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Isis X - Poems and Photographs by South African Women (Botsotso, 2005)
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Isis X is an anthology of twelve South African women poets and three photographers. The poetry covers a wide range of themes but focuses on ideas of womanhood – more particularly, negotiating femaleness, motherhood and femininity in contemporary South Africa.
Isis is the Egyptian goddess of fertility. The ‘X’ in the title refers to a kind of ‘everywoman’ and has obvious connections to the power involved in the act of naming – neé Malcolm X. Isis is a figure of paradox; at once mother and temptress, priestess and whore. It is this paradox, this layered complexity related to ideas of woman, or even personhood, that the poets of Isis X convey with strength, poise and subtly.