Mishka Hoosen
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The girl who then feared to sleep
R120.00Angifi Dladla
The girl who then feared to sleep is Angifi Dladla’s first book of poems in English. In an imagistic voice, Dladla looks back to the last decades of apartheid, including the violent states of Emergency and the necklace killings by township ‘comrades’. Alongside these upheavals are poignant poems of dreams, childhood, family and the school where he taught at the time.
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Dladla has a great capacity to live with uncertainty and pain, and his poems reflect this. He is one of the few South African poets prepared to engage fully with the trauma of violence and apartheid in a direct descriptive way, while remaining open to the vulnerability as well as the possibility of the present. This openness allows him to redefine his relationship to both past and present. His awareness of the true violence and tension of post-apartheid society is liberating […] For him, revolution begins with a turbulent but necessary journey of self-discovery, encompassing introspection, dreams and heightened consciousness.
– Kyle Allen
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Call it a difficult night
R220.00Mishka Hoosen
Call it a difficult night is a story about madness. Using anecdotes, poems, dialogue, and fragments of historical research, it follows a nonlinear path in tracing the life of its narrator/protagonist. Institutionalised after a ‘final break’, a young woman remembers in sharp detail disturbing childhood visions, which had become overwhelming by the time she was at school and university. When she finally gets a diagnosis – temporal lobe epilepsy – a doctor explains that she is likely to be either demented or brain dead by the time she is 30.
Set mainly during her short spell in the mental hospital, the story proceeds through encounters with nurses, doctors, other patients and also the friends who visit her – many of them frightened by her state of mind. These encounters, painful but quite often funny, take us deeper into the feelings of the narrator and further into the workings of a mental health system which generates definitions of madness. She is defiant in her noncompliance and deeply suspicious of her treatment. She is sure that her hallucinations, dangerous and terrifying as they are, are preferable to the dulling effects of her medication and its theft of her creativity.
Call it a difficult night is a novel brimming with empathy, observation and lyricism, by an author who has the capacity to describe great joy and great suffering.