The JRB presents an excerpt from Griefseed, Malika Lueen Ndlovu’s collection of poems, essays and reflections on grief, which won the Main 2026 University of Johannesburg Prize for South African Writing in English.
Griefseed
Malika Lueen Ndlovu
Karavan Press, 2025
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Introduction
Grief is fertile soil. Grief is a medicine well, a purposeful fire. Grief stretches us beyond our fixed stories, our skins and bones. It reshapes and dictates a new music, initiates a transformative dance. Grief knows the way, is a knowing darkness, a dance of, with and through all kinds of shadows.
Grief calls in ways only you will hear, no matter how close others are or how intimate their understanding of you may be. Inevitably, the multi-dimensional dying that grief initiates means they cannot possibly be with you or hold you entirely. Grief offers a natural schooling in listening, timing, acute attention through all our senses as we gradually come to embrace its presence. Being with your grief grows a relationship with your life, your body, your world, with all that surrounds you – like no other force can. If you want to be well, learn your way to wellness, grieving well is unavoidably part of mapping your path. This is not a school of right or wrong, more of be-longing … an extraordinary way to discover how to be, how to live with your longings. Without conscious effort, mental struggle or urgent labour, grief grows adaptability, and fills you with the gratitude fruit. We are all grieving, carriers of sorrow. To be human, to be authentically and wholly alive here, means being with all the various ways in which dying and loss are an integral embroidery of all our lives. Grief exists in all our stories, our epic and even unknown lineages. Once we begin to get a grasp of its pervasiveness, this paradox of how pain makes you acutely appreciative of life, we can come to know the light and liberation that grief brings. Even when you cannot feel or see it, grief is not suffocation. It is not meant to make you stagnate. It is at times overwhelming, yet like all tides, it is consistently moving, washing in and out like a kind of breath. It may seem an unbearable gravity, but like all rivers, all your grieving is leading you home, to self and source.
For many, it has taken the global pandemic we have been living and dying through, to hear and see the interrelatedness of our grief, to expose our interdependence. It has also offered a vital re-minding, calling us to listen to and acknowledge Nature as an authority on growth, adaptation to change, loss, rupture, on evolution beyond the known. This so-called crisis context served as a breakdown and a breakthrough for millions of us. None of us could say we had been here before. How do we find anchorage, sanctuary or a way to root, when everything is in a state of flux within and around us? These kinds of questions surfaced and reverberated widely.
The only thing I’ve remained sure of is that the only constant is change and the compass still points inward, not outward. Or at least it begins by substantially going inward before extending outward. I invite you to consider planting the seed of possibility within your heart and mind, that we can connect and hold each other in these grief ‘conversations’. I hope this book’s offerings will encourage you to open the doors, closets, the mental graves you may have avoided visiting or denied existed. May these words support your courageous vulnerability as you choose to face, enter, move through and discover, instead of close or run from, what your grief has to reveal. The dreamseed of this book planted four years ago has taken an unpredicted path towards its emergence, to reach you. Everything in its time. Nature shows us every day and everywhere that we can learn to surrender and allow the flow of sorrow to move through us naturally and into the renewing currents of life. We are reshaped by this allowing, and we expand beyond our thinking. This book is only a part of the ever growing body of evidence, revealing what grief has grown in my life. It is also a bag of seeds that I now share, lovingly, with all who feel that their inner soil is ready to receive them.
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Letting
Let the wound weep
mess with your sleep
make you forget
to call or eat
want to curl up
hide from light
knot your tongue
your mind chattering
scratched record
through the night.
Letting is never easy
but somehow part of
coming through
even when you cannot see
something vital
is being retrieved.
Let the wound weep
for its own coming
into being
for all the time it took
for you to truly
look at it
naked and raw
once more.
Let the wound weep
rage, sob and howl
hear its call
in solitude or crowds
listen
for when and how
to answer
to play, stay shallow
dive or sink deep.
Let the wound weep
breathe, go slowly
healing is a dawning
can feel like losing
seem like burning
drowning or dying
only the wound knows
how many days or ways.
- Malika Lueen Ndlovu is an internationally published South African poet, playwright, performer and arts project manager. Her poetry collections include Born in Africa but (1999), Womb to World: A Labour of Love (2001), Truth is Both Spirit and Flesh (2008), Invisible Earthquake: A woman’s journal through stillbirth (2009), and CLOSE (2017). Her published plays are A Coloured Place (1998) and Sister Breyani (2010).
