Obs books is one of my favourite places in Cape Town. It's shelves are full to the brim with books, a large swath of which are intensely local and queer.
The walls are adorned with artwork that you can buy and the vibes are distinctly Obs.
However on this particular Sunday the back of the store is the focal point of the place.
You walk through a rainbow streamers that cover the entrance and find yourself in a room full to bursting. People fill the benches, sat six to a table made for four at best, they lean against shelves stuffed with slim, well curated zines and novellas.
They're all here for a poetry collective curated by Alice Sholto-Douglas called Sour Fig Poetry.
She’s been doing it for almost a year now, with several events under her belt and a small but wonderful community springing up from her idea.
We sat down with her to see how this all began and where it's going.
So how did it all start?
“It was really fun. What happened was I was 18 and in Paris and I had gotten in with this crowd of really cool people at NYU. One of them was a poet and so he took me to this space called Au Chat Noir, very fancy. You went under the floorboards and you got your wine and you listened to spoken word poetry.”
“In Paris the flavour of spoken word poetry felt quite different to what I had encountered before and I really enjoyed it.”
“I had a good time, and I think I just sort of started to crave those kinds of spaces.”
“I do feel that a lot of poetry in different parts of the world can be quite manicured in a way. Like people are very conscious of themselves, they're not super free and frisky and wild, people take themselves very seriously.”
“And those weren't quite as fun for me. I also think it's quite scary to share poetry in spaces where you feel like people are going to be judging you.”
“When I was back in Cape Town I was thinking more along the lines of are there spaces for poetry where you can let your freak flag fly and be whoever you are and not feel like you're having to perform as much.”
“There's more space to use poetry as a kind of medium for self expression or something more political or something more subversive or whatever and less like strictly needing to be a perfect art form.”
Would you say the queer aspect is super instrumental to this?
“I think in my mind I was trying to do something that was not necessarily purely queer, but I am queer and I felt like I wanted it to be a queer space and also do feel like those spaces are valuable.”
“I think it's definitely not exclusively for queer people, anyone can come.”
“I do think I'm trying to do something where I kind of prioritize and foreground voices that you wouldn't necessarily encounter at other poetry events because they're not foregrounding those people.”
“Which is not necessarily a bad thing, it's just a different space, so it's nice to have our space where we can do that and foreground those things.”
“I would hope that we could do more social and fulfilling, enjoyable activities that are also political in some way and I think people are figuring that out quite a lot at the moment.”
“Especially because at any Palestine event I've attended, besides actual protests, they’ve been so full of art and culture and these beautiful, rich discussions with people.”
“It's really meaningful stuff happening through connection but it's also enjoyable, even though it's contending with something that's really traumatic, terrifying, scary and upsetting.”
“So I feel like there's a kind of duality that these events can hold which people shy away from, I think, a lot of the time and I wish they didn't. Because I think it's actually the best way to get that kind of community.”
“I do feel like you find a lot of good people in the kind of shadows of those places, they're not necessarily front and center and so it's nice to find those people and bring them together to each other in a place where they can all feel accepted and included and not inferior in some way.”
Looking at the Zine it feels very polished, it's got its own typeface and good quality paper. Will Sour Fig Ever Expand into something more multimedia?
“Oh that's so kind but I have to confess, I stole the whole thing from my friends in Paris, a small poetry collective called the Belleville Park Pages. They made these pages and sold them all around the UK, just to try and get poetry in print in an accessible way again and to get contemporary poetry read again, so the whole formatting of it is lifted from them.”
“I feel like in the typefacing I did change a few things but the folding and all that is stolen entirely from them.”
“I do admire those things because I think it's tricky to do. I don't think people tend to go into book shops and buy a poetry book like they would have in the past, you know?”
“They have a different relationship to this kind of literature and I love New Contrast and what they do for a certain reason. They've got a nice collection of people and they have an event associated with the publication, so I feel like you can kind of get the best of both worlds and both angles on it and they get their stuff out there in a very accessible way.”
