A GIFT THAT CAN’T BE QUANTIFIED
When we try to write down our very own, personal story, we often find that we cannot separate our stories from those who have nurtured and influenced us.
As South Africans prepare to celebrate Mandela Day on 18 July, the AVBOB Poetry Project is acknowledging Nkateka Masinga, an award-winning writer, poet and scholar whose original voice pays tribute to the leaders and storytellers who came before her. Her poems have been translated into several languages, and she has just published her sixth collection, Daughter Wound, through UK-based Hazel Press (https://hazelpress.co.uk). Thanks to her studies in medicine, she was recognised as a Mandela Washington Fellow in 2018. Then, in 2022, News24 identified Nkateka as one of 30 Young Mandelas of the Future.
We asked her how it felt to be associated with Mandela’s legacy in this way so early in her career.
“Being selected as a Mandela Washington Fellow made me more intentional about my own legacy and what I want to be remembered for. I was given resources that made my journey easier. Years later, when I was granted the opportunity to take part in the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program alongside a group of selected writers and medics, I began working on a series of poems responding to health-related news stories in South Africa.”
“Being named a Young Mandela of the Future felt like stepping into shoes that were too large for me. I have read Long Walk to Freedom several times, and it makes me incredibly emotional each time because I know that some of those experiences would have broken me. I feel honoured to be considered a trailblazer in the industries that I work in, but I feel as if I fall short of the great man’s legacy. All I can do is try my best to live up to the ideals that he stood for.”
In some of the most moving poems in Daughter Wound, this admiration for past heroes is transferred onto her mother, a storyteller from whom she is still learning. In ‘Heritage’, she writes:
“I am rewriting my mother’s story on my face
See the quotation marks holding my smile together?
Even my laughter is hers, not mine…”
Masinga explains, “‘Heritage’ stems from a realisation that I had in my late 20s regarding my mother; not only am I beginning to look more like her as the years go by, but I have been singing the songs and retelling the stories that she sang and shared with me as a child and finding renewed comfort in them. Rather than merely learning from her, I am now gathering the knowledge she has shared with me so that I can share it with my future children. Heritage is about passing on a gift that can’t be quantified.”
This unquantifiable gift, passed on across generations, allows her to keep writing, as she explains in ‘Brown Wonder,’ a poem in which she poses questions to her younger, despairing self:
“Do you know
you are your mother’s favourite breathing thing?
You have taken your last breath many times
but she has prayed
for all these second
(and third)
Chances…”
Armed with this realisation, she can recognise herself, by the poem’s end, as a “golden brown wonder of a woman.”
In the days ahead, write a poem in which you pay tribute to a hero who has taught you difficult, necessary lessons.
The annual AVBOB Poetry Competition opens for submissions on 1 August 2024. Visit www.avbobpoetry.co.za today and familiarise yourself with the competition rules.