Product Description
Weeping Becomes a River
Author: Siphokazi Jonas
Format: Paperback
The Book Lounge's Book of the Year 2024
South African Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) Awards: Best Fiction Poetry 2025
University of Johannesburg Debut Prize 2025
Siphokazi Jonas is a weaver of seemingly discordant worlds; growing up in an Afrikaans dorpie, attending an English boarding school, and going on annual holidays to a village emaXhoseni during the transition years of South Africa’s democracy made this a necessity.
In Weeping Becomes a River she confronts the linguistic and cultural alienation experienced as a black learner in former Model C schools in the 1990s and early 2000s, then fashions the fragments to reclaim and rewrite her place within a lineage of storytellers.
Migrating between forms, between poetry and intsomi, she navigates the waters of tradition, religion, intergenerational experiences of rural and urban spaces, and the ways in which family dynamics affect the body. She is not only a referee of the raging tensions within her, but she also pieces together a language for pathways of leaving and returning.
Her poems grapple with the past, the present, and possible futures without forgetting that “the body is marked territory from birth, and the scent of it never leaves”.
About the Author
Siphokazi Jonas is a South African poet, playwright and actor with an MA in English Literature and a BA in English and Drama. She was the 2016 runner-up for the national Sol Plaatje European Union Award and headlined as the first Featured Poet at the Poetry Africa Festival in 2021. Siphokazi received a Best Short Film South African Film and Television Award (SAFTA) as co-producer of the poetry film #WeAreDyingHere. Her work has appeared in Poetry London, Atlanta Review, Versopolis Review, The Poetry Society and Stanzas. Weeping Becomes a River was one of Brittle Paper's 100 Notable African Books of 2024, the Book Lounge's 2024 Book of the Year, joint winner of the 2025 HSS Award for best poetry collection, one of Topping Africa magazine's seven must-read books for 2025, and winner of the 2026 Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry.
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