Weeping Becomes a River

By: Siphokazi Jonas

Narrated by: Siphokazi Jonas

Penguin Random House South Africa presents an immersive, poetic and mythical audio journey rooted in traditional South African storytelling.

Weeping Becomes a River, narrated by award-winning author and performer Siphokazi Jonas, weaves seemingly discordant worlds, rooted in her experiences of growing up in an Afrikaans dorpie, attending an English boarding school, and going on annual holidays to a village emaXhoseni during the transition years of South Africa’s democracy.

Migrating between forms, between poetry and intsomi, she navigates the waters of tradition, religion, intergenerational experiences of rural and urban spaces, and the ways in which family dynamics affect the body. She is not only a referee of the raging tensions within her, but she also pieces together a language for pathways of leaving and returning.

Her poems grapple with the past, the present, and possible futures without forgetting that “the body is marked territory from birth, and the scent of it never leaves.”

Recorded by: Creafulence

Sound design: Elvis Sibeko

Mixing and mastering: ES Studios

“Unonkala wadidiyela” sung by: Zimbini

©2024 Penguin Random House South Africa (P)2025 Penguin Random House South Africa

Beautiful, just beautiful

I decided to purchase Siphokazi Jonas's "Weeping Becomes a River" from Audiobooks. I adore #audiobooks, but I’m often cautious when it comes to African texts. Too many times I’ve encountered readings that flatten the linguistic, rhythmic, and cultural textures that can only be carried by someone who knows the language, the land, and the people from the inside.

Jonas is the complete opposite of that experience. She animates her poems with a presence that feels almost impossible to capture in words. Her vocal inflection, the emotional registers she moves through, and her exquisite #isiXhosa pronunciation elevate this audiobook into something luminous. It’s one of those rare audiobooks where the performance becomes part of the poetry’s meaning.

And as someone who teaches French, I had a particular fondness for Conversation Patterns. The image of “tripping on conjugations and quitting” French is painfully familiar. I know many of my students will recognise themselves in that moment and smile in solidarity.
If you’re looking for something powerful, tender, and beautifully rendered, this is it.

I cannot recommend this collection, and especially the audiobook, highly enough.

it's the writing, it's the storytelling... it's the experience for me!

having read this work and sat with the different elements for a while now, i had not expected to be more blown away. Siphokazi carries us with the gentle allure that is the theft of ixhalanga. now we are here. not concentrating. stealing time from our work and our lives..searching frantically for our tongues, spring cleaning our own experiences, smelling samoosas and left with no land... only poems. and a river that reminds us every time we try to go home... that asinankabi. oh my dear heart!

even the glossary has me undone!!! "bring yourself into the room by listing your genealogy" i mean!!!!

More than a book, it is an experience

Not only is Siphokazi’s writing robust and expansive, this audiobook let’s one into what i think is the intended full experience of poems and stories. There insights I wouldn’t have gotten If I’d only read the book. The sonic scape makes the experience that more colourful and enjoyable.