Weeping Becomes a River (Paperback)

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 this collection.

Siphokazi 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.

General

Imprint:	Penguin Books
Release date:	August 2024
Authors:	Siphokazi Jonas
Dimensions:	209 x 133 x 7mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Paperback - Trade
Pages:	64
ISBN-13:	978-1-77639-208-7
Categories:	Books > Language & Literature > Literature: texts > Poetry texts & anthologies > General Books > Local Author Showcase Promotions
LSN:	1-77639-208-6
Barcode:	9781776392087

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