Unlearning “Clean” — Finding Myself in the Mess of Healing

I grew up learning to make myself smaller — quieter, neater, easier to understand.

Preparing for my conversation with Anele Siswana, I realised how much of my own story was about unlearning that.

Anele calls his work “Dirty Work as Sacred Work,” and it made me think about how often we associate cleanliness with worthiness — how we hide the parts of ourselves that feel too African, too spiritual, too mystical for polite company.

But maybe healing doesn’t happen in the neat spaces. Maybe it happens in the messy, in-between ones — where our ancestors sit beside our therapists, and where our dreams become data.

I think of my grandmother, of the ways she prayed and spoke to the earth. Those practices were never written in books, but they were lessons in resilience, in meaning, in connection.

“They had certain practices that I was lucky enough to interact with, but the older I get, the more I yearn for that, because there are teachings you can’t learn in a book.”

Healing, then, is not about purity. It’s about remembering. It’s about doing the dirty work of reclaiming what was stripped from us.

Unlearning clean is how I am learning to come home.

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