WITSIES WITH THE EDGE
[BA Hons 2005]
Saaleha Idrees Bamjee Winner of the 2020 Ingrid Jonker Prize for English Poetry for her collection Zikr (uHlanga Press)
Images: Saaleha Bamjee
The prize is awarded in every alternate year to the best debut in English. It was instituted after the death of the respected South African poet in 1965. Multi-talented Witsie Saaleha Idrees Bamjee grew up in Azaadville, on the West Rand of Johannesburg. She has a MA in Creative Writing from Rhodes University and won the Writivism Short Story Prize in 2014. She is an accomplished photographer and food blogger who has worked as a journalist and graphic designer. She says “Zikr is a remembrance; it is a repetition or devotion. It is an awareness of something bigger than you, an awareness of the divine and even if you don’t believe, it is just an awareness.” Her poems are honest, poignant and humorous about what it means be independent in a world of traditions. In The Good Life she writes: “Good girls clean chickens/ love their grannies/marry well/cry in cupboards/dust under dressers/don't visit empty-handed.” In Women on Beaches she writes: “The first bathing suit was a wooden house wheeled into the sea. They used to sew weights into hemlines. Drowning was a kind of modesty.”
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