There has been important work on Black South African women's poetry and the ways that experience, the body and memory are central to its formal, political and ethical commitments. This essay is laced with these traces; they reflect my location as a non-citizen South African Black woman, teacher, writer and poet. But this essay is also much more.

The dreamland

My daughter sits like my great-grandmother Esther.

She does it like she knew her and like she breathes her spirit back to life each time she folds one leg over the other, ending up with them flat on the ground in a way that seems impossible. But if you are a child descendant of Esther, you know how. This is how my daughter sits.

My great-grandmother breathes warm air against my ear, says nothing. I know that she is deeply grateful that I bring a daughter who sits in a way so close to her deepest expression.

She breathes deeply in gratitude for the angel-light born to us. My grandfather, her son Edgar, laughs. His father, Isaac, says nothing. Always. Heartbroken perhaps?

Or perhaps it is always and only my wish for the dead, who left scraps of kin strewn across territories, leaving us only the explanation of national borders to gather our sense of being. Perhaps they left nothing because they had no other option. Any other explanation feels too cruel.

In Conscripts of Modernity, David Scott talks about the feeling that I describe as cruel, as a problem of narrative. For Scott, anti-colonial movements rely on the narrative of overcoming colonialism in articulating demands for a better future, and that when this future of freedom arrives, it can only be understood as an overcoming. These stories of overcoming make the history of the nation, and its time of independence the only story that we know. And it seems that all we then have is a repetition of the same narrative of overcoming.

Panashe Chigumadzi begins These Bones Will Rise Again with a reflection on the coup-not-coup that saw President Robert Mugabe finally deposed after 30 years in as president. She reads this moment as a ‘Fourth Chimurenga’.