'A tender exploration into the beating heart of a community that endured through culture and sacrifice, with such detailed references to life in the 1960s for Indians in Johannesburg and Durban. Smita will live long in the memory of the reader. Well-recommended.' -Shubnum KhanGrowing up in Bakerton, Springs in the 1950s and '60s, Smita (Smeets) Maharaj is puzzled by a great deal of adult behaviour. Why must her tall, handsome father be so obsequious to the police? Why must brown people sit in separate train carriages from white people? Why can't her mother see how much more important it is for her to get a good education than to learn to make the perfect roti?Caught between the beloved traditions of India and life in a quickly modernising South Africa, between family roots in Natal and a prosperous present in the Transvaal; between the madness of apartheid and the pull of her own desires, Smita struggles to find her feet in a world beset by contradictions. As the Maharaj family expands and grows, and her mother's twin obsessions with producing a son and finding suitable boys for her daughters to marry dominate the family's discourse, Smita wrestles with satisfying her parents' wishes and following her own path as she navigates her way through school and life - and comes to terms with a long-held, painful family secret.
In Thicker than Sorrow, Khadija focuses on appreciating and honouring her roots and unearthing her history. Rummaging through the drawers and closets of her blood family and the family she has chosen, she discovers inspiration and beauty in the most ordinary places: a bowl of rice, a kitchen, a daisy chain, a sunflower garden, a galvanised bath. The poems reveal a poet who is, "falling in love with my roots and me, life. And it's just the beginning. I am a multitude of voyages."A powerful meditation on identity and belonging. Stylistically fluid, the work ranges from visceral lyrical explorations of personal and collective memory, to political protest to exuberant praise poetry. Heeger celebrates her mixed ancestry and her rootedness in African soil through the interplay of standard English and Afrikaans, as well as dialect and indigenous languages. By turns melancholy, angry and joyful, the collection is an emotional whirlwind that carries the reader from the Overberg and the Cape Peninsula all the way up the African continent and back into the intimate world of the poet- Annel Pieterse, University of StellenboschHeeger's words are a rallying cry, a praise poem and a soothing ballad. Rooted firml) inside her bloodline, her culture, and her land, she writes for us. The most powerful kind of Love: one chosen over and over again, through trauma, and inter-generational pain, through ancestral erasure and the continued silencing and impoverishment of an entire community, by today's political, social & economic realities. Her voice is that of the griot, and the sage. And through it all, the soft caress of a Cape wind blows, saying: and still we are here, and still we love.- Toni Stuart, poet
In this novel about being seen and what is not seen, the previously hidden is revealed when the unexpected happens. In the soaking winter of 2010, two teenage girls set off to a party and disappear without a trace. Six years later, during a catastrophic drought, a young woman vanishes while on her way home from work. In the days following these events, those closest to the missing women are forced to question how well they really know them. Tracey Hawthorne is the author of many non-fiction books, including an award-winning biography of the artist John Meyer. Flipped is her first novel.
In the Shadow of the Springs I Saw is an exploration, and stories, of people who live in the Art Deco buildings of Springs. It is the imagined lives of those who live in a space that is not theirs historically but one that they have reclaimed. This work, in times of doom and complaint, creates a new narrative: one of revival, vigour and celebration.'The writing tries to capture the "grain" of a place, object or conversation, as if a swatch were cut from a larger fabric. One could trace the use of similar techniques back to the canonical modernist works of James Joyce, William Faulkner, John Dos Passos, William Carlos Williams or to a later experimenter like Burroughs ... Adair uses these techniques with flair and purpose ... the book's method is to declare and contradict, to present one side and then another, keeping both present.'Ivan VladislavicBarbara Adair is a novelist and writer. In Tangier we Killed the Blue Parrot was shortlisted for the South African Sunday Times Fiction Award in 2004. Her novel End was shortlisted for Africa Regional Commonwealth Prize.
A Bed on Bricks offers the gift of nine stories, each tracing complex psychological journeys and relationships threatened by incompatibilities of culture, age, gender, class, sexuality and race. Fumbling for one another across these divides, characters are as rich and diverse as the African landscapes they inhabit. This collection of stories explores difficult but profound truths about human nature and the intricacies of our interactions across the sub-Saharan region. In doing so, A Bed on Bricks rewards readers who enjoy tales that rupture cliches through original and challenging narratives.
The Girl Who Chased Otters is a sensitive tale of friendship, love and acceptance set in the southern suburbs of Cape Town.
The much-anticipated sequel to the turtle dove told me (Modjaji Books, 2013), which won a SALA Award in 2014, stem of the moon is the second volume in a trilogy that spans the years 1990 - 2010. In this collection, Sliepen paints impressions of a small town, Clarens in the Free State, as well as glimpses of life in the Netherlands and Bali. The reader shares the intimate experience of the birth of her first child and the poems take us on a profound journey through Namibia. Sliepen's latest collection is a love song to a child, a lover, a mother, and the quiet strength of the moon that connects us all.
The catalogue also contains articles about publishing the indie way, book-making in the time of COVID-19, and more.
The Summer We Didn't Die is Christine Coates' third poetry collection. It is an assured, tender collection that offers the reader a way to think about the mysteries at the heart of what it means to be human, in this place and time.
The poems in 'predicaments' explore women's responses to the constraints and consequences of choices they have made. Their responses are not much changed through the millennia of myth, history and into contemporary times. The poet reflects on significant moments in the lives of women such as Helen of Troy, Delilah and Joan of Arc, and the predicaments they are faced with in a man's world.
Eighty-five-year-old Alma tracks a stallion through the wild bush. A young woman leaves her corporate job to start a wine farm as her marriage stales. A mother leaves her war-torn home to seek safety for herself and her daughter and a girl begs for survival. In a series of ten mesmerising stories, Cranswick pulls aside the covers to let us in on the lives and inner lives of women thrown out of their comfort zone. With chilling clarity and a haunting lyricism, Cranswick slows down time, zooms in close, and refuses to look away.
Skye is looking for normal. She grew up different and it rankles. Home isn't normal; her mom isn't normal. Her brother, beloved as he is, isn't quite normal, either. Her marriage was kind of normal (Cam is a wealthy, handsome man who's nice enough) and now it's a dumpster fire. And look at South Africa entirely NOT normal. She's got PTSD and she's in mourning. She doesn't know who she is or what she wants. She tries to anchor herself to tangible things: to her cooking, to her neighbour's children, to sex. But as she relives her past and tries to plan her future, she feels increasingly dislocated. Skye escapes when things get overwhelming, and realises almost too late that she's about to make everything worse.
In her debut collection of short stories, Lindiwe Nkutha takes us through the minds of people you may overlook on an ordinary day: The wayward neighbour you vaguely remember seeing every day as a child until the day he vanished. The face you see every weekend at the local drinking hole, you exchange a polite nod but know little about, not even her name. The young woman who is caught between her faith and her love for a woman. Their lives are untidy, tainted with the pain, joy and violence as they share with us stories they wouldn't share with anyone else. Nkutha's words weave in and around the weights we drag behind us from one place to another, with a sensitivity and wit required for such vulnerabilities and intimate moments.
The Only Magic We Know is a celebration of all the poets Modjaji has published. This anthology offers a taste of the range and diversity of the poems that have appeared in the individual poets' collections. The authors include:ingrid andersen • marike beyers • melissa butler • margaret clough • christine coates • colleen crawford cousins • phillippa yaa de villiers • isobel dixon • sarah frost • elisa galgut • dawn garisch • megan hall • kerry hammerton • khadija tracey heeger • colleen higgs • eliza kentridge • haidee kotze • sindiwe magona • michelle mcgrane • jenna mervis • joan metelerkamp • helen moffett • malika ndlovu • tariro ndoro • azila talit reisenberger • shirmoney rhode • beverly rycroft • arja salafranca • karin schimke • katleho kano shoro • thandi sliepen • annette snyckers • jeannie wallace mckeown • crystal warren • robin winckel-mellish • wendy woodward • makhosazana xaba • fiona zerbst
Fall Awake is a study in contrasts, exploring belonging and unbelonging; tracking the coming to terms with a fluid sexuality, and examining how relationships work or don't work. Jeannie McKeown also confronts head-on the terrifying life-changing experience that is motherhood. Sometimes irreverent, always heartfelt, the poems in this collection speak to a particular life, and to what it is to reach the middle of one, and still find yourself with new horizons and more to learn.
A man is travelling to Africa from Europe. And yet it is also about waiting - waiting for Africa.Volker, a German, leaves his home in Frankfurt for Windhoek. He leaves a lover, he is leaving for a long time, and he does not have a return ticket. He does not know anything about Africa, to him it is one country, not a continent, neither does he really know where he is going to; he just knows that he wants to leave Europe.Lufthansa, the airline that carries him stops at Charles de Gaulle airport and here he waits and waits and waits. And in the airport he observes and describes and thinks. The text is a stream of consciousness, Volker's thoughts. Interspersed with this are stories of people he encounters in the airport; a murderer, a terrorist, a person with dwarfism, a trans woman, a porn star, a terrorist, a child trafficker, a paedophile. All are connected, with each other, with Volker and with us, the readers.Adair's novel is innovative in form, self-conscious and self-critical; it challenges conventional Western assumptions that all good novels have a clear story line, a good plot and fully rounded characters.
A page turning, gender and genre-bending novel set on the Cape Flats in Capetown, South Africa; a story of people who live in a place of violence which involves drugs, corrupt clergy, queerness, friendships - and how these survive in a society that is dysfunctional due to historical social problems; very much a novel of now, the 21st century. A book that will change the literary landscape of South Africa.This work is based on the research supported by the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences
This is Joan Metelerkamp's ninth book of poems. Her previous book, also published by Modjaji, Now the World Takes these Breaths (2014) was one of three on the short list for the Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry. Her poems have appeared in many South African anthologies. As well as poems she has written reviews and essays about South African poetry, and read in most festivals in South Africa as well as in Lisbon, Rio de Janeiro and Paris. She has been an associate of the Institute for the Study of English in Africa, as a part-time teacher on the MA in creative writing at Rhodes University; before that, for five years, she edited New Coin poetry journal.
Three incarnations of women: a mother, a daughter and an old crone. A haunting of past, present and future selves. Drawing loosely on the Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone, this poetic text explores the process of individuation, the inevitability of a young girl's journey into the shadow and into the unknown, of the bonds that connect mothers and children to each other, of loss and the dense beautiful soaring life that we are all traveling through.
You wear silencesitting on the concrete floor of a librarya shroud like speechLanguage does not belong to you…An honest exploration of dislocation and (un)belonging in its forms: exile from language, exile from country, and exile from sanity. In her debut collection of poetry, Ndoro divides and intermingles national and personal history in an attempt to reach herself. Within its fragmented prose and lyrical poems, Agringanda is not only a celebrated capture of language but also of its intriguing subversion as it navigates meetings of class, gender, nationality and race.
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