Griefseed is a gift, an offering from the pen of Malika Ndlovu that seeks to transform the ways we think about and process grief.

Multidisciplinary in scope, the text includes poems, personal essays, images, and reflections on grief that punctuate the life story of the poet, offered here as medicine. These creative pieces function as both window onto an individual woman’s life as she has journeyed with, through and beyond grief; as well as a mirror, inviting the reader to see their own lives and losses reflected within Ndlovu’s.

This invitation to sit with grief, hold it, look it in the eye, and tend to it, is also an invocation to consider multigenerational relationships – how grief cements our relationships to the past, to ancestors, to descendants. To note where grief echoes along kinship lines, spreading itself throughout the branches of family trees. How centuries of grief from our grandmothers and grandfathers lodge themselves in our own bodies, crying out for release, relief and processing. If we dare to take up this visceral knowing, grief can transform us, becoming a generative site for renewal, rethinking, recasting.