Khulile Nxumalo
ten flapping elbows, mama is a poem series composed of several different elements, styles and voices, and its concern is mainly (though not solely) with being black in South Africa in the 10 years of transition since the 1994 elections. Nxumalo writes: ‘I have tried to be […] aware of style and form all the time, especially when trying to make language do new things. In what I call psycho-narration, I try to write beyond the understanding that the “inside of one’s head” and “the objective world” are really distinct worlds. This is a form I have grown to love more since I started preferring the long poem format that sits on a conversational tone. It’s a multi-vocal way of writing or telling stories in a less authoritative way, a kinda voice democracy in the poem.’
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[Nxumalo] wishes to occlude the distinction between “what’s reality out there and what’s inside my head,” constructing a mood of uncertainty around the conventional first person narrator of lyric poetry: in order that his poetry should become, in his words, “anti-lyrical,” and thus complicate reader’s relationship to the poems’ protagonists, particularly the first-person narrators.
– Kelwyn Sole, Scrutiny2
