Phillippa Yaa de Villiers

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Phillippa Yaa de VilliersBorn17 February 1966 (age 59) Hillbrow, Johannesburg, South AfricaNationalitySouth AfricanEducationRhodes University; University of the Witwatersrand; Lecoq International School of Theatre; Lancaster UniversityOccupation(s)Poet, performance artistNotable workThe Everyday Wife (2010) Phillippa Yaa de Villiers (born 17 February 1966) is a South African writer and performance artist who performs her work nationally and internationally. She is noted for her poetry, which has been published in collections and in many magazines and anthologies, as well as for her autobiographical one-woman show, Original Skin, which centres on her confusion about her identity at a young age, as the biracial daughter of an Australian mother and a Ghanaian father who was adopted and raised by a white family in apartheid South Africa. Quotes "I became Phillippa Yaa when I found my biological father, who told me that if he had been there when I was born, the first name I'd have been given would be a day name like all Ghanaian babies, and all Thursday girls are Yaa, Yawo, or Yaya. So by changing my name I intended to inscribe a feeling of belonging and also one of pride on my African side." "After growing up black in white South Africa, internalising so many negative 'truths' of what black people are like, I needed to reclaim my humanity and myself from the toxic dance of objectification." "Thoughts behind Indegenius: concept for the 29th", Pulse, 8 November 2014. Retrieved 4 April 2025. "Because I wasn't told that I was adopted until I was twenty, I lacked a vocabulary to describe who I am and where I come from, so performing and writing became ways to make myself up." MarLa Sink Druzgal, "Around the World with the Poetry of Phillippa Yaa de Villiers", Traveling Marla. Retrieved 4 April 2025. "I started writing poetry when I was a child, my first published poem was when I was 11. I was brought up in a home that loved poetry and literature, especially the English language. But it was only when I was older that I realised that writing is so much more than words playing on a page. "Writing contains the writer, their concerns, their social context and their history. My own history became a block to my creativity as I started to explore my identity as a black woman adopted by a white family in apartheid South Africa." "I felt like the colonised and the coloniser were fighting each other inside my brain. Writing continued to be important to me but I was convinced that it was simply a therapeutic process, of no value to anyone else." A Woman in Science | "Center for the Advanced Study of Human Paleobiology | the George Washington University". Retrieved 4 April 2025. "As a mixed-race African and adoptee I feel, paradoxically, oppressed and completely free....My adult life has been largely devoted to healing this rift. The freedom of my paradoxical position, is in fact that I don't have the constraints of a traditional role and I have access to the world." Crossing Borders", Issue 3, 2006. Retrieved 4 April 2025. External links Category:1966 births Category:Women authors from South Africa Category:Poets from South Africa Category:Playwrights from South Africa Category:Artists from South Africa Category:Women artists Category:Women born in the 1960s Category:Living people