013 · Dream
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In my dreams, I am rarely alone.
There is a woman who takes many forms. Sometimes she is a variation of my mother. Sometimes she is a woman I have never met. Sometimes she is Karabo Mokoena.1
Karabo Mokoena was a 22-year-old South African woman murdered by her boyfriend in 2017. The case shocked the country. Her image circulated across news media for weeks and lodged itself in my subconscious. Over time, it became something else. Not Karabo herself, but an image of South Africa I could not resolve. A figure of innocence and violence. Beauty and dread. Home and estrangement. My subconscious took the photograph and altered it until it became less a person than a symbol. A simulacrum. A private, unstable image through which love, fear, memory, grief, and accusation continued to flow.↩