Publishing Tips Archives – Inkazi Africa

The Grammar of Feeling

Inkazi Africa Editorial — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 13:26:14 +0000

The Poem is a Vessel for what cannot be carried in ordinary Speech

Inkazi Africa

There is a moment every writer knows.

One evening, seated on your balcony, you are reading back your own poem, or someone else’s, and you catch it: a comma where there should be a full stop.

A sentence that begins with ….And….

A verb that refuses to agree with its subject.

A fragment, lone and unapologetic, sitting on the page like a single stone in a dry-season field.

And you hover. Red pen in hand, or cursor blinking.

Do I fix this?

There is a thin line between maintaining the integrity of artistic writing, especially poetry, with its so-called grammatical errors, and correcting those errors while still retaining the poetic art. This is, perhaps, the most important editorial sidenote a literary platform committed to African voices can have at the back of its mind.

This whole idea begins in the griot’s throat.

Why Grammar Exists

Grammar is not the enemy of expression. It never was. Grammar is, at its most essential, a social contract, the agreement we make with one another to be understood. A shared map for navigating the territory of language.

The more you write, the more you realise that subject follows verb, punctuation marks the pauses our breath would take in speech and sentences complete themselves so that the listener arrives somewhere, not stranded in syntactic wilderness.

But the more you write, AGAIN, you learn that there are rules of grammar that were never handed down from a pure, eternal source. They were described to us, but not prescribed from actual human usage.

If , especially, you are looking at the English Grammar, you will realise that these rules were observed, catalogued, and debated in another geographical location, then handed down to us, Africans.

For most of African literary history, literature that was written in this grammar that was not our own was mostly broken, then frowned upon, then rejected.

"When a Kikuyu poet breaks English grammar, she may be importing the syntax of Kikuyu, its rhythms, its pauses, its logic of relation. All this is imported into a borrowed tongue which is not error. That is architecture of poetry"

Inkazi Africa

This is why the grammar question is especially alive on this continent. Our poets do not only break English grammar rules. They also bring other grammars to bear, the grammar of Kikuyu, Kiswahili, of Yoruba, of isiZulu, of Dholuo, and those grammars reshape the poem from the inside out.

African voices, African Syntax

To understand why grammatical “errors” in African poetry are often the most important parts of the poem, we need to sit with three poets whose work enacts this argument rather than merely stating it.

Love Cycle

Later he
will wear out his temper
ploughing the vast acres
of heaven and take it

out of her in burning
darts of anger. Long
accustomed to such caprice
she waits patiently

for evening when thoughts
of another night will
restore his mellowness
and her power
over him.

~ Chinua Achebe (Nigeria)

The House

Mother says there are locked rooms inside all women;

kitchen of lust,
bedroom of grief, bathroom of apathy.
Sometimes the men – they come with keys,
and sometimes, the men – they come with hammers.

Nin soo joog laga waayo, soo jiifso aa laga helaa,
I said Stop, I said No and he did not listen.

~ Warsan Shire (Somali/British)

Sisters

I see the wisdom of eternities
In ample thighs
Belying their presence as adornments
To the temples of my sisters
Old souls breathe
In the comfort of chocolate thickness
That suffocates Africa’s angels
Who dance to the rhythm
Of the universe’s womb
Though they cannot feel
Its origins in their veins

~ Lebogang Mashile (South Africa)

Achebe’s poetry, less celebrated than his fiction but equally precise, uses punctuation as power.

Shire’s signature is the lower-case beginnings of each stanza but carrying different weight in a Somali-British body. No capitals. No formal punctuation.

Mashile’s spoken-word roots mean her poems are scored for the body, not the page. Each line break is a breath, a beat, a moment of weight redistribution. Conventional sentence structure would compress these seven lines into two. That compression would destroy the cumulative physical effect, the felt sense of carrying something across generations. The “fragment” structure is not an error as it may seem, but a beautiful choreography.

Advice for Poets and Editors

On this continent, the question of intentionality is braided with the question of voice. African writers working in European languages are always already making decisions about whose grammar governs the poem.

When Ngugi wa Thiong’o argues for writing in African languages, he is making an argument about grammar at the deepest level, not punctuation, but the entire architecture of thought. When our poets bend English toward the cadences of their mother tongues, they are not failing English. They are enriching it.

For poets: know your rules before you break them. Grammatical knowledge gives you the baseline from which deviation becomes legible. Without the baseline, there is no tension, no music, no meaningful surprise.

Ask the poem what it needs. When you encounter a violation in your own draft, sit with it before correcting it. Does it do something? Does it create a sound, a rhythm, an ambiguity, a pause that a correct version would not?

For editors: the most dangerous editorial act is correcting everything toward an imagined standard of neutral correctness. Neutral correctness is the death of voice. And on a continent where our voices spent centuries being corrected toward colonial standards, the stakes of this are not merely aesthetic.

Distinguish between pattern and accident. One misplaced apostrophe may be a typo. Twenty of them, deployed consistently in moments of emotional intensity, may be a signature. Read the whole poem before you judge any single line.

Grammar and poetry are not at war. They never were. They are in dialogue, the oldest, most generative dialogue in human expression.

Grammar says: here is how we agree to be understood.

Poetry says: yes, and here is what happens in the space between agreements.

For African writers especially, the space between those agreements has always been where the most important things are said. In the break, the fragment, the unfinished sentence. In the lower-case i that refuses to make itself large. In the dash that holds open a wound the world would rather see sutured.

The best poems are not the ones that followed all the rules. They are the ones that made every choice with the full weight of craft, intention, and feeling behind them.

Rules, after all, are the grammar of what has been done before. A poem is the grammar of what needs to be said now.

Inkazi Africa

When you read a poem that violates the rules and still moves you, still finds you in the dark and names something unnamed, what is it, exactly, that you are responding to? The violation itself? Or the intelligence, the awareness, the trust, behind the choice to violate?

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The Weight of a Word: A Writers Guide to Language, Race and Reader Trust

Siona Lootu — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 15:41:14 +0000

We need to talk about descriptions.

Specifically, we need to talk about how we describe skin, and the subtle, often unintentional ways that language can reinforce harmful stereotypes, even in our favourite romance novels.

Recently, a specific line in a book by Elsie Silver sparked a necessary conversation in the bookish community. The description in question involves a young, white character with blond hair, described as having “a tan so dark that his knees almost appear dirty.”

On the surface, this might seem like a harmless way to describe a rugged, outdoorsy kid. But if we peel back the layers, this sentence exposes a deep-seated literary habit that equates darkness with uncleanliness.

Let’s unpack why this matters, why it hurts, and how we can do better.

The Burden of Historical Stereotypes

Language does not exist in a vacuum; it carries the weight of history.

The Colonial Gaze: Historically, colonial literature and racist propaganda frequently associated dark skin with impurity, hygiene deficits, or moral corruption (“dirty”).
The Reader Experience: For a reader from a marginalized community, encountering a tanned skin described as “dirty” creates an immediate dissonance. It stops the reading experience. Instead of seeing a “sexy cowboy,” the reader is forced to confront a racial microaggression.
Reinforcement of Bias: Even if unintentional, pairing “tan” and “dirty” reinforces a subconscious societal bias that equates whiteness with purity and darkness with degradation. When a narrative celebrates the “grit” of a white character but uses the same terminology to describe the appearance of a “blackness”, it risks validating these harmful associations.

Evaluating Authorial Intention vs. Narrative Execution

First, let’s look at the author’s likely intention. Elsie Silver was almost certainly trying to paint a picture of a “feral,” free-roaming childhood. We’ve all seen those kids—sun-bleached hair, scabby knees, running wild in the summer sun. The goal was to evoke a sense of ruggedness.

However, in literature, impact always outweighs intent.

The phrasing didn’t say his knees were dirty because of mud or grass stains. It said they looked dirty because the tan was dark. The sentence structure creates a direct causal link:

Darkness = Dirtiness.

Why This is Harmful (Even if the Character is White)

A common defence for lines like this is, “But the character is white! It can’t be racist.”

This is what critics call the “White Shield” Fallacy. While the character himself is not a person of colour, the imagery being used is rooted in anti-Black and anti-brown sentiment.

Reinforcing Colourism: For centuries, colonial standards of beauty have dictated that whiteness is “pure” and “clean,” while brownness is “stained” or “dirty.” When a book suggests that a deep tan looks like grime, it validates that worldview.

The Reader Experience: Imagine being a reader with naturally dark knees or elbows (a common biological trait for many people of colour due to hyperpigmentation). Reading that a dark skin tone “looks dirty” isn’t just a description of a fictional white boy; it reads as a judgment on your own body. It suggests that your natural skin needs to be washed off.

The Trust Gap

When an author, and by extension, their editorial team, lets a line like this slip through, it erodes trust.

For marginalized readers, reading a book like this is often an exercise in guarding oneself. You read waiting for the other shoe to drop, waiting for the text to remind you that you don’t belong in this fantasy. When a line conflates pigment with filth, it confirms that fear. It pulls the reader out of the romance and reminds them of the biases they face in the real world.

It also raises a question about the publishing process: Where were the sensitivity readers? Why did no one in the editing room pause at the equation of “dark” and “dirty”?

The “Loaded Words” Sensitivity Checklist

This isn’t about “cancelling” an author; it’s about asking for more nuance.
We can write vivid, rugged, and messy characters without relying on lazy, harmful tropes.

Here is a simple guide for writers (and a checklist for readers):

Separate Pigment from Grime: If a character is dirty, describe the mud, the dust, the oil, or the grass stains.

Describe Colour as Colour: If a character is tanned, use words that describe the shade—bronze, golden, deep umber, copper.

Check Your Similes: Ask yourself, “Does this comparison rely on a stereotype?” If you are comparing a skin tone to dirt, soil, or food in a way that creates a value judgment, delete it.

Broader Implications for Credibility and Reception

Words shape our reality. They have the power to validate us or alienate us. By decoupling darkness from dirtiness, we make room for a literary world where brown skin is described with the same beauty and neutrality as white skin.

We can love a book and still demand it does better.

Let’s keep pushing for that nuance.

For more, click on Inkazi Blogpost

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