The International Student Community, Being an Artist from the Diaspora, and our Love of SLC with Sifiso Mabena
Rhiddi Kuthiala ’25 and Lucie Barsali-Dradem ’25
Artwork courtesy of Ysabella Beatriz Chiongbian Punzalan ‘24
If you’re an international student, you probably know Sifiso Mabena for sending out emails checking on our mental health, and letting us know about upcoming events her office organizes. If you see her on campus, she will never ‘Sarah Lawrence’ you. She will always say "Hello", check up on you, and—at least in my case—attempt to speak a few French sentences to greet you.
Being an international student, it can be hard to find the right resources. But Mabena, Nicole Mirando and Todd Pettiford are doing their best to support the international student community. Mabena graduated from Sarah Lawrence in 2018, and was a professor in the Theater Department from 2019 to 2022. She is now the Interim Director of International Student Advising and Belonging. Alongside her colleagues, Mabena is in charge of taking care of Sarah Lawrence’s international community.
We met her on a sunny Monday morning, in Barb’s reading room. Mabena, introduced herself as “a New York based artist and educator, originally from Zimbabwe.” She spent her childhood there, and moved to Botswana with her family at 14. She then went to high school in South Africa, did university there, and started her career there. After a few years as the head of drama at an international school, she decided to leave South Africa to go to the United States, “I really felt strongly, for my professional development and also for my personal development as an artist, that I wanted to come to grad school and develop in that way. I’ve always wanted to be an educator and an artist at the same time. So it felt like a good step.”
Mabena's experience at Sarah Lawrence really is a central part of her life. “I’ll never forget running down the corridor and the deputy headmistress, my boss, stopping me asking, what is happening?” Mabena laughed when talking about the evening she got her acceptance letter as a student in SLC. Initially, she wanted to apply for the writing program. “I had notions of being a poet.” But she realized it wasn’t the ideal career path for her when she did not receive the feedback she had hoped for from a writing coach (the coach asked her, “These are the poems you have? Do you have anything else?”) But Mabena didn’t abandon the idea of furthering her studies completely. She was still attracted to the “uniqueness” of the education at SLC, and found the theater department, “It [was] like all of the things that I am passionate about. It just was so aligned.” She’s always wanted her art to be “in service for something,” so the civic engagement part of the department attracted her strongly, “I’ve never wanted to make art for art’s sake.” At Sarah Lawrence, Mabena could continue to teach, develop as an educator, and grow as an artist.
She was still a teacher at the international school when she received her acceptance letter. She was working from her classroom one evening. When she met her boss in the corridor, she answered, “It’s just a joyous evening!” A really big part of her coming was the scholarship, “I truly don’t know that I would’ve come. I drained everything that I had to come here. Maybe unwisely,” she laughs. She adds, “But I don't regret it.”
Coming to the US was not all fun and games, to say the least. Being an international student definitely has its share of stressful and scary situations, especially with the US administration. When asked about her worst memory from her times as a student here, she recalls the time, in her 2nd year, when she needed to have her passport renewed. Mabena gathered the required documents, traveled to the Zimbabwean embassy in DC to have her file stamped, and then was told to "mail [the package] through DHL." Cultural confusion worked its magic here, and Mabena assumed that the officer at the embassy meant any courier service, not specifically DHL–like how people from the diaspora use Colgate when they just mean dentifrice. Mabena’s package was misplaced by USPS and she had to restart the whole process. "It was a whole drama.”
But like any artist, Mabena was able to channel this and the many other traumatic experiences that come with immigration into her art.. She recalls a time when as part of the theater program, she did a site-specific performance, bringing her cohort in the process of an Immigrations and Customs line. She transformed the traumatic memories of harsh treatment by US immigration officers, at the border, into a game, “It was fun to bully them a little bit.”
