A History of Disappearance

Description

This debut collection feels as though it should be sung. Many of the poems resonate with an internal music, achieved through strong rhythmic verses and gentle repetition. The titles, too, point us to music, one poem is a “hymn”, another a “song”. Lubala’s focus is on migration, loss, violence and pain – hard subjects, but so tenderly handled that some of the pieces give the impression of lullaby.
The poet’s own journeys, from the Democratic Republic of Congo to South Africa, to Ivory Coast and back to South Africa, are reflected in her verse: “I came up thin/strained across three countries”. She resists, however, a simple narrative of paradise lost and the hostility of the host country. While the poems yearn for home, and document multiple forms of violent exclusion in unfamiliar places, they do not shy away from the complexities and ambivalences of home itself.

Indeed, home is about “the glory of the trees” but it is also a place where “a jug held white birds of paradise/still as my father’s rage”. Home is “a narrow bed”. Home is a place of solace but also of violence, recalled in fragments and images: “My uncle/gone some twenty years/telephones at dinner to tell me/he was once a child soldier”. Thus, in “A burial hymn” we receive the prayer: “Oh Lord/that I belonged to any land but this/ that I could not read the currents/that the dirt knew nothing of me.”

– From a review by Shari Daya