Mercia Kandukira is a writer based in Binghamton, NY.
Her new creative nonfiction essay “Spook Asem” published by Center for Humans and Nature is available now!
Mercia Kandukira grew up seeing Namibia’s sandy and mountainous landscapes.
Her writing reflects a perceptiveness to the natural world not only as an important witness to history, but a home to care for. As a descendant of those done to death during Namibia’s tumultuous history with imperial Germany, Mercia brings a Namibian woman’s literary perspective to the country as a post-atrocity society.
“I may not know much, but I know enough to understand that the land knows more than us.”
“Ada Limón”
Being When Meant Not to Be a Memoir in progress
This memoir interweaves history, neurology, and personal narrative to give voice to Kenouho, a young girl who suffers sexual abuse on a reservation in the outskirts of Namibia. The reservation is constructed and understood in this memoir as a colonial space that keeps indigenous Namibians in a state of economic precarity, with girls and women particularly voiceless and vulnerable to abuse of all kinds. The memoir uses Ovaherero cultural practice and performance to document history, extracting from unwritten artifacts to construct a personal, family legacy of trauma and survival within the larger socio-political framework.
Kandukira’s work uniquely gives voice to “the lived experiences of women and girls” that would otherwise be erased, and it is a step toward recognizing and promoting the value of their being in a postcolonial, patriarchal cultural context that has always devalued them. Her personal experience of these conditions is made “political” in the most compelling ways, providing a heartbreaking illustration of the postcolonial legacies of genocide and how these are carried in the bodies of women from one generation to the next. She writes in the hopes to confront and stop that transmission from occurring, and to help readers fully understand how colonial and patriarchal histories are alive in the present and not just part of some distant past.
Keep up to date with Mercia’s reflections on the writing process, how she does research for creative nonfiction while teaching and working on a PhD.
More Creative Projects
Mercia is a music lover and poet who also writes lyrics. She has worked with, composers Neva Derewetzky and Sarah Macentee on the following pieces, yet to be published. She’s also working on a poetry chapbook.
To Histories in Sand
To Histories in Sand is a fusion of Yiddish folk music and Ovaherero wailing dirges or Outjina, which are elegies performed at funerals by women. As part of the oral tradition, the elegies which are rooted within the landscape, provide an historical account of the deceased person’s birth and demise, tracing their genealogy back to ancestors who survived adversity. During the Ovaherero Genocide mothers who lost their children as they fled German colonial troops, wailed. In their wails, the spot where a person died, or water was poisoned, is often remembered with vivid descriptions of landmarks. Comparable to epics, Outjina is a form of literary history, and though mostly available as oral text sung in monotone, can be regarded the same way history textbooks are.
Moments with You
Moments with You is an ode to memories treasured like antique vases we never want to fracture. It is a celebration of effortless actions like sensing strawberry cotton candy vanish on the tongue while a toothy-smiled, loved one watches on. This piece is inspired by the joy of watching a telenovela with a beloved sibling weeks before one dies. Thus, the piece takes off with a lone piano tune soon joined by the cello which invokes a mental playback of unfinished conversations. The mezzo soprano gives words to anguish slowly rising. The powerful chords in the cello and repeating piano bass line moves the piece forward into an emotional climax. And just as calm proceeds turmoil, the music calms back down into that lonesome piano tune which melts into hollow parallel fifths. The B minor chord which ends the song like an unfinished story, leaves the listener asking for more.
Poetry Chapbook
These poems were generated during a workshop run by Tina Chang in the Fall of 2020. The poems explore moments in Namibia’s turbulent history with Germany’s Second Reich, particularly the Genocide of 1904-1908 in which 80% of the Ovaherero and 50% of the Nama were killed in a planned racial extermination campaign. The poetry in this chapbook draws on Namibia’s ocean and desert landscapes, mindscapes and bodyscapes to illustrate the inherited trauma of those who live under the shadow of this gruesome history.