While The World Was Burning

by Nkateko Masinga

People will always ask you what you are doing to stop the fire when the world starts burning. And you will look at what you have and wonder what you can possibly do to fight the flames. But what can a stick do in a fire except be burned by it? What can a clay pot do in a fire except to melt in it? And in such helplessness, when our small offerings only fan the flames, what do we have besides one another? How do we survive except to become water for each other?

This offering speaks of the way we hold each other and are held while the world is burning. How we escape fires. How we become water for others, for ourselves.

33 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 26, 2017

About the author

Nkateko Masinga is an award-winning South African writer and scholar. She is a 2019 Fellow of the Ebedi International Writers Residency, a 2018 Mandela Washington Fellow and a Golden Key Scholar. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2018 and her work has received support from Pro Helvetia Johannesburg and the Swiss Arts Council. In 2019, she co-won the Brittle Paper Anniversary Award. Nkateko is the director of the Internship Program at Africa In Dialogue, as well as the founder and managing director of NSUKU Publishing Consultancy. She is a graduate of the University of Iowa's 2021 International Writing Program (IWP) and served as the guest editor of the ‘Please See Me’ Summer Supplement, comprised of work by fellow IWP alumni. In 2022 she was selected by News24 as one of South Africa's 30 Young Mandelas of the Future. Nkateko's poetry has been translated into French, Bengali and Tamil. Her latest body of work, titled “Daughter Wound”, is forthcoming with Hazel Press in the UK.

Reviews

[Ashwin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love Nkateko Priscilla Masinga’s work. It does that thing, so hard to explain because it cannot possibly be re-manufactured, where it allows for so much to enter. It does not resist moving in and through and all the way between a mind, a heart, a soul, a world, a country, a body. And I love how Masinga takes the poems from that place of wanting answers to immediately offering questions.

[Nyakallo Maleke · Rating 4 out of 5]

delicate poems. Reading them felt like having a conversation with a girlfriend and a sister.