We spent a day together in Manchester. The cloudy sky threatened rain as we walked throughout the postindustrial city, discussing mandla’s multidisciplinary practice, the collaborative energy of the local queer arts community, the potential of museums, and the realities of citizenship … or lack thereof. Mandla was born in Zimbabwe and now lives in the UK—a seemingly unending journey across continents, histories, and legalities that have shaped the infinitely complex and visceral storyteller who walked beside me. I found myself compelled to ask, “so, Manchester is home? It’s good here?” which mandla eagerly affirmed with “good for now.” Over coffee, we discussed mandla’s expansive practice, which includes poetry, scriptwriting, songwriting, and stage performance, all intertwined and individually profound.
Language has always been a preoccupation for the artist: mandla received a degree in English literature and creative writing from the University of Westminster, and has been writing since adolescence. She speaks multiple languages, including English and sleight of hand. Speaking English is more than simply learning grammatical rules and extensive vocabularies, it’s also body language and lilt. I cannot simply say, “I’m British” in my clunky American accent and be believed. I must perform British. For those who navigate the world between countries, cultures, and genders, there is an intimate understanding that performance is a critical survival skill, and mandla has mastered it. Hence, we must make room for lapses in truth and slippages of language … we all have the potential to be liars when confronting the whole of our past.
It was at the Manchester Art Gallery that we began discussing as british as a watermelon (2019), mandla’s breakout work of autofiction written for the stage and now translated to video. In this piece, shown in the 2023 Sharjah Biennial and at the Julia Stoschek Foundation, mandla demonstrates mastery of sleight of hand. The short film features the artist narrating their life, or perhaps the life of someone else, to an unseen audience. Mandla moves within a minimalist set designed to suggest the walls of a little house, or perhaps the holding cell of a prison. Watermelons litter the floor haphazardly, sometimes comically rolling along, or cradled in mandla’s arms like a baby. Dressed in an apron covered in watermelon wedges, mandla drags a knife along healed scars and asks us to bear our own.
“My memory is a long-lost appetite that’s watching, day by day, as fruit turns to mold,” mandla says in the 30-minute video.
Do you know the origins of the watermelon? How the fruit came to the UK, to the wider Western world? Can we trust mandla to tell us how mandla came to the UK, or even how mandla came to mandla? The narrator expresses their control by breaking the walls of performance to reveal what they want revealed, and to hide what needs to remain hidden. As british as a watermelon is a guttural retelling of the personal experiences of a queer immigrant child from the perspective of an adult who is figuring out how to heal. Perhaps it is a beautifully crafted narrative about faulty memory, and the inability to hold on to a singular truth. Personally, I believe the performance is about the death of a young girl named Bridget and a being called mandla who protects Bridget’s memory and plays games with her spirit.