“And it's accessible to people who want to get their poems out there as well, which is kind of cool.”
The paper quality, and even the illustrations are so good.
”The illustrations are fun because I get different people to do them.”
“I get random different friends to draw them for me - the last one's pomegranate was my friend Izzy, she's amazing.”
“The night before I was like “Hey, can you please draw me a pomegranate?”
“She went ‘Sure’ and the next morning sent it over and it was this perfect thing, she's brilliant.”
“I've had other people draw things for me in the past, everyone’s been kind about it.”
That's a cool motif actually, I love that it's a new person every time.
“I was thinking about it, it's coming up on a year now since the first one and I was thinking of doing a compilation of all the Zines, all of the poems and bringing them together in a more official document of some kind, like a small magazine.”
“I don't know yet, but something to include more illustrations or more art, it's a baby idea at the moment but it'll grow, hopefully.”
How did you source the poets? Because I feel like you have such a distinct clique of people that do it.
“Honestly I wish I knew it myself, how such a great group of people came together. I don't know what I did.”
“People keep trying to give me the credit for it and I feel hesitant to take the credit because I don't really know, I think just the right people showed up for this thing and it's created a really good crowd, a good group.”
“Although I've been in the english department at UCT for a while - I did my masters there and just kind of never left, because I continued tutoring and I took up an admin role in the department. So I know a lot of people through that, even my students who've come and participated and performed poems, which is really cool.”
“I think I was hoping when I made the instagram that I was going to convey the kind of space that it was going to be, and hoping that that attracted the right crowd and I think it did.”
“I feel like I've met such amazing people through doing this but I didn't find them myself, they came to the right place I think. And they made it.”
“It wouldn't be what it is without these people. They're very cool people,and so kind to each other, just good people.”
“I think that kindness is kind of the secret.”
So who would you say is adding to it?
“Honestly, everyone. Anyone who comes regularly. Because there are regular people that come. There are people who perform often, people who regularly submit poems.”
“I mean, they're nourishing the whole thing, they're keeping it going and they set the whole tone of it. They make the whole flavor of the night or the day when they're performing.”
“Because sometimes it tonally shifts from topic to topic and some of them are heavier poems And then the occasional humorous one in there to punctuate it,while others are more generally humorous. And then you'll have a couple of sadder poems peppered in on a different day so it's a completely different experience every time, a different feel.”
And especially with the theme - the theme doesn't necessarily set the tone.
“I'm always surprised, actually, where people take the theme, because - I think I said this explicitly when I advertise - but I try to explicitly say take this and run with it.”
“It doesn't mean anything, I'm not looking for a particular thing.”
“I'm just giving you a theme and hoping you do something wild within that constraint if it is even a kind of constraint. I don't want people to be hemmed in by it. That's not the goal at all.”
Is there a selection process with the poems? Like, is there anything in particular that you look for?
“I kind of vet them, which goes...Weirdly, sometimes.”
“What I'm conscious of is making people feel uncomfortable or allowing someone to come up and perform a poem that doesn't protect the sanctity of the space in some way.”
“That's mostly the reason that I want submissions first which also obviously allows me to do the pages so I have them all and then I can just kind of put them all together.”
“But I tend not to reject people unless there's something that feels to me like it just doesn't belong in that space.”
“Because it's offensive or because it's… I don't know if there's something about it.”
“But to be honest, I have missed this, sometimes there have been times where something has made it in and I've had a moment where I'm like, ooh, I don't know if I If I read that tonally in the way that It was intended.”
“And I sometimes misread the poems, which also can be quite fun because I'll read a poem and then I hear someone else perform it and when they perform it, it's so different sometimes.”
“It's incredible.”
“Which also goes to show me something - I've had such weird moments around, like, how am I reading poems?”
“I'm far from objective in how I approach these things but it is cool to see how when people carry their own poem, it comes through with a different kind of intention.”
“You can really feel the intention.”
“So it's cool but, yeah, sometimes it's run me into a bit of an “Uh-oh, kind of wish that wasn't in there.” situation.”
“Yeah, there have been poems where I've thought, like, oh, this might be tongue-in-cheek and then it's not and then I'm like, “oh shit, it's serious, oh, there's a layer of irony that I generously injected into this thing, whoops.”
“They take on a different form when someone reads them, They come to life in a different way. it's the cool part about it.”
Is there anywhere you wanted to see Sour Fig go?
“Honestly I haven't even imagined it, I haven't thought about it - it's one of those things where I made it and it just kind of happened.”
“I feel like it just kind of came together. I feel quite lucky.”
“So maybe I've become a bit complacent in the sense that I'm not thinking of ways to expand it, but I also don't know if that necessarily has to happen.”
“I kind of like it the way it is, I think if it were to organically evolve into something else, so be it you know, I'd roll with the punches.”
“Obviously, I have some role in kind of doctoring it and curating it in some way but I'm kind of open to see what form it takes because I don't feel like I'm necessarily the only one making it.”
“I feel like other people are collaborating to make it. I’m more curious than sure of where I'm going.”
Where do you think the cultural scene in Cape Town is going?
“Oh, that's a good question, I worry about speaking about this because I don't know if I have great authority on this, I feel like I'm just a random person floating around and just sort of encountering things as I encounter them.”
“Like I'm not as plugged in I would say, I just kind of go where the dopamine takes me or where someone’s like ‘Come to this event and lets go here.’”
“I do think about literature in particular, I do feel like boomers or people from that generation tend to be quite skeptical about our generation when it comes to enjoying reading, which I find kind of ironic because I feel like we do more reading just not in the way that they have done it before.”
“So I do think the landscape for literature itself is changing in major ways, people read differently now, people read a whole book on their phone, you know what I mean?”
“The way we encounter a book is very different. I don't know, I think certain things, like Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, you can't read on a phone because you have to flip back and forth right, so there's a kind of like physicality to it which is being replaced by scrolling and I don't know what that is but there's something else going on.”
“There's a different kind of physicality to the process and so I don't know. I think that live events are taking on a different quality now, because you get to engage with these words in a way that's different to the way you generally would on a phone.”
“Even the publishing scene is becoming quite trippy because people can establish themselves as a writer before they've even been picked up by a publisher just by putting it out on the internet.”
“There's a kind of democratization but then that also comes with a bunch of weird things going on, right? Like some people get such a voice and you're like ‘Why? Why does this person have such a voice?’”
“I think we’re (Queer people) good at doing things, like we're good at doing events, people are always bringing stuff together.”
“But I do feel like in queer spaces there's becoming more and more of a space where there's kind of crafty things or just hanging out or just reading poems or whatever.”
“It used to be more of the party scene and stuff exclusively and I think diversifying that would be really good for a lot of people especially, like, the neuro-spicy people.”
“They want a space that's less, you know, overstimulating and scary sometimes.”
“So I think it would be nice to see more of that, more of that diversification of the kinds of ways that we can build community with each other.”
The longer I spent at the event, perched on a barstool amongst the dense group of poets and listeners, I started to notice something.
A poet would walk to the front of the room, they’d nervously approach the mic, begin reading and they’d melt into the poem, losing any sense of discomfort.
The whole room would be absolutely enveloped into the poem, we’d be drawn into the words completely.
Some of the poems were humorous, others had wonderful wordplay and a near tangible mouthfeel as the poem read them aloud, there was even an outright tongue in cheek manifesto at the end.
All of which elicited an emotional response from the room.
Art that leaves you with this kind of feeling is basically lightning in a bottle and the fact that it kept happening, poem after poem as I sat there is incredible.
If any of what I just described is even slightly compelling, be certain to follow Sour Fig on Instagram to keep up with their events and their lively cast of poets and make sure to be at the next event they host.
