Sue Nyamnjoh
LIVING IN FULL
What creative endeavours are you considering for 2026? As you contemplate new projects and recommit to old ones, do you wish you could tap into the spontaneous energy of children?
As we celebrate International Day of Education on 24 January, the AVBOB Poetry Project celebrates the courageous, life-affirming work of Sue Nyamnjoh, a young Cameroonian-born poet whose work embraces the full range of human experience. In ‘bone apple tea’, a poem from her debut anthology, (un)ravelling (Langaa, 2023), she writes:
I want an appetite for life
so voracious
it puts
the gluttony of capitalism to shame.
“It was only as I was gathering the poems for the anthology that I began to see how varied the thread of emotion was,” Nyamnjoh says. “But then, the variation makes sense when I consider that the poems were written over a period of four years. It would be uncommon not to feel the full spectrum of emotions. I believe that accessing human emotions is essential. The experience of feeling in full is necessary for continued survival. Selective numbness is a myth.”
While (un)ravelling explores emotions from despair and loneliness to resistance and the stirring of new love and desire, many readers will find Nyamnjoh’s different evocations of childhood most moving. In ‘petite fille’, for instance, she addresses a younger version of herself as follows:
Little girl
Promise me
You’ll return to that wide toothy grin
Swear to me
You’ll leap again
With that spring in your step
Give me your word
Cross your heart
And hope to die
“I actually can’t remember how I wrote that poem,” Nyamnjoh says. “I think I might have been looking at a childhood photograph of me. As I remember, I was making one of those extravagant gestures that come so easily to children who are too young to experience self-consciousness and shame. I wanted to reach back to that sense of playfulness, of not being burdened by the world in any way.”
Other poems emphasise the supportive networks that make such free-spiritedness possible. In ‘have you eaten?’, after claiming a proud heritage in which tales of brave deeds are passed on from father to child, she suddenly collapses the reader’s expectations: “All this is untrue.” Instead, she acknowledges the importance of stability and quiet resilience:
Ours was a
‘Have you eaten?’ kind of love.
The kind which left my fees paid, my stomach full and my body clothed.
Ours was a love that
made sure there was a roof above my head
and it did not leak.
As for future plans, Nyamnjoh is already writing towards a new anthology and imagining fresh contexts for her work.
“Right now, I’m creating without expectation, rediscovering the joy of writing and falling in love with words all over again. I’m reading. I’m pretty sure there will be another collection in the not-too-distant future. And then, I’m really interested in collaborating with creators in other disciplines. Earlier this year I worked with Zwide Ndwandwe on a show we called Strings and Words, and he played electric bass and designed soundscapes for some of my new poems. I’m interested in exploring poetry in motion through dance collaborations. I want my poems to live fully and to move between realms with nimble footedness. And I would love to make (un)ravelling more accessible and release it as an audiobook at some point.”
In the next few days, write a poem in which you describe the kinds of support you experienced as a young child. Which aspects of love and care were expressed and emphasised, and which were not?
The annual AVBOB Poetry Competition closed at 23:59 on 30 November 2025 and reopens in 2026. Visit www.avbobpoetry.co.za and register to enter.