Dead Rats

by Sitawa Namwalie

It smells of death.
It smells of death in my car.
It smells of rotting dead rats.
My old car is putrid with the smell of dead rats.
They decompose slowly, slowly somewhere in the body of my car.

The stench cloys, hangs on the air, moist, ripe.
I see them in my mind, six-day-old rat carcasses oozing secretions;
Dead flesh wriggles with hundreds of white maggots gorging on dilapidated flesh.
I cannot ignore the smell; it unsettles my mind.

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Inside Photography: Lidudumalingani

by Lydia Kasese

South African writer Lidudumalingani is a person of extraordinary talent.  He was awarded the Caine Prize for his short story ‘Memories We Lost’ and the Miles Morland Foundation Scholarship in 2016, making him the first person to accomplish that fete in a single year; something that other writers can only wish. Apart from writing and film-making, Lidudumalingani also has an eye for photography and he sometimes merges these art forms to tell incredible stories.
In this interview, he talks to Enkare Review’s Nonfiction editor, Lydia Kasese, about his photography on Enkare Review, his writing, and things in-between.

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When Man Becomes Water

by Lidudumalingani

After the two poets, Clint Smith and Pages Matam, launch into their powerful poem, ‘Flash’, reciting the opening line together, “Sometimes I stalk myself on Facebook,” followed by a short stanza, such that each poet recites only a single line, the poem begins. The function of the opening stanzas have the feeling of only existing to interrupt the permanence of silence, the moment a room falls silent in anticipation of the performance and so the sentences work as a way to ensure that the entire audience takes a breath at the same time, that nobody is left behind. It is when Smith begins the next stanza that things get interesting. Smith says, “Then I come across images from the year I spent living in South Africa, a place where I fell in love with photography but struggled with the fine line between capturing my own experience and exploiting someone else’s suffering.”

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Deuteronomy or Book of Dust

by Umar Abubakar Sidi

An excerpt from ‘The Poet of Dust’

in the pantheon of words

P         O         E        T          R        Y               R           U           L           E            S

                                                                                                    in the pantheon of words

POETRY is the wind, the clouds of fragrance, the breeze, the breath of GOD, foul odour, the rotten smell of truth, the monstrous phallus, scrotum of the inner corridors of the vagina, luscious liquids, delicious meal, firm buttocks, inviting thighs, episodic fragments of LUST in love, the secrets of the aphrodisiac, the KAMASUTRA of words, the katap, the kitip, the kurup, the expansion of ambitious climes, the white teeth of the brown ZEBRA, the innocence of

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