Kinderlê

These poems work through grief as a kind of storytelling cure, mourning the poet’s own losses and those of Namaqualand’s children. The title recalls a monument at Steinkopf in the Northern Cape to children killed there in 1867, and to losing a baby and one’s innocence. Eight sections unfold like a story: a love she dreams is ending, then breakdown and a stay in a psychiatric hospital, the lines splintering across the page, then a miscarriage, nearly losing her life, losing her faith, and a tangled bond with her mother, faced with fierce honesty alongside race and gender. Written in Gariep and Nama Afrikaans, the poems recast Bible stories and well-known Afrikaans verse, so that in one of them the menace comes from a white man rather than a dark one.

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About the book

Form

Poetry

Length

112 pages in the original

First published

2024 by Queillerie

ISBN

9780795802706 (original)