Yellow Shade

Angifi Dladla

Lament for Kofifi Macu, Angifi Dladla’s second book of poems in English, was published in 2017, sixteen years after his first collection. The book shows Dladla making use of a wide range of forms, from lyrical to closely observed portraits, from elegiac to satirical, as well as poems inhabiting the African spirit realm.  His poetic voice, always clear and memorable, varies from poem to poem: at times public or bardic in tone, at times intimate and tender, at other times bitter with accusation.

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Lament for Kofifi Macu is Angifi Dladla’s second collection of poems in English and the title poem, which narrates the searing yearning of a young girl who longs for the return of Kofifi – an activist murdered by his handlers in exile – signals some of the central themes and stylistic devices in the book. The “lament” is not just the girl’s, but also the poet’s – for himself, and for those the poet speaks for in these poems, whom he calls the “double-wounded”, those betrayed by the new political and business elite post-1994. ‘Almighty Father,/ Healer of the double-wounded,/ hold this hand – charred/ in this freezing freedom’, the poet writes in “Prayer of the Wounded”. Dladla draws on different poetic forms and techniques – narrative, lyrical, eulogy, free verse, the impressive use of identical rhyme, the litany of praise poetry etc. – with frequent shifts in register, and in implied reader or audience, sometimes within the same poem.

– Alan Finlay