It's just, I would say, faith. I had very clear visions of me being a champion. When I saw this picture of Reg Park on a cover, standing there like - as Hercules, from the Hercules movies, I looked at that, and then I looked at the inside and I read the story, and I immediately started creating visions of me standing there on the pedestal at the Mr. Universe contest and me being Hercules and me doing movies and so on. And that created such unbelievable drive and such unbelievable will and discipline, that there was absolutely no stopping me. I mean, I went to the gym two hours every day lifting weights. When I came home afterwards, I lifted an extra hour and a half and did bodybuilding training, and it was just relentless.

It comes out of an intuition, or a learned intuition, I guess. You study a long time ’til you can do it. But it’s from looking around you, it’s from understanding what’s happening in the culture, what’s happening in the world.

I do, but I never force it out of myself. I’m kind of trying to explore writing as a practice, so you know, I journal every day, I try and do kind of something for the art every day whether that’s reading or watching film or practicing guitar… It kind of ebbs and flows, but I do try and do something creative every day. When it comes to writing poetry or songs, I really have to have an idea or have that desire to get something down. I feel like the best art comes from a sense of necessity and urgency, like I can’t help but talk about this. I can only be in that creative space when I really want to and when internally it feels right.

Well, you’re right, I think the hard work definitely paid off. My grandmother drove me three hours to dance and three hours back from age six to age 11. I would do my school work in the car on the way there and then get home at like 11 o’clock at night, five days a week for many years. My training was seriously intense, and nothing came easy. I worked for everything I’ve ever been given.

I don’t think I could. Of course I’m saying this on American soil. I’m facing a few more months of work in this city, but at the end of it, I will be returning to South Africa. I would like to believe that if for some reason the situation deteriorated to the point where I was told, “If you leave South Africa, you can never come back,” I’d stay there. There were periods in my life when I could have been seduced away. I am incredibly fortunate that the government took away my passport at the point when I was most open to seduction. With my passport gone, I could have left on a one-way ticket. But the issue was so starkly highlighted that I had no problem in saying, “No.”

That is true. That one little corner of South Africa, Port Elizabeth and its immediate surroundings, is a region that I know like the back of the hand that holds my pen as I write about it. I can stand on a street corner in Port Elizabeth, look at anybody and put together some sort of biography. I know where they come from, where they’re going. I have a feel of the textures of their life. If I stand on a street corner in New Haven, which is a place I’ve gotten to know as well as any place outside of South Africa, I am still at a total loss to identify the people passing me on that street.