Linathi Makanda is a writer and artist based in South Africa. Her debut poetry collection, When No One Is Watching (Odyssey Books), has received both local and internatonal aclaim on how emotionally gripping it is. Her photographic works have been featured in international publications such as Vogue Italia, Color Bloc Magazine as well as Michigan’s Saginaw Valley State University art journal, Cardinal Sins. Her visual, Seasons, which blends elements of art direction, poetry, and videography has been featured by New Plains Review, a platform by the College of Liberal Arts at the University Of Central Oklahoma. This body of work was also recently selected to screen at the Lift Off Online Film Festival in the UK under Short Films. She has appeared on local platforms and publications such as Hear My Voice, and Drum Magazine. Linathi continues to venture into her craft driven by passion and hopes to continue exploring other avenues of creative expression.

Precious Okpechi: Hello Linathi, it’s good to have you as our featured poet for the month. First, I would like to talk about how intentional you are about being vulnerable and intimate with your readers. How do you reconcile being emotionally honest in your poems?

Linathi Makanda: Thank you so much for holding space for me and my work. I love that you started with this question in particular. 

By nature, I have a fragile and sensitive spirit, and for a long time, I didn’t feel understood in my fragility. I had spent much of my time hiding and wishing it away. But when I started writing, it felt as though I could fall apart in whatever ways I wanted to. Because of this new knowledge, the more I grew into writing, the more I realized that I couldn’t possibly imagine any other version of myself stepping into my poems. I couldn’t imagine offering anything else to my readers. It has been liberating to extend these parts of myself I once held on to with so much shame to other people who might relate.

Precious Okpechi: My mother fed me these words / And now I am feeding them to you. / In the same room you lay in pain, in the rubble, your healing is in the air. / All you have to do is breathe…

These lines contain an aspect of communal healing: coming together as a collective, identifying generational issues, and helping one another ease through. Can you share with me your thoughts on poetry as a form of healing?

Linathi Makanda: Poetry to me means falling apart and also coming together and these are two places I believe both the writer and the reader often go to within the genre. I see poetry as an emotional adventure. You go into it not really knowing exactly what you are looking for, but you always find so many things within. 

So as a form of healing, I feel poetry challenges us to contemplate, dream, and unpack the full spectrum of who we are and can be, in a way that does justice to how we feel and our experiences. As well, the act of writing or reading poetry lessens the sense of isolation we have experienced as a result of what we have gone through because we realize there are others out there who have gone through the same thing.

Precious: You co-host a podcast “And That’s The Chat,” and in one of your episodes “Love Me Tender: The Art of Giving Into Love,” you talk about how difficult and yet important loving “fully” is. I would like to hear more about this?

Linathi: I believe you only love as deeply as you’ve loved and gone deep with yourself. That’s the tricky part. I feel we need love as a governing force because it can transport us to the highest version of ourselves and that is something that reflects in many aspects of our existence. 

So, when I speak about loving fully being difficult but necessary, I mean exactly that. How much will do we have to dig deep within ourselves? How much of ourselves do we know and love in order to guarantee ourselves and others the full experience of what love is?

Precious: Please share a few lines from one of your favourite love poems and tell me why you love it so.

Linathi: I love the simplicity of longing portrayed in Trista Mateer’s Oranges. It begins with these lines:

I wake up in the middle of the night
and I text you things like “why aren’t you in my bed?
come eat a bowl of oranges off of me.”
I don’t know what this means.
I don’t even know what I’m trying to say.
Something about you and me in bed
with sticky fingers
and wet mouths
is appealing to me even in half-sleep

The nostalgia that comes with missing a lover can be stirred up by just about anything. I also love the sensuality with which Trista uses innuendos. The words in this poem make me want to call my lover and spill my heart out to them, but it also evokes in me a sadness that reminds me of what it feels like to be a longing body, desiring things that are somehow out of reach at the time.

Precious: Can you talk more about the celebration of womanhood in these lines of yours:

A woman with skin like yours / With the kind of magic to make something out of nothing. / You possess the same power. / You are water, a healing component / For yourself and for others

Linathi: Women are ever so overlooked and with my own experiences of living in the shadows, embracing womanhood has also become a central part of my work. I want to write to life the parts of myself that lived in the shadows, and also give to other women, who may not have the words, a way to find themselves.

This is a Proverb

One thing at a time, Nhanha
Grandmother says. You are laughing, a spoonful of supper in your mouth.

One thing at a time, Nhanha
You close your mouth this time
To hum, still.

Each time you carried Grandmother’s groceries, you did all at once
Your little hands always dreaded going back and forth.

You think about that a lot now,
How you could never just pause
If for a while, brief as the silence before an amen
How, even on days when people pointed at the grains of sawdust
on your hair, remnants of the cord you share with Cain
You carried them with you – stones weighing down your back pocket.
You let out no word
You let out no scream
You dragged your way through this life.

And now, as you slowly learn to become,
A woman desperately after her own healing
Taking two steps forward, one step back. Again.
You think back to Grandmother’s words:

One thing at a time, Nhanha,
Your heart hurts here and here, give it time
Do not rush, what’s there will come to you.
Let love, wait, and watch life return to your skin.
You are a garden in need of attention.