Oct 8, 2020
S1, E5: Desiree-Anne Martin - Busting myths about motherhood and speaking your truth
Today I’m speaking to Desiree-Anne Martin. Desiree-Anne is a published author, poet and general word junkie – her writing can be found in anthologies, online, and in the Living While Feminist collection – the piece we’ll be talking about today.
In 2018, she published a poetry collection called Believe More Deeply, and a short story called ‘Orange, White and Blue’ in the Life Righting Collective anthology, This Is How It Is, published by Jacana. That same year she published her memoir – We Don’t Talk About it. Ever – which was described as ‘searing, brutal, and breathtaking’. In July 2020 Desire won the national arts24/ Kwela Books Corona Fiction Competition, with her story of a young girl from the Cape Flats dealing with her father’s alcoholism during Lockdown called ‘Delirium’, beating out over 1200 entrants. She is hard at work on a short story anthology and her a second book.
Besides being a prolific and successful writer, she is many more things too – an addictions and general counsellor in private practice, a director of two companies, a lecturer, a postgraduate student at the University of Cape Town, a wife, full-time mother to an 11-year-old and a three-year-old, and a part-time warrior-woman. She is a recovering addict with 16 years of sobriety, dabbles in her own unpredictable mood disorder and is a vocal advocate for mental health issues as well as the destigmatization of this and other taboo issues.
In her piece in Living While Feminist, Desiree-Anne explores many of these parts of herself and her relationship to feminism. She says:
“I’ll be honest: I didn’t know what it meant to be a feminist for a long time. Not truly. It was a word I feared, influenced by those around me. However, like any words that are feared, they have power … I didn’t know I was a feminist until long after I had actually been one for a while. Because no one told me what feminism was or that I had a right to hold those sacred beliefs and ideologies.”
Indeed, Desiree-Anne’s words have power, she is a full-blown rights holder to feminism, as we all are, and it is her powerful writing and work that we’ll be exploring more of today. So welcome Desiree-Anne