What work can poetry do, in the endlessly genocidal present, and the burning after-now? How can poetry teach us not to look away? And not only that, how can poetry teach us to look closer?

In each of the five sessions (July-October) participants will engage with the work of one poet, and one poem, from one region currently affected by genocide and imperialist violence. In these close gatherings, we hope to foster rituals of solidarity, care, rage, hope and imagination within the otherwise spaces poetry affords us.

in which the ancestors are returned what was not given / in which our bones remember the dust and air they are made of/ in which memory holds the weight of all stars/ in which we are burdened by our own light/ how we belong to the names we are given/ and by our names / we bear their charge/ say agwang/ ashina/ kura/ say i am the shadowed howl/ i come by claws / by hunger/ by meat and honey/ as the livid wound/ as blood red//dolence/indexed: / small fires of the bottle brushtree I summer's hibiscus/ bright juice of the pomegranate/ split sweet/ overripe mangoes/ milkwood fruit/ the fevered neck/ the leather/ the warp/ the woof…

On behalf of the Ingrid Jonker Prize Committee, I wish to announce that the winner for 2024 is A History of Disappearance by Sarah Lubala.

Comments by the judges:

A History of Disappearance traverses various locales – Johannesburg, Congo, Canada – in voices that are poised, precise and elegant. With deft integrity the poet explores the trauma of dislocation, war, grief and loss, rescuing the reader from the dehumanising language of spectacle. This collection is redolent with a vibrant sensory language, which unpeels, with delicate and delicious tension, layers of intimacy.

Sarah Lubala (she/her) is a Congolese-born South African poet. Her debut collection, A History of Disappearance (Botsotso Publishing, 2022), was featured on a number of notable book lists, including Open Country Mag's 60 notable books of 2022 and The Africa Report’s 15 must-read books for summer 2022. She has been shortlisted twice for a Gerald Kraak Award and once for a Brittle Paper Award for Poetry and was longlisted for a Sol Plaatje European Union Poetry Award. She is the winner of the HSS Award 2023 for Best Fiction: Poetry.

If there is one book of poetry you read this year, make it this one. The collection by the Congolese-born poet will stay with you long after you have returned to book to the shelf. In tender, haunting and mesmerising words, Lubala explores the ways people disappear, displacement, war, trauma, misogyny, racism, xenophobia, and more.

Lubala’s family fled the Democratic Republic of Congo two decades ago amidst political unrest. Through these poems and photographs, she explores the violence of displacement in women’s lives.

From the opening poem, the Gerald Kraak Prize-shortlisted “6 Errant Thoughts on Being a Refugee,” Lubala probes the experience of living on the margins—the pain of displacement, loss, absence, and grief—centering girls and women. The 56 poems, most of them like prayers, span forced migration, gender-violence, xenophobia, race, mental illness, love, and belonging.

The widely published Congolese poet, whose family fled their home country due to the political unrest of the 1990s, hands in a collection of 37 poems for her debut effort. A History of Disappearance probes the nuances of xenophobia, displacement, mental illness, and gender-based violence.

The DRC-born poet tells OkayAfrica how and why she practices 'a poetics of disobedience.'

Sarah Lubala has been interrogating the history of disappearances. And no, she’s not with the FBI or DCI, but with the POETRY department. ‘I arrived with/ bruised knees/ wet hair/ a mouth-full of salted fish,' -- she recreates the scene in '6 Errant Thoughts on Being a Refugee,' the first poem in her debut poetry collection, A History of Disappearance.

This poem reveals Lubala is an authority on the subject. She doesn’t write about what she’s heard or read, but from lived experience. Two decades ago, her family fled the Democratic Republic of Congo amidst political unrest as militant factions tried to overthrow the dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. From Congo, she stayed in South Africa, Ivory Coast, and then lived again between South Africa, Holland, and China for a few years. ‘I was raised on the Congolese-gospel/ I can teach you how to forget/ where you are from,’ she writes.

A History of Disappearance contains 37 poems and photographs by Julien Harneis, Bill Wegener, and others. Some of the themes addressed in the anthology include forced migration, displacement, xenophobia, gender, sexual violence, mental illness, memory, and remembering. Sarah recently had an interview with Adhiambo E. Magak for OkayAfrica about the book and her life experiences, writing that “Death, abandonment, displacement, disavowal, much of these histories are marked by disappearances of all kinds…I wanted to write about disappearance as a structure of experience, and not only as an event.”

There is the disappearance occasioned by forced migration, when you are a subject in exile and ‘doubly dislocated’, both ‘presently’ and historically, given your colonial past. There is a disappearance of roots and kinship. The book is about the difficult process of departure, deterritorialisation and the confusion that follows.