These Hands
by Makhosazana Xaba
(Timbila)
Poet Makhosazana Xaba’s collection, her first (and the result of her working in a writing group), has a strong strain of domestic struggle and violence. Xaba had a tortured family background and, in the first poem, she reprimands her father for his pernicious drinking habits, which eventually killed him. She describes her mixed feelings: she liked the song her father sang when inebriated, but also abhorred his drinking.
Xaba doesn’t only talk about the domestic issues. She also deals with poverty, democracy and other social subjects. As she says, ”I don’t predetermine what I write. I listen to voices in my head and honour them. I write poems that wish to be written, that speak to me in loud voices.”
Some of her poems are very direct and contemporary: And the Game Plays On, for instance, is a very sad account of a story that made headlines when a Limpopo boy, Tshepo Matloha, was murdered by white rugby players in the province. Another, The Silence of a Lifetime, is about rape and how it can recur in one woman’s lifetime.
These Hands is a collection of 52 poems containing different ideas from Xaba’s life experience. The title poem is about a journey that the writer’s hands have gone through. She deplores the fact that the hands have touched faeces, oozing wounds, mucus, guns, grenades, barbed wire, penises (masturbating) and vaginas. Now she’s quite relieved because the hands mostly caress keyboards and fondle pens and paper. Long may those hands write poetry!