Pagecast was at the 2025 Open Book Festival, where we spoke with authors about their writing journeys and the stories they share with readers. In this episode, Wamuwi Mbao interviews Siphokazi Jonas about her poetry collection, Weeping Becomes a River.
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”.
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