Drama therapy’s central principles involve embodiment and projection. This article reflects on these principles as an undercurrent in the method chapter of my master’s thesis. I proffer that, as a novice narrative inquirer, I transformed the trauma of my grandmother’s hoarding of empty plastic bottles into an adjunct research process for a narrative enquiry method. Through the process, I draw parallels between this intuitively driven mode of conducting research, that is, reconfiguring the extra sensibilities attained from my maternal lineage: my mother, grandmother, aunts and other women elders who trained my researcher capabilities through Zulu cosmology. As such, I explain how the concept of umkaphi (guide) provides grounded ethical guidance, critical distance and interties with reflexivity. I argue that proximity to the subject matter, as well as participants, positions the researcher at an advantage for in-depth data collection and analysis. I explain how Western, educated, industrialised, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) research has affected drama therapy research and why a new reading of research is needed. The article is sectioned into titles forming waves of arrival: arriving to myself, arriving to drama therapy, arriving to the concepts of umkaphi, arriving to the concept of invisibilisation, and arriving to a method of transforming the experience of my grandmother’s hoarding into an aspect of narrative research methodology—ukuhlahlela okulahliwe. The findings signal a procedural change in drama therapy through unique and intentional reconfigurations by Black drama therapists.
Nobantu Shabangu (2026) studied this question.