THE pain of losing a mother to cancer prompted United Kingdom-based social worker Nkosiyazi Kan Kanjiri to pen a poetry collection titled Looking For Mother, his debut book.
Kanjiri’s mother Elinah Hlongwane succumbed to cancer in 2008 the year that she was diagnosed with the deadly disease. He was 16.
He told NewsDay Life & Style that he wanted to find a way to deal with the loss when he wrote the poems that include Looking For Her, When Mother Died and Home Is A Memory.
“My mother died in 2008 and I only shed my first tears in 2013 after I had said, let me write the story of my life. So when I was writing this book (which I am still to finish) I would be crying, thinking about my mother. This is how I shed the first tears five years after losing my mother,” he said.
“The first section titled Mother, Home, Memories, is an attempt to mourn my mother. Not every poem in that section is about my mother, for example Hell Heaven, Home and Mothers Memories. They just carry the mother theme and talk about issues affecting women.” Kanjiri said there were several other losses that the collection talked about.
“Overall, the poems are about coming to terms with loss. I wanted to bring out the fact that hope and resilience are not built by shying away from our loss, but from facing it and communicating it as frankly as possible,” he said.
The book, which was published late last year, is available on Amazon and it contains 65 poems.
“The book is now on Amazon as an e-book and paperback. So, anyone can order it from anywhere. But I will make it available in book stores later because not everyone can purchase on Amazon,” he said.
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Kanjiri was second winner of the Drama For Life Online Poetry Contest held by the University of Witswatersrand, South Africa, in 2017 at the time he was studying at Fort Hare University.
In 2019, his poems were selected for the South African AVBOB (Afrikaanse Verbond Begrafnis Ondernemings Beperk) poetry project and in 2020 some of his poems were published by Fundza Literary Trust.
He contributed poems to three anthologies, namely Eagle on Iroko (2016), Zimbolicious: An Anthology of Zimbabwean Literature and Arts Volume 3 (2017) and Best “New” African Poets (2018).
