Kleur kom nooit alleen nie

Wounds and their healing run through these poems, which also travel beyond South Africa, to other parts of Africa and to Europe, asking where the poet belongs on the continent. An opening cycle gives voice, in their own Afrikaans dialect, to Nama people of the Richtersveld, whose grazing land was taken for a national park, and who wonder whose land it now is and where they themselves belong. Other poems mourn violence on the continent, rage at its suffering, or wrestle with the act of writing itself. In the closing travel poems, to write is to set out towards other people and to look for a new language, one in which the old apartheid split between "us" and "them" might give way to a larger "we".

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About the book

Form

Poetry

Length

96 pages in the original

First published

2000 by Kwela

Author's age

48 when first published

ISBN

9780795701177 (original)