Zulu love letter: drawing in and re-assembling

Watching Zulu Love Letter again in 2020, I was attentive to what the film did to me corporeally. I was curious as to what truths I would be moved to feel in my body. This is my entrée to this discussion. Does Zulu Love Letter have any resonance for the present or was it a product of a particular time whose concerns have been overtaken by issues of a rapidly changing world? Zulu Love Letter transports us to what now seems like a different time. I feel a hint of nostalgia that draws me affectively to the past. This drawing towards the past is also embodied. We feel the pain of a historic moment that is both past and ongoing. Karl Marx’s assertion that the past is not even past rings true. Me’Tau, the old woman’s searching for an explanation of her daughters’ death triggers our own searching for things and memories lost. The drawing in unsettles us affectively. Our bodies are moved and therefore interpolated into the film. We become part of the ongoing historical arc of themes probed by the film. This speaks to affects historical and temporal contours. Affects emerge in the confluence of intraand inter-generational social influences and the effects are manifested and experienced through the body. Years later, the film is able to draw us in and move us. We are moved bodily and we articulate this drawing is as a language of the body. Watching Zulu Love Letter with an embodied lens drew my attention to the sensorial as represented by its tactility. The beading, drawing, signing, gluing, and games played by Simangaliso and her grandmother, all involve active touching. The tactile character of the film draws us in. The film relies on the affect of sensoriality to reach beyond language but also to draw viewers in. The use of affect in the film enables an analysis that overcomes the shortcomings of narrowly conceived discursive and representational theorizations. The film also uses haunting and dreams to make temporal connections between time scales. This temporal uncertainty enables an epic timescale that can be read to encompass the present. I rely on assemblage thinking for my reading of Zulu Love Letter. Assemblage thinking is useful for making meaning of affect. This includes the centering of affectivity, memory, sensoriality, multi-temporality, and political effects. Haunting is one of the central genres of the film. Zim Ngqawana’s music shrieks through the film. He was a haunted artist whose music was of here and the ancestral realm. It represents madness when history is topsy-turvy and it boomerangs at unpredictable speed. Haunting relies on the memory of things past but