Snaps For..? Boipelo Maetla

Healing Starts at The Beginning

Heart, fold yourself. Coil yourself into a ball of nothing and hide yourself. When they are tired of pulling you apart, I will follow the blood trails you have left behind and I will rescue you. Heart, erase all the names I have introduced you to. They have unveiled their true colors and none of them resemble my favorite shade. Maybe I should start liking different shades, but if that means I'm to falter into minute splinters of my past, heart, I would rather have you and I be colour blind. Heart, break yourself. Dissolve into an attack that make the people have their backs to me, worry about me. Heart, you and I will never be in sync if we do not go through thus healing. The tears in my eyes are your audience, put on a show! Break so loudly that my suppressed whimpers feel compensated.. My voice is torn so that you do not feel alone, so you have an idea of what your reflection should look like. Heart! I hope you never take for granted the strength it took to gather our cheap smiles into a support group and call them laughter. Heart, we are mourning rejection Tonight because we rejected ourselves first.

Boipelo Maetla is a public speaker, educator, debater, author, free-lance columnist and all round creative. Recently, she came in the top three of the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation speech contest which awarded her the privilege to share the stage with deputy president Cyril Ramaphosa, struggle icon Ahmed Kathrada and Business Day editor, Songezo Zibi. She is a contributor for internationally based women and girl child empowerment company, Global Girl Media and a former volunteer for the National Youth Development Agency (NYDA).

Boipelo Maetla is a published author, having been the youngest of the writers featured in the short story anthology by South African publishing house Black Letter Media, titled My Holiday Shorts (myholidayshorts.com). With the belief that solidarity for global cohesion is a social responsibility, the 18-year-old is also an on-call poet for the NGO, Palestinian Solidarity Alliance (PSA), a platform that managed to help her learn from and share dialogues and stages with Gauteng premier, David Makhura and Road and Transport minister Ismail Vadi amongst others.

“I always advocate for the empowerment of the universe through literature. Literacy is the first form of liberation. I also believe that creativity exists in all forms and in every context and is an underrated agent of social change”- Boipelo.

As a poet, Boipelo has graced various stages, including Solidarity for Women of Palestine, Sandton Poetry Show and Poets in Offices under the pseudonym, Ben Jackson