My collection embraces different kinds of poetry. Some poems come via my home in Pimville Soweto, the urban sounds and multilingual speech patterns as I move through it. Other poems draw on Sesotho culture and tradition, which still run strongly in my family, and at times, I integrate the different kinds of sounds and associations of Sesotho and English in the same poem.
“u-Grand, Malume? (Zulu slang: are you ok, Uncle?) is dedicated to two uncles who were victims of the antiapartheid struggle. The poems are my way of bringing Jabulani Maswanganye’s spirit back home; he joined Umkhonto weSizwe, went to exile in 1977 and never returned.
“Zabalaza Republic reiterates the need for my people to find value in our blackness. For my generation, the battle against white supremacy culture has taken on psychological implications echoing sentiments of what Du Bois referred to as double consciousness. My poetry comes from the wreck left behind after ethnic and racial collisions.
The same poet who observes that ‘Everybody is a bridge’, then asks in Zen -fashion,
“Is it me, or is it you?/ are you reflection or projection / or the light that’s shining through?’’ and can also note in a very down-to-earth way, that “If we hadn’t robbed the car washers of their coin/they might not have turned so mean, you know? / Let them earn a little income, bra/ If we’d chiselled our hearts open, tried to see it from the middle/we’d have softened just a little.”
My collection embraces different kinds of poetry. Some poems come via my home in Pimville Soweto, the urban sounds and multilingual speech patterns as I move through it. Other poems draw on Sesotho culture and tradition, which still run strongly in my family, and at times, I integrate the different kinds of sounds and associations of Sesotho and English in the same poem. 
“u-Grand, Malume? (Zulu slang: are you ok, Uncle?) is dedicated to two uncles who were victims of the antiapartheid struggle. The poems are my way of bringing Jabulani Maswanganye’s spirit back home; he joined Umkhonto weSizwe, went to exile in 1977 and never returned. 
“Zabalaza Republic reiterates the need for my people to find value in our blackness. For my generation, the battle against white supremacy culture has taken on psychological implications echoing sentiments of what Du Bois referred to as double consciousness. My poetry comes from the wreck left behind after ethnic and racial collisions. 
The same poet who observes that ‘Everybody is a bridge’, then asks in Zen -fashion,
“Is it me, or is it you?/ are you reflection or projection / or the light that’s shining through?’’ and can also note in a very down-to-earth way, that “If we hadn’t robbed the car washers of their coin/they might not have turned so mean, you know? / Let them earn a little income, bra/ If we’d chiselled our hearts open, tried to see it from the middle/we’d have softened just a little.”