She is beautiful
But she doesn’t know it or maybe
She chooses to hide her beauty
In the exterior of her hard face …
So, okay she has a hard face
And the thing is she hides her softness
In the moments that she tries not to smile
Her softness is gently imprinted
Like a soft kiss in all the faces
She has captured with her eyes
I tell you
She gives you pieces of herself
Behind the lens with every snapshot, click, still frame moment that she captures
She tells you her story
No-body looks at her carefully captured like the photos she has taken…
no-body looks at her without her name
I have looked at her without the weight of her name
Without the things she stands for
I realised that she is beautiful
With every hour she blinks approximately 1200 times
and in that time she tells you her story
Not the one that everybody knows
She tells a story of a love loss
A mother who left too soon
To see the life she built for her daughter
A mother who left too soon to see
Her daughter’s identity
Her daughter’s success
She left too soon
But she can see the legacy her daughter is making with a name she gave to her
See can see her but can’t tell her
How she feels
This is just one of the stories
These stories are a part of het beauty
When I look at you
I see that your dreadlocks hold
The memories of these streets you have travelled with every curl
You have a twist to the stories
You want to create
And they have become the construction of your being
Your mind tells us the measurement of a world
We see through your eyes
Because you see beauty in strength
The strength of women that love women,
men that love men,
women hidden in men, men hidden in women
You see their beauty and you allow them to stand beautifully
constructed in their own eyes
I know that when I look at you
I see beauty because I see
That you see beyond the socially constructed idea of beauty
and that makes these portraits beautiful… Zanele,
that makes you beautiful.

© Andiswa Dlamini
3/12/2014

A tribute to Faces and Phases.

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2014 Jan.2: Look at me