Poems, short stories, artwork and photography by S. Sudanese women
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Loading... - Solomon Afful
- 28 Sep 2022
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The anthology reflects the lives of the women writers and artists, and at the same time gives voice to the very real lived experiences and lives of every woman of South Sudanese heritage. The ideas and experiences in this book span decades. They straddle borders, they cross continents and describe events that are hard to imagine, even with some knowledge of South Sudan’s history.
The 268-page book that was published by Femrite Publications in 2020, and divided under seven themes captures the effects of war, including homelessness and the mistreatment of refugees and the challenges of living in foreign countries, family separations, love, fear and tension, disease, starvation, death and destruction, hunger and thirst, the unending wars, and the gloom that has befallen the land.
The title of the anthology is derived from Bigoa Chuol’s poem ‘Birth water’. The poem is to the children whose birth water is broken by whizzing of shrapnel.
“…We know war in sunken eyes/We know it in the jabbing hunger pains/We know it in our callused, blistered feet,” the poem reads in part.
“…We know the reeking smell of almost, entirely well/We cannot hold it to our cracked lips/So, we bite down on our children and our kind bleed.”
“There is time to perish/But there is no time to mourn/There is time to rot/But there is no time to bury…,” the poem runs further.
Lydia Minagano Kape’s poem ‘Run’ is about a young woman who is no longer afraid of death. When the bullet was shot and they shouted run she instead stood still and watched as gunpowder filled the lonely air. She is not ready to run from death because she has died countless times already. Her body is a tomb, a walking dead, and a ghost. She has buried enough pieces of herself to form a cemetery. She dies every time a bullet cuts a branch off her family tree. Read More...
