Summary: A collaborative lyric essay written in two voices across two continents, braiding personal memory with the slow violence of climate change, fracking, and water scarcity in Namibia and upstate New York. Moving between a father’s foresight, a cousin’s death, and a letter that never arrived, the essay meditates on inheritance, environmental grief, and the breath we leave behind in a world we are quietly making uninhabitable.
Description: Afrikaans for “ghost’s breath” is a co-authored lyric essay by Mercia Kandukira and Leslie Heywood published by the Center for Humans and Nature...
Read MoreSummary: This is Not an Epic opens with the impossibility of answering the Ovaherero question “who are you?” which is a question that traditionally demands a full genealogical recitation tracing one’s lineage to the genocide’s fallen ancestors. Unable to perform that recitation because genocide and displacement severed the family tree, the narrator calls her sister Mbukamuna from Binghamton, New York, piecing together fragments of their family history: a great-great-grandmother named Caroline who survived the genocide and lost a son, Kenaendo, in the flight. The essay moves between this telephone reconstruction, a series of dreams including the unearthing of a foremother’s corpse, and a surreal vision of dismembered torsos, and a waking conversation with the narrator’s partner about the fundamental problem of historical witnessing, what it means to encounter atrocity through archives and history books, rather than lived memory. The essay ends in grief, in the names of the author’s four siblings, each name a fragment of an inheritance the genocide made impossible to hold whole, and in the recognition that to write from scattered branches is not failure but the only honest form of testimony available to descendants of the dispossessed.
Description: This is Not an Epic (Alchemy Literary Magazine, 2022) takes its title from the Ovaherero tradition of genealogical self-introduction, a spoken perform...
Read MoreSummary: Juicy is a lyric essay that braids the end of a romantic relationship with an inventory of inherited and ongoing political grief — the Ovaherero genocide, colonial trophy collecting, the display of African human remains in Western museums, and environmental destruction in southern Africa. The essay challenges the separation of personal and political experience, arguing through form that intimate loss and collective trauma occupy the same emotional and historical territory. Central to the piece is a critique of institutional and academic language as a mechanism that aestheticizes violence while distancing itself from accountability. The essay ultimately turns toward the ethics and necessity of storytelling — what dies with us when we cannot speak, and what writing, told lovingly from the heart, can recover.
Description: Juicy (HerStry, 2022) is a lyric essay situated at the intersection of intimate memoir and postcolonial political critique. The essay moves associativ...
Read MoreSummary: Basters opens with the author’s mother urging her to conceive a mixed-race child with a white man , a request that appears, at first, absurd and painful, but which the essay gradually reveals as a survival instinct shaped by colonial violence. Moving between the author’s relationship with a German man in the United States, her mother’s deathbed in Outjo, the history of the Ovaherero and Nama Genocide, colonial-era racial hierarchies in Namibian schools and reservations, and the science of epigenetic trauma inheritance, the essay traces how the internalized hierarchies of German settler colonialism persist in the desires, fears, and self-perceptions of Ovaherero descendants. The figure of Jahohora, a kinswoman who rubbed stinging nettles on her skin to repel German soldiers in 1904, stands in direct contrast to the mother’s ambivalent permissiveness toward a German-blooded grandchild, and the essay reads that contrast not as contradiction but as the legible aftermath of a century of denial and dispossession. The essay concludes with the argument that Ovaherero and Nama trauma is not merely psychological but epigenetic, genetically inherited, structurally ongoing, and that the genocide continues wherever its denial does.
Description: Basters (Hamburg University Press, 2025) is a lyric essay published in Global Memories of German Colonialism, edited by Jürgen Zimmerer and Julian zu...
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