tree], I think the vases encapsulate beautifully for me the experience of being touched by all that you see, all that you live, and having those things be a central part of your story,” she said.
As an international student from Turkey, Çetin also mentioned that she can especially appreciate the experiences Msimang and Yadukha convey.
“I love that although this speaks to feelings of displacement and isolation, it is also a creation of two artists coming together with shared feelings.”
