Kumukanda by Kayo Chingonyi (2017): a man raised in Britain feels unfinished because he never went through his Zambian father's people's initiation, and grew up instead through grief.
Chingonyi's Zambian heritage and the Luvale initiation, the three six-line stanzas and closing questions, key quotations, and the poems it compares well with.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'Since I haven't danced among my fellow initiates', 'Tata's people would think me unfinished', 'a child who never sloughed off the childish estate', 'in order to die and come back grown', 'I was raised in a strange land, by small increments', 'when I bathed my mother the days she was too weak', 'to dress my mother's body', 'If my alternate self, who never left, could see me', 'this need to speak with a tongue that isn't mine', 'my father's father and my father's father's father'.
Form: three six-line stanzas of long, unrhymed lines; two statements and two closing questions, with the repeated 'father's father' reaching back through the generations.
Structure: the initiation he missed, the 'small increments' of grief by which he grew up in Britain, and an imagined meeting with the self who stayed in Zambia.
Context: Chingonyi was born in Zambia in 1987 and moved to the UK at six, and the poem is from his first collection, Kumukanda (2017), which won the Dylan Thomas Prize; the mukanda, or kumukanda, a Luvale initiation in which boys of 8 to 12 live apart in a bush camp, a symbolic death as children, and come home as men.
Compares well with Jamaican British (a dual heritage and a father's people), My Mother's Kitchen (a mother and what is inherited) and I Remember, I Remember (a childhood seen from adulthood).
