Parse Journal (Jun 2024)
In Reverie: Two Love Letters to Vinah
Abstract
This text stages an expansion of further possibilities for Vinah, one of the characters in the video essay/essay film Reverie made by Nobunye Levin and Palesa Shongwe, through drawing on the structure of the film and the performance talk that accompanied its screening. In Reverie, the character of Vinah is mobilised in a critical engagement with Lionel Rogosin’s film Come Back Africa (1959), in which she first appears. Vinah is cited as an example of the gendered nature of waiting and cast as a character that is deployed to examine the tensions and possibilities between dreaming and freedom among a cast of other women, including the makers of Reverie. In the film, the makers explore the concept and state of reverie as a political tool for “emancipatory dreams” and dreaming—a tool of political action to ward off the inertia of despair—in relation to this cast of women, including Vinah. This text further contemplates Vinah’s role in Come Back Africa towards imagining a further set of possibilities for what she might dream of and how this might exemplify freedom for her. This is offered in the form of two love letters to Vinah in which the makers directly address her in their reflections and further imagining through reverie.
