Books
The Swan Isle (2035)
greyheart
"Trane was the Father, Pharoah was the Son, I am the Holy Ghost" Albert Ayler
At once poetry and an ars poetica, a novel and its undoing, songlike and shattered, greyheart attacks language's fissures to explode its most enigmatic dualisms: the sublime and the monstrous, love and hate, freedom and enslavement, black and white.
The third and final part of his cardiac arresting prose trilogy, greyheart is also the most blooadsoaked and heartfelt. As Rampolokeng says it: "greyheart is no novel, poetry/short story collection/ anything like that. it is my manifesto (my ultimate statement to the world. nobody has to 'like' it. in it i 'speak' my being."
Born in Orlando West, Soweto, in Johannesburg, Lesego Rampolokeng is a poet, novelist, playwright, filmmaker and writing teacher. He is the author of several pioneering collections of poetry including Talking Rain (1993), The Bavino Sermons (1999), Head on Fire (2012) and A Half Century Thing (2015). He is also the author of four novels, several plays, screenplays and has collaborated on albums, performances and recordings with several musicians.
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Jah Hills
A Novel
Jah Hills is alone in the Kwafindoda bush, waiting for the elders to come, burn ibhuma and deliver him home when he is tricked, captured and turned into isithunzela. A creature trapped in a wardrobe by day and only freed at night, to move between the realm of the living and the dead. One night, he narrowly escapes and finds his way back. But home is no longer home...
Set between Kwafindoda, where the nature is alive and ghosts exist even before someone is dead, and South Africa's gritty urban townships, Jah Hills explores the conflict between life and death, folklore and philosophy, so as to write the Unlanguaged World of today. A breathless journey, at once fevered and visionary, it invites the reader to find wilderness and brutality in the banal, the beautiful in the bizarre and to seek answers, not in the sum, but in the derangement of its many seething parts.
Unathi Slasha is a writer from Despatch, Khayamnandi. He is the author of the novella Jah Hills and the chapbook Much with the Dead & Mum with the Dying, or: Rigidities of Rationalism, Camaraderie Criticism & Contemporary South African Literature. His work has been published in several South African and international literary journals. His work is an attempt to reimagine and subvert Nguni folklore to write what he coined as The Unlanguaged World.
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A Half Century Thing
Essays
Published in 2015, on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday and a quarter of a century after his debut Horns for Hondo (1990), Lesego Rampolokeng's A Half Century Thing is a devoted heresy, a sermon on the word, on politics and aesthetics that challenges what poetry does, what it can do, even what it is willing to address as a form.
"Lesego Rampolokeng’s latest collection reveals a poet who is adept at harsh, harrowing imagery and flights of sonic beauty." Gwen Ansell
Born in Orlando West, Soweto, in Johannesburg, Lesego Rampolokeng is a poet, novelist, playwright, filmmaker and writing teacher. He is the author of several pioneering collections of poetry including Talking Rain (1993), The Bavino Sermons (1999), Head on Fire (2012) and A Half Century Thing (2015). He is also the author of four novels, several plays, screenplays and has collaborated on albums, performances and recordings with several musicians.
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