Maybe Ernesto Che Guevara was right when he said that he couldn’t think of any revolutionary lacking the important quality of love.Myesha Jenkins’s poetry collection Breaking the Surface is a long testament of love with seven chapters and countless verses. I love the book and the poet’s spirit, that’s my confession.
The gospel according to Myesha is a thought-provoking naked rehearsal of truth in a play titled LIFE. I shy away from referring to poets as sexperts because that will be stealing bread from the academics, but what can you say about a poet who writes "I have never understood / how our very difficult bodies can / fit so puzzle-piece-perfect together / in so many ways and positions / lost in the passion of sex / or afterwards / as we snuggle like kittens / or small children / sleeping" (Sleeping with him). However it would be risky to relegate Myesha to an ‘immigrant American woman who "moved to South Africa permanently in 1993, alone at age 44", a revolutionary woman in search of an elusive African revolution, who instead found the community development sector and pimped her soul to its aims and objectives’.
Myesha’s nucleus is a scary bunch of equally creative people. Her collection explicitly mirrors that she feeds from most of them. Breaking the Surface is a book of love, agape, and its sisters and brothers. Those are the people she secretly dreams with while she shares some of those dreams with poetry enthusiasts in anthologies like Timbila and Botsotso.
Breaking the Surface is a book of reflection, the closest you’ll come to the heart of a reluctant feminist. In politics they say 'Malibongwe igama la makhosikazi'. To Myesha's book one can only say 'Aluta continua amigo!'
first published in WORDSTOCK
Ke ya se kwa sereto sowa sago Prayforce Mashilane. Sona se monate mara nkare o nale bothata le didudla. O nagana gore bududla bo maka ke go dja kamatla? Go go botsa nnete go nale mabaka a go tlala ya a ka makang gore motho a tsefe. Le mo o ka dja bjang, mo o se lephao la bodudla o ka sa none ende gore sdudla se be slender ke go wota. Sdudla ke sdudla mfo! Yamogela ka mokgwa wo se leng ka gona.
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