🌀Talk Description

For most of her life, Malika Ndlovu has explored how creativity serves as both response and responsibility in the face of life-shattering experiences. In this gathering, she invites us into a conversation about grief, creativity, and the cycles of birth and loss. Through reflection and creative exercises, participants will tend to the interrelated griefs that live within our bodies — the unspoken, the cellular, the ancestral.

Malika reminds us that the earth of our bodies holds memory and that creativity, as an innate human capacity, is the soil we can turn and return to. Here, composting of old or harmful stories becomes possible, allowing new, regenerative ones to take root. Together we will explore how midwives, birthworkers, and caregivers might meet loss — their own and others’ — through creative tending, presence, and remembrance.

👤 Speaker Bio

Malika Ndlovu is a South African poet, playwright, and applied arts practitioner whose transdisciplinary work centres on heritage, identity, healing, and the medicinal power of creative (self) expression — a birth right inherent to all human beings. Her words and performances have appeared on pages and stages worldwide for over 25 years.

Author of Womb to World: A Labour of Love (2002), Invisible Earthquake: A Woman’s Journey Through Stillbirth (2009), and Griefseed (2025), Malika has long worked at the intersection of art and healing. A member of the Sp(i)eel Art Therapies Collective, she has collaborated widely across health, NGO, and university sectors, promoting creativity as a means of psychosocial support and grief integration.

Her advocacy around pregnancy-related loss has featured in The Lancet, BBC World Service, WHO campaigns, and at international conferences such as Women Deliver and the Human Rights in Childbirth Africa Summit. Through her writing, performance, and facilitation, she continues to weave creative pathways through trauma, grief, and remembrance — a lifelong labour of love.

Facebook: Malika Ndlovu
Instagram: @malikandlovu
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/malika-ndlovu-707b81a