Unbound Spotlight: Navigating Loss and Legacy with Mubanga Kalimamukwento
A showcase of bold, necessary, and transformative writing.
Unbound: A showcase of bold, necessary, and transformative writing.
Unbound is a recurring feature showcasing new writing and essential poetry—works that challenge, inspire, and redefine the art of language.
In Another Mother Does Not Come When Yours Dies, Mubanga Kalimamukwento crafts a powerful tapestry of grief, memory, and survival. This multilingual, hybrid collection of essays and poems is a haunting exploration of loss, weaving together personal narrative and cultural wisdom with raw emotional resonance. Shortlisted for the 2023 CAAPP Book Prize, Kalimamukwento’s work resonates as both self-excavation and a communal conversation between past and present.
At its core, the collection is an unflinching confrontation with the absence of a mother and the enduring echoes of early love. Kalimamukwento navigates this emotional terrain with lyrical precision, moving fluidly between scenes, fragments, and meditations. Her words challenge the linearity of grief, embracing its complexity and transforming it into a space where memory and loss coexist. As Sihle Ntuli notes, the collection explores “the everchanging shape of a grief we humans tend to carry and how we ought to find a place to put it down.”
Drawing from the Bemba proverb tapafwa noko, apesa umbi—translated as another mother does not come when yours dies—Kalimamukwento reckons with the permanence of loss and the cultural wisdom embedded in ancestral sayings. Yet, she refuses to settle into sentimentality or easy resolutions. Instead, she invites readers to sit with the ache of absence, to reflect on the bonds that shape us long after loved ones are gone. It is this delicate balance between mourning and memory that makes the collection so unforgettable.
Kalimamukwento is no stranger to navigating complex narratives. A celebrated Zambian author