i was raised on
the Congolese-gospel
i can teach you how to forget
where you’re from
to worship the wide road before you
hands open
like this:
make each palm
a letter
to the sky

dear théophile
i imagine your bed
stills smells like burnt sugar
and keen aching
i cannot cross the threshold
that room is steeped in a fever so ravenous
it devours the air

Who will take her?
this sorrow-of-home-girl
this river-of-bees-girl
this blood-honey-girl
this night-singing-girl
this throat full of ghosts

a. i like to think of the black men in those shaving commercials. foam glistening down
their chins. throats you could practice hunger on.

b. i don’t pray the way the nuns taught us. i left my rosary in uncle paulin’s car on that
trip to kananga 3 years ago. i’ve only just remembered.

c. there is skin more tender than daylight just behind the ear. i plant two kisses on the
indian girl i met on tinder. her laughter is clean water.

The tongue also is a fire
through the year’s slow teeth
all the days of my life
speak against me
See fire eat fire
see it set the whole course
of a life on fire
and itself set on fire by hell

For weeks I have tried to write an essay   
on ‘Black Death and Elegy’
I composed letters instead:
Maman,
I am writing to you from across the water
the years have been a heavy tide
against the shore of me 

Issue 206 features exceptional poetry from Sarah Lubala, Jarred Thompson, Pieter Odendaal, Shari Daya, Melissa Sussens, Jim Pascual Agustin and many others. There is also a special excerpt of Kraal, a performance text by Jason Jacobs and prose by Jijana, Tayla Simpson and others. Cover art is by Qhamanande Maswana.

“I am what my mother (land) has endured,” writes poet Sarah Lubala in her essay “First Country.” In it, she meditates on a legacy of violence, one felt in her homeland—the Democratic Republic of Congo—and on her body, and that of her unborn child as she prepares to give birth in South Africa. 

Accompanying the exhibition As Though We Hid the Sun in a Sea of Stories, this reader weaves together essays, conversations, and poetry that trace the multiplicity of worldviews, histories, and archives that have existed within an area of Central and Eastern Europe, Central and North Asia, and further beyond. The texts search for, and propose, reappraisals and novel frameworks to make sense of  cosmological, cultural, and political histories in the geographical area that the exhibition engages with. Via rigorous historical research, the reader includes themes ranging from the geographies of Jadidism, definitions and understandings of Indigeneity in different contexts in the world, and a reappraisal of Muslim subjectivities that defied control and uniformization by the Russian Empire, among many other perspectives.

The words moved in my blood. Something to do with waiting, that space of endless suspension. The in-between. Relentless and wide. Waiting has always been my ontological occupation. I exist liminaly, in the space between borders. I experienced a literal border crossing when I was three, as my family rushed to South Africa to escape a crumbling autocracy, and I’ve been troubling borders ever since.