In Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler’s seminal work, the protagonist Lauren Olamina receives an internal edict that grants her both a framework for survival and a sense of purpose: “All that you touch, You Change. All that you Change, Changes you. The only lasting truth is Change. God is Change.” The novel, set in a near-future, post-apocalyptic America unravelled by ecological collapse and social breakdown (so, more like now-future), explores the fractured terrain of community and resilience in the face of disintegration — this awareness of change as both inevitable and generative is what carries Lauren forward. 

I’m thinking of Octavia, and her depiction of Lauren, as I piece together my conversation with Haneem Christian. Lauren’s understanding of change forms part Earthseed; a philosophical construct that Octavia uses as a literary device, to insist that survival is only possible through reimagining belief and orchestrating destiny in commonality with others. Haneem, I think, is doing something similar. Change informs how Haneem’s work re-orientates themselves within the historiographical and spiritual roots of Cape Town; that things have changed, and will change, and archiving these tides is the call of certain people, from each generation.  

To divine a philosophy and an archive, as Haneem does through their work, requires an eye attuned to see — truly see — and to witness. This psychic and skillful means is so embodied by Haneem, that one of their projects is literally titled, ‘Eyes To See.’ The act of seeing gathers into a seed, from which a praxis and politics of care can take root and grow. This notion, that care is a resource, means that we each have a collective to uphold the way we care and what we create. If you look closely, Haneem praxis and care is granting us their wisdom tree.

In our conversation, I ask Haneem where they might situate their practice as an artist; “In the past three years, I’ve really been nurtured by grief. Our eldest brother died, as well as all of our grandparents” they reflect, “It made me rethink everything — about life, about creativity, about my spiritual inheritance. My brother was one of the most creative people I’ve ever known, and my grandfather, who had his own journey with mental illness, was also almost possessed by creativity. He photographed every single day in Kalk Bay, capturing fishermen and boats. He was so misunderstood. I grew up completely surrounded by creativity.” 

Grief, as we both agree whilst talking, is an immense initiation; loss and death birth new forms of becoming, and for Haneem, it has been the recognition that creativity itself is their inheritance — passed through family histories of both brilliance and struggle.

This awareness deepened through Haneem’s politicisation during South Africa’s decolonial student movements, in which erasure and visibility came to upturn the rainbow nation haze – that democratic promise which opiated our political consciousness, as the so-called ‘born-free generation’ still grappling with the systemic inheritances of apartheid and colonialism. “During #FeesMustFall, I remember the trans collective disrupting one of UCT’s supporting-the-movement events. I thought: nobody is going to document or archive this moment with an honest eye. So much of the storytelling at the time was coming from men — regardless of their intersections — and it was erasing the work of the trans collective and black women. That moment really stuck with me and pushed me to think about my role as someone who could be on course with an honest eye.” 

‘Ha da ge a (we are here) with Lucy Campbell’, Photographed by Haneem Christian

This honest eye threads through Haneem’s artistic and archival work. For them, their practice is inseparable from radical reimagining; “My thesis idea was that the only way we can make real change is if everything burns down and we start from zero. My lecturer told me that was inciting violence, that I couldn’t write about that.” Destruction is a necessary part of life, and one of the greatest paradoxes of Western imperial society is that we inhabit a culture that is, in essence, a death cult — and yet we remain terrified of death. The very notion of radical dismantling equates to death in the eyes of those invested in power’s continuity.

Incubated by grief and drawn to fertile beginnings, I ask Haneem about the seeming inseparability of their spiritual and political practices to which they share “My spiritual and political understandings of myself are completely intertwined. For me, reconnecting with my ancestors is both a spiritual and political act. As a so-called coloured person, our identity has been dissected, and we’ve been removed from our ancestors and stripped of land. That means our spiritual practice has very little ground to stand on. So my work is about reclaiming that inheritance, and why I now call myself an archivist over an artist or filmmaker. What I’m really trying to do is to archive.”

Haneem’s work is rooted in the histories and presences of Queer, Black, and Indigenous liberation in Cape Town, and most deeply, the Cape Flats. The Flats, as a landscape, is a scarred but beautiful archive — layered with histories of displacement and survival, peppered by the stubborn flora of fynbos and the salt-stung winds of the coast; reminders that resilience takes many forms. “I feel haunted by the saying, ‘We’ve always been here.’  I always ask: who is the ‘we’? Where is the ‘here’? Especially on the African continent, those questions matter. Naming and locating things is powerful. As a queer, so-called coloured person from the Cape Flats, naming gives us a place to plant our roots,” and that’s “why my first film was about locating the ‘we’ and the ‘you’ on this continent — starting with the indigenous Khoi people, who had a three-gender language system. We have always lived this way. Film became my way to make those histories accessible, because people at complex intersections often don’t have access to literature that speaks to us.”

This practice of naming and locating becomes, for Haneem, a politics of home-making in a place historically designed to unhouse. They draw strength from thinkers like historian Lucy Campbell — to whom their film “Rituals of Resistance” is a homage — who once told them that people of mixed and diverse heritages, systematically severed from their roots, often struggled to find their home. “That really landed for me,” Haneem recalls. “Locating ourselves in history is one way to find home.” 

Through their archives Haneem is re-inscribing presence — planting roots where erasure once took hold, and insisting that belonging is an inheritance and a practice of equal honour.

Malume – Thandi Gula, Photographed by Haneem Christian

For Haneem, inheritance is  a matter of responsibility. “I’ve reframed my idea of inheritance. We usually think of it in material terms, but I’ve come to think of it as spiritual. My mentor described photography as part of my visual inheritance, and I love that. My body of work, ‘Kewpie Se Kind’, came from that place – thinking about people in history, like a gender-diverse person who decided their life was worth occupying space for, and so they did. That’s the kind of inheritance I claim.” Kewpie is, herself, an iconic — a drag artist and hairdresser who lived in District Six in the 1950s and 1960s, and documenting her own life and community at a time when queer lives were totally marginalised and erased. Kewpie’s images are records of joy and belonging as ever-present, and her archive has since become a vital record of queer existence under apartheid; she now stands as a patron figure for queer people in Cape Town today.

Photography and film are Haneem’s offering, with their preference for medium-format film, they embrace the discipline of slowness. “The research before I even pick up my camera takes months… I mainly shoot medium-format film, which only gives me ten frames per roll. That forces me to sit with myself: what am I trying to say in this photo? I’ll spend 15 minutes finding a single frame – I don’t care! I want a moment that will live on forever, beyond me.” Haneem’s work attends to a gesture of care that carries the weight of the eternal, and this ethic of care extends into the politics of representation. 

“My constant question is: what is my duty in subverting the power dynamic? What makes me different from a white man photographing the same subject? For me, it’s about responsibility, and asking why does this person want to be photographed? Why do they want to share themselves and live on forever through an image? My art is about translating that.” Translation, in Haneem’s hands, is the space in which sound and movement could carry what the still frame could not. “I always joke that my brother (the equally and extraordinarily gifted artist, Imraan Christian) bullied me into filmmaking. From the start, he was like, ‘You have the eye, you’re better than me, do it.’… But eventually, I reached a point in photography where still images couldn’t hold everything me and the people I was researching with wanted to say. The craft, the archive, needed more from me. My brother and my partner – my two biggest bullies – pushed me. My films really are just my stills in motion, with sound meeting the image. That was the natural extension of archiving.” 

Haneem resists easy categorisation, and though they “don’t think of myself as chasing an aesthetic or actually don’t call myself a filmmaker because I respect the technicalities of the craft too much,” their work occupies a specific mood, which can only be a direct reflection of Haneem’s own essence. I think this often defines an artist from having a unique point of view to having a transcendent one; how much of their innate essence can they capture, when reflecting work that has little to do with them? How can one be universal and personal, all at once? That is mastery. 

This ethic is most alive in their recent body of work, which centres the lives of Black queer elders as embodied archives. It is a chapter in a broader ancestral story that Haneem has been called to write. 

‘The Girls at the Klopse – Chenal le Cap, Emogan Moore, BB Vahlour’, photographed by Haneem Christian

When I ask Haneem about how their international and local success has felt; they explain that “I don’t measure myself by accomplishments, but by my most recent body of work… I had moments where I thought: I’m actually doing what I set out to do. Sitting with Aunty Yvette, with Lucy Campbell, with Theresa Raisenberg — lamming in their houses, drinking tea — I felt like, if I died now, I’d done what I came to do. That’s the kind of arrival I believe in.”

“Being with those elders, or working alongside them is entering a dialogue that is its own kind of creative ancestry. That, to me, matters more than earthly acknowledgements or accolades. It’s what makes me feel at home in my practice.”

Locally, and within the fraught realities of the Cape Flats so often reduced to headlines about gang violence, Haneem insists on nuance. “The Cape Flats are described as the most dangerous places, and yes, they are — but let’s not homogenise them. I’m from Grassy Park, and I can’t just walk into Elsies River unless I’m with my sisters who are from there, and we’re having the best time! That’s what I want to trace in my work: that we create full and abundant lives as Black queer people, wherever we are.” In this way, Haneem’s commitment to relationships and archiving have the ability of dissolution against borders imposed by the consequences of apartheid’s spatial design. 

I usually conclude these conversations with something open-ended, or with a gentle nudge for advice toward our younger community members. Instead, I ask Haneem what their truth is now, to which they muse that they might have to come back to me…I know, it is a vast, impossible question, but I feel its weight hang between us, as Haneem’s work is some of the most truthful I have seen. They relent to my question, sharing: “So, my brother died at the exact time my career began growing internationally. He was 33; I’m 30 now. That was the loudest reality check. It taught me that nothing fucking matters except who you are in this moment, and the truth you choose to live, and that truth can change. I think staying true to that is why my career has been slower than others, but I’m grateful. Grief has given me perspective on time, on reality, on what’s real and what isn’t.”

“My brother’s death was my initiation into my spiritual journey, but also into my humanness. The truth is, there is no truth.” In this refusal to be dazzled by recognition, what shines instead is Haneem’s luminous truth of being alive in the now, as a living expression of their ancestral inheritance.

As a professional and artistic pathway, this is the deepest of journeys.  

Written by Holly Beaton

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