If a Shakespearean actor, a Christian missionary and an isiXhosa praise poet walked into a bar, their conversation would sound something like the poems in this collection.

Siphokazi Jonas is a weaver of seemingly discordant worlds; growing up in an Afrikaans dorpie during the transition years of a newly democratic South Africa and going on annual holidays to a village made this a necessity. Her work as a spoken word poet often fuses poetry, theatre and film, and she brings this genre-mixing to the page by using the intsomi form to weave the narrative of her poems together.

Jonas’s poems explore the impact of linguistic and cultural alienation as a black learner in former Model C schools in the 1990s and early 2000s. She is not only a referee of the internal war between isiXhosa and English within her, but she pieces together a language for leaving and returning between the past and the present, and a possible future. Her poems ask questions about navigating tradition, religion, migration between rural and urban spaces, and how families choose to make their own culture. Weeping Becomes a River is a timely reflection on the cost of being the early test subjects of South Africa’s democratic project.