Gabeba Baderoon grew up in the Cape Flats, a dusty, low-lying part of Cape Town, South Africa, located just behind the iconic Table Mountain. Once a seabed, she says, “this place of abandonment—featureless and unbeautiful where there is so much beauty in Cape Town,” had no appeal to South Africa’s Western colonizers. As they claimed Cape Town’s choicest areas for themselves, they forcibly rehoused many of the city’s Black populations in the Flats.

But in this overlooked area, Baderoon—an award-winning poet and associate professor of women’s gender and sexuality studies, African studies and comparative literature—found the inspiration for her latest book, a memoir in poems titled Autobiography of Sand: Relief Map of a Drifting Mind, which she will work on this academic year in Cambridge, Mass., as a Harvard-Radcliffe fellow. Based on a concussion she experienced in 2018 that for a time robbed Baderoon of her ability to write, Autobiography of Sand will explore pain and an artist’s inability to create—and also further Baderoon’s exploration of her country’s often painful history.

She grew up during apartheid—a system, she says, “that was always affirming its own structures in so many ways you didn’t realize that you’re taught to despise yourself, to despise other people, to venerate some people.” Finding a language to articulate the impact of that was not easy—and though she frequented poetry readings during her years at the University of Cape Town, Baderoon didn’t write poetry until she came to Penn State in 1999 on a graduate fellowship and took an evening poetry class in the HUB.

“You would have to produce a poem every week,” she says, “and one week, I sent one of my poems to a competition in Philly I read about in the City Paper newspaper. A few weeks later, I got a call from my mother in Cape Town saying, ‘Someone from America called to talk about a poem of yours.’”

Through her Penn State class, Baderoon says, she found a way to articulate her feelings and experiences of growing up in South Africa by writing about her family and friends and what she describes as “the small, unimportant domestic matters” of life under apartheid.

“I discovered I could write about the big topics in a way that was less heavy by focusing on the overlooked dimension of the private lives of Black people,” she says. “Around us, there was always this really violent space—in the schools, in the hospitals, on the beaches. But in the private arena, I found a kind of freedom that lent itself to a new kind of poetry.”

Baderoon’s first collection, The Dream in the Next Body, was published in 2005 and won the Daimler Chrysler Award for South African Poetry. Her most recent book, A History of Intimacy, was published in 2018 and recounts the heady days following Nelson Mandela’s release from prison in 1990.