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The Abyss Of Despair
Paperback
Publisher: Thembani Onceya
Published: Feb 26 2026
Pages: 160
Weight: 0.42
Height: 0.37 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
What does it mean to survive the abyss? This interdisciplinary volume offers an inquiry into despair as a lived, gendered and historical reality in South Africa. Comprising thirty poems and six academic essays, it moves from affective testimony to African-centered theory.
It begins with the poetics of gender-based violence, archiving the psychic afterlife of violation. It then re-centers Africa as epistemic ground and maternal geography, reclaiming love and the erotic as sites of restoration.
The final section undertakes a comparative study in African philosophy, drawing on Ancient Kmt, amaXhosa thought, and the Balobedu Rain Queenship of Modjadji. Through Maat, through umntu ngumntu ngabantu, and through Modjadji as a living paradigm of female sovereignty and ecological custodianship, it argues that despair is a rupture of relationality - between self, community, ancestors and cosmos. Creative expression and Indigenous knowledge are thus presented not as separate domains, but as contiguous modes of survival and theory-making.
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