Shared Breath in the Tomb of the Earth: Earthly Respiratory Systems as Resistance to Racial Capitalism in Uhuru Portia Phalafala’s Epic Mine Mine Mine (2023)

Abstract

In Uhuru Portia Phalafala’s epic Mine Mine Mine (2023), the lyric subject looks the South African socio-ecological inequalities square in the eye, slices hegemonic ideologies marked by racism and colonialism apart, and regains strength in aesthetic forms of collective resistance through solidarity. Drawing on the work of Magdalena Górska, who offers a politicised understanding of embodiment through the lens of bodily, cultural and natural enactments of breath; Stacy Alaimo, who conceptualises the “proletarian lung” as a corporeal marker of intersectional identity formation and class struggle; and Phalafala’s own epistemic idea of the “matriarchive,” which centres on matrilinear patronage and women rights, I argue that the representation of breathing rhythms in Phalafala’s epic relate to the semantics of working and living in an inhumane, contaminated and racialised space (i.e., a society dominated by the mine-industry). By focussing specifically on two tropes, the lung and the womb, I show how Phalafala connects the body to the earth in a “poetics of possibility,” which intervenes in the dominant production system (i.e., racial capitalism) that continues to foster environmental and social injustices in the current South African political landscape. By simultaneously individualising the collective and collectivising the individual, the lyric subject invites the reader to join the rhythm of a shared ‘combat breathing.'