Do join Siphokazi as talks about her award winning poetry book “Weeping Becomes at River” at Pinelands Library on Wednesday 16th April from 10am till 11am 

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, she fashions the fragments to reclaim and rewrite her place within a lineage of storytellers.

Migrating between forms, poetry and intsomi, she navigates the waters of tradition, religion, intergenerational experiences of rural and urban spaces, and how family dynamics affect the body. She is not only a referee of the raging tensions within her but also pieces together a language for pathways of leaving and returning.