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Exploring identity: Sihle Ntuli's poetry navigates themes of belonging and home

In Owele, poet Sihle Ntuli embarks on a deeply personal return, not to a single place, but to a confluence of memory, language, and landscape. As rivers flow through the hills of KwaZulu-Natal, Ntuli follows their paths to the origins of his family and clan. Ntuli moves seamlessly between English and isiZulu, creating a collection that feels deeply personal. Paired with Samora Chapman's photography, Owele is more than just a book of poems — it's a visual and spiritual journey, searching for meaning beneath the surface of time, place, and identity. Read an excerpt below. *** Baw Baw (One for the Black Sheep) black sheep so willing to shear your own dark wool to convince the eyes gazing upon you that you too are worthy of love behold a thread unravelling a glass ceiling untouched hands burrowing beneath a heavy burden of proof all you have ever known was a golden child whose body blocked your sun, your thick black wool eclipsed at every turn black sheep for so long you've lived under the sun to the point that you've made peace with embodying a shadow if young lambs lose their way only the tender bleating of the ewe will lead them home a voice resonates with the ram in agony so fluent in the language of pain how different it all could have been if only for the nurturing Symposia at Bernard's Quartyard brother, if only you knew how this house came to be & don't you ask me how I define home – at least not for now, because your question is capable of moving me to tears. & as we sit here on these empty Black Label crates, consider how some have found home in cold barley, coating throats in white foam, pacified pariahs of struggle imagine if their Anglo-Saxon names were also forced upon us just so others could feel at home – like umkhulu, denied his birth name Shongani, becoming Bernard to the ones who so forcefully removed him. brother, what I mean to say is that KwaMashu was never our home, it was merely a place, where his body landed after being thrown his throne only claimed in the ceremony of his ancestral planting, deep into the soil while his spirit was being returned home, leaving the women of the house with the burden. ugogo and her daughters worked hard to turn this house into a home, this very house we've inherited – left to us after all but one died – in their memory, may we ensure its integrity is preserved. consider this house as compensation for the home umkhulu lost – his clenching mind unable to let go before his soul did with the kind of hurt that returns as soon as it is remembered. what is home if our neighbours only speak to me in English, oblivious to what the language has done? & so your question about home is one that is hard to answer, because when the pain comes, I always have to convince myself that I am a man who cannot feel a thing – who will not feel a thing – until suddenly I am overcome by the urge to disappear. DM