Word Art at 151 | Young Voices : Mthabisi Sithole

Recently, the implications of collecting the past, present and future through the voice of poetry have interested me with increasing urgency.

The instances from which every piece of poetry arises seem to promote uncertainty more than anything else while thee poems’ form is much more assertive in its materiality. They become my markers for how worldly livelihood has/may have been processed. Poems as cataloguing documents interest me immensely.

Another of my most persistent interests is with how the English language can, if at all, be concientised to the realities of a non-Anglophone experience across all spheres of a modern existence and beyond (forward or backwards). I find the exercise of even writing in English to, in some way, be a perpetual interrogation and manicuring of identity. Poetry that is linguistically imbedded in the arms of a domineering foreign tongue also brings me to question anyone else’s control in the aforementioned interrogation of identity.