Writing Craft 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?

The post The Grammar of Feeling appeared first on Inkazi Africa.

The Name Behind the Story: A Complete Guide to Pen Names

Siona Lootu — Thu, 14 May 2026 18:02:05 +0000

Before a reader encounters your prose, your characters, or your ideas, they encounter your name.

It sits on the cover, tops the byline, and becomes the first signal of what kind of story they’re about to enter. So what happens when the name on your birth certificate doesn’t feel like the right name for your writing life? The most important thing you have to deal with then is:

Should I use my real name, or is it time for a pseudonym?

That’s where pen names come in.

In the world of literature and poetry, a pen name (or nom de plume) is not just a fake name, but a branding tool, a shield for privacy, and sometimes, a creative persona that allows a writer to speak more freely.

Before picking a name, it’s important to understand your “why.”

See, the word
pseudonym comes from the Greek pseudos (false) and onoma (name).
But framing it as “false” misses the point.

A pen name is often the truest version of a writer’s creative self, unburdened by family expectations, professional constraints, or the weight of an identity that belongs to a different part of life.

Pen Names Through the Ages

Writers have been using pseudonyms for as long as writing has existed in public form.

Mary Ann Evans published her novels, including Middlemarch, one of the greatest ever written, as George Eliot in the 19th century. Her reason was sharp and pragmatic: she feared critics would dismiss her work as lightweight “feminine fiction.” By adopting a male pen name, she ensured her books were judged on their merit alone.

Around the same time, three sisters in Yorkshire made a similar calculation. Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë published their early poetry as Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, gender-neutral names chosen, as Charlotte later wrote, because they were “averse to personal publicity.

Charles Dodgson, an Oxford mathematics lecturer, published his whimsical fantasy novels under the name Lewis Carroll. The distance between his professional life and his imaginative one was, perhaps, the very space that made Wonderland possible.

More recently, Stephen King published prolifically as Richard Bachman to test whether his success was tied to talent or fame. (It was both, but the experiment itself was telling.) And thriller writer Nora Roberts became J.D. Robb when she began a new futuristic series, allowing readers to clearly distinguish between her two distinct bodies of work.

The pattern is consistent across centuries: writers use pen names to navigate a world that doesn’t always make space for the full range of who they are.

How to Choose the Right Pen Name

Choosing a pen name is a creative act in itself. Here are principles to guide the process:

You have to start with purpose. Ask yourself, why do I want a pen name?

The reason shapes the choice. Privacy needs suggest something entirely distinct from your real name. Genre-branding suggests something evocative of your subject matter.

Second, you have to consider your genre’s conventions. Literary fiction carries different naming conventions than romance or horror. Research the names of successful authors in your space and let that inform your choices.

The other aspect to consider is memorability, availability and searchability. Say it aloud. Spell it out. Google it. Can readers find you easily? Is the name distinct enough to stand out, but accessible enough to remember?

And finally, make sure it fits. This is subtle but important. You will be signing this name, saying it in interviews, building your entire public writing identity around it. It should feel like you — or at least, the you that you want to be as a writer.

Whether you publish under your birth name, a carefully chosen pseudonym, or something in between, that name becomes the vessel for your work. Readers will attach their emotions to it, their memories, their loyalty. Booksellers will search for it. Librarians will file by it. Future generations may know you by it alone.

So choose deliberately. Choose with awareness of the creative freedom you need, the audiences you serve, the privacy you require, and the story you want your name itself to tell.

A pen name is never just a marketing decision. It is an act of authorship, perhaps the first, and most defining, one you will ever make.

Have you considered using a pen name?

Share your thoughts, questions, or your own pen name story in the comments below. And if you found this article useful, explore more writing and publishing insights on Inkazi Africa.

Learn more about pen names

Click Here

The post The Name Behind the Story: A Complete Guide to Pen Names appeared first on Inkazi Africa.