One issue that International Students often face is finding people who understand their experiences. Mabena was able to use her art to make her friends and classmates understand a formative, and distressing, part of her journey as a student, which is so Sarah Lawrence. However, in the middle of this cross-cultural chaos, Mabena made happier memories. Her first Christmas in the US comes to her mind. She was unable to go back home; and Christine Farrell, a faculty member at the SLC Theatre Department offered up her home for all the international students that could not go home. Mabena remembers getting lost, alongside her friend Gustavo, while on her way to Christine's house. “[Christine] ended up getting an Uber for us to arrive. And it was amazing. The food was great, we sang, we laughed, we told stories, we played games. It just felt really special.”
After graduating in 2018, Mabena did some work with student affairs, and in 2019 came back to Sarah Lawrence as a faculty member in the theater program. She worked there until 2022. Her favorite classes to teach were her “Actor’s Workshop” and her lecture “Home as a Metaphor for Survival: Theatre in the African Diaspora.”
The first one was her favorite because of the different perspectives she gave on acting to her students. She explains that unlike Western traditions of acting, which work from the inside out, with a lot of internal work on understanding the psychology of a character; some non-western traditions start from the outside in. These traditions entail a lot of physical work, a body-based practice, which is something totally new for western students, “I’m obsessed with seeing light bulbs go off when people understand that being centered and being grounded, focused, elevates your performance tenfolds,” she describes.
“Theatre in the African Diaspora” was a great opportunity for her to teach students about plays from writers that they perhaps would not have encountered otherwise. She put plays that were meaningful to her in the syllabus, notably some by her mentor Andrew Buckland, a White African artist who used theater as a means to protest apartheid in South Africa. They actually sat randomly next to each other on a flight to South Africa once, and were able to discuss protest theater and some black African artists he collaborated with that Mabena admires as well–like Gcina Mhlophe, Zakes Mda and John Kani, “There’s like an urgency to that style of writing and performing that is fresh, even now,” she concludes.
In 2023, she was approached with an opportunity to come and serve as Interim Director, after the retirement of current director, Shirley Be. “She was someone who was influential to me. It felt very lovely to carry that until they found the permanent director. And also to serve a community that is so meaningful to me because I was a part of it.”
It must have been obvious to Sarah Lawrence that she was perfect for the role. She talks a lot about the international community, even when she was an educator, and about their struggles and finding ways to support them was something that mattered intensely to her.
She took a break from teaching. “I went on an adventure to make art very intentionally,” she laughs, “and found that it was not possible.” She explains that she prefers to use her art in service of others, and to “elevate people’s experiences.” She actually did so recently, in an event she co-hosted with Briana Martin, Director of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging. The “Diaspora Art Slam” was a success. People read poetry, did collage and pins, and had great talks around good food. “I love that I [got] to blend all parts of myself through that program.” And even though she stopped formally teaching, Mabena still sees her now administrative role as education, simply with different “learning outcomes.”
During our talk, Mabena seemed really admirative of Martin “She’s also an artist of her own. She’s a poet alongside being a higher ed professional.” And we came to understand that her admiration for her was also accompanied by a broader admiration for all of Sarah Lawrence’s staff.
One of her favorite things here is seeing how the faculty is still very connected to their artistic practice. Teachers here are actually working in the field they teach about; they are publishing, auditioning, performing, doing art shows “When I go to SLC’s website, it’s constantly professors being acknowledged for publishing in this journal or that book.”
Beyond that, Mabena is admirative of what she calls the “Sarah Lawrence rigor”--how everyone here is passionate about what they do. Mabena has seen all aspects of life here. She has been a student, then an educator and now an administrator, and says this passion is “across the board.” She goes into detail, explaining how the women working at the career service love what they do and are constantly working to get better. How it’s the same for people in her office (the student life suite) from Nelson Rodriguez working in community engagement, to First Year Education and Residential Life. “I see first hand the excellence and the drive that people have.” And of course, how much she appreciates her colleagues at the International Student Services Office, Nicole Mirando and Todd Pettiford. She adds “it’s fun sometimes to sit in the faculty staff dining room and be part of conversations, or overhear conversations where faculty are discussing ideas and just enjoying what they do, enjoying learning.”
Mabena doesn’t escape this rule—her passion shows through everything that she does, being a working artist on top of her work as an educator. When we ask what was her favorite artwork that she did abroad (meaning in the U.S.), she laughs “Abroad meaning here or at home? Because I’m like, I don’t know where I am anymore. What does home mean anyway?” She then answers that it is Sunflower, a project of her own she premiered in the summer of 2022. She received grants from different bodies to put it together; the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA), the Jim Henson Foundation, Kanessa Shaw and her Mellon grant, the Jerome Foundation, in part through Dixon Place Theater, where she performed.
When she lived in Kwekwe as a child, playing with her mother, she accidentally planted a tree which grew oranges on one side and lemons on the other. With her mom, when they moved to another city called Bulawayo, they didn’t want to abandon this tree so they pulled it up, took it as a transplant, and were able to plant it back in the garden of their new home, without it dying. It’s still here today. Sunflower uses this image of a tree with the same roots but giving different fruits, as a metaphor for her immigration experience. “I thought that was such a beautiful image for the life of someone who has a hybrid identity,” she explains. “I identify as Zimbabwean, but I have this life in America, I’ve lived in the UK, I’ve lived in Botswana, I’ve lived in South Africa, and that’s different fruits. It was a study on identity, being uprooted, putting down roots, what it feels like to replant yourself in a new place.” She was able to take it on tour that summer with the New York State public festival. She says she’s not sure of its future life, but she actually recently got an inquiry about it: “Someone remembered seeing it and was interested in remounting it. So I’ll wait to see what happens with that!”
https://www.fisopearlmabena.com/media?pgid=lf3aii0l-11f80eaf-e343-4232-981f-b4c803b13342
She misses the good weather of South Africa and Zimbabwe, “the wind here is offensive to me, it hurts my soul,” she laughs. She misses the food, and the people, and the sounds that people make. She misses saying her name to people without anybody telling her to repeat it, she misses the familiarity and the peacefulness of just being Sifiso.
She has access to a rich artist community in Zimbabwe. She mentored young writers in performance text, and she is always looking for opportunities to collaborate with them. In the future, she would really like to take Sunflower there. “It would take some reworking because it’s definitely made for an American audience. That would be a fun challenge to take that same story and take the same elements and rework it.”
But right now, where she is laying her roots and interconnecting them is the Sarah Lawrence community. Her office offers so much support needed by the international community here, that I don't know if our trees would be as fruitful without her. As a matter of fact, if she had one piece of advice for international students, it would be to get connected. “Community is so key, because it can feel so isolating.” As a student here herself, working against this isolation was “a dialogue,” as she calls it, “It really took in some parts understanding and support from the people around me, but also my vulnerability in asking for help and asking for support to get through that.”
Another advice would be to get involved, “To go back to my Sunflower metaphor, it’s about putting down roots. Those roots are all connected underneath the ground, and we don’t see that. We see a tree over here and a tree next to it. But underneath, those roots are touching each other, they are interconnected.”
One of the things she is passionate about in her current role is being able to give opportunities for students to create those roots. She really values the international community here. She thinks that these students have a lot to offer. For her, we think about things from a different perspective, have a whole different idea of life, a different background, way of thinking and of being, different ways to solve problems and conflicts. She recognizes that sometimes, it falls upon international students, because we are a minority here, to make efforts, to make friends, find people, go out there. She is committed to creating programming for international students that helps facilitate this experience. One thing she would really like to see is an international student’s organization, coming from the students, for the students. Apparently some students are already working on it, and on ways to make people feel that they have a community, from the summer before arriving, to the end of their education at Sarah Lawrence. Mabena would love to support such a project.
If she had one thing to say to a prospective international student, it would be this, “Having been here as a student, faculty member and an administrator, there is something really encouraging about how deeply everyone cares about the work that they’re doing. It’s infectious. I don’t think that you can be in an environment like this and not feel inspired, not feel a call to rigorous investigation and rigorous work. Rigor and Sarah Lawrence to me go hand in hand. I would say to Sarah Lawrence students coming here: get excited! And get ready because it’s a fun ride, and it’s a deep one.”