Penguin Random House SA has shared a video of Siphokazi Jonas introducing her ‘exquisite, courageous and moving’ poetry collection, Weeping Becomes a River.
If a Shakespearean actor, a Christian missionary and an isiXhosa praise poet walked into a bar, their conversation would sound something like the poems in Weeping Becomes a River.
Jonas is a weaver of seemingly discordant worlds; growing up in an Afrikaans dorpie during the transition years of a newly democratic South Africa and going on annual holidays to a village made this a necessity. Her work as a spoken word poet often fuses poetry, theatre and film, and she brings this genre-mixing to the page by using the intsomi form to weave the narrative of her poems together.
Jonas’s poems explore the impact of linguistic and cultural alienation as a black learner in former Model C schools in the 1990s and early 2000s. She is not only a referee of the internal war between isiXhosa and English within her, but she pieces together a language for leaving and returning between the past and the present, and a possible future. Her poems ask questions about navigating tradition, religion, migration between rural and urban spaces, and how families choose to make their own culture.
Weeping Becomes a River is a timely reflection on the cost of being the early test subjects of South Africa’s democratic project.
‘I was breathless after reading this collection. It is exquisite, courageous, energising, boundary-scaling, mesmerising, moving.’—Gabeba Baderoon
Watch the video, and listen to Jonas reading her poem ‘Birthright’:
I receive the things
my grandmothers left for me
in a dream
mother and father
have gardening
I have poems
rent
and no land
