In Outlaw Culture, bell hooks writes that the function of art is to imagine what is possible. I once used her thoughts on creativity and the imagination as my defence on a panel I participated in alongside two African-American men in March 2018. The panel was in Durban at a literary festival called Time of the Writer. One of the men, Salim, was facilitating a conversation between myself and another writer. In fact, it was not, in the end, a conversation. Instead, Salim conducted two parallel conversations. I’ve facilitated panels before and I know what it's like when the facilitator decides, ‘I won't try to have one conversation, I’ll just speak a bit to this one and then speak a little to the other and then change and then change’ and so on. That was the kind of panel I was a part of. At one moment, Salim turned to me to challenge me on the relationship in my novel The Woman Next Door between Hortensia, a Bajan woman, and Marion, a second-generation South African woman. Hortensia has retired to Cape Town; Marion's parents, Jewish, fled Europe from the terrors of Nazi Germany and settled in South Africa. The novel, I like to say, is about the ‘hateship’ between these two octogenarians. It is also an experiment. Salim challenged me on the nature of the relationship, as he struggled with the fact that Marion, a racist woman, remains ‘unsympathetic’ throughout the story. ‘At no point,’ he said, ‘did I manage to relate to her.’ He also struggled with a particular scene in the novel when, unable to comb her head of short tight curls, Hortensia allows Marion – for a few seconds – to run a comb through her hair. ‘A black woman would never let a white woman touch her hair,’ declared Salim. I was surprised that Salim felt comfortable to speak for what black women would and would not do with their hair, an authority I, a black woman, would never even give myself. He seemed to carry the assumption that there is one Black Woman Hair Guidebook and all black women have signed up to it.