Category: Book

ABOUT THE BOOK

Griefseed is a gift, an offering from the pen of Malika Ndlovu that seeks to transform the ways we think about and process grief. Multidisciplinary in scope, the text includes poems, personal essays, images, and reflections on grief that punctuate the life story of the poet, offered here as medicine. These creative pieces function as both a window onto an individual woman’s life as she has journeyed with, through and beyond grief; as well as a mirror, inviting the reader to see their own lives and losses reflected within Ndlovu’s. This invitation to sit with grief, hold it, look it in the eye, and tend to it, is also an invocation to consider multigenerational relationships – how grief cements our relationships to the past, to ancestors, to descendants. To note where grief echoes along kinship lines, spreading itself throughout the branches of family trees. How centuries of grief from our grandmothers and grandfathers lodge themselves in our own bodies, crying out for release, relief and processing. If we dare to take up this visceral knowing, grief can transform us, becoming a generative site for renewal, rethinking, recasting. Ndlovu’s words are a balm. She writes in community with sisters, ancestors, children, grandchildren and spirit guides from a beyond to which we are all connected, and to which her work creates pathways. Her work and words heal. Accept the offering. Within the seed of grief lies transformation, transmutation; a settling into the knowledge of the connectedness and oneness of all.

— BARBARA BOSWELL, author of The Comrade’s Wife, Grace: A Novel, And Wrote My Story Anyway: Black South African Women’s Novels as Feminism and editor of Lauretta Ngcobo: Writing as the Practice of Freedom

Publication date: February 2025

ISBN: 978-1-0672224-9-9

Cover photograph and other photographs in the book by Coral Bijoux.

Cover design: Monique Cleghorn

Respondents: Makhosazana Xaba, Janet Aalfs, Hisla Bates, Sarah Malotane Henkeman, Gcobani Qambela, Lindy ‘Gogo Masechaba’ Dlamini, Iman Rappetti, June Bam, FreeQuency, Coral Bijoux, Peter Fox, Pregs Govender, Fiona Ross, Barbara Boswell

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

MALIKA LUEEN NDLOVU is an internationally published South African poet, playwright, performer and arts project manager. Her poetry collections include Born in Africa but (1999), Womb to World: A Labour of Love (2001), Truth is Both Spirit and Flesh (2008), Invisible Earthquake: A woman’s journal through stillbirth (2009), and CLOSE (2017). Her published plays are A Coloured Place (1998) and Sister Breyani (2010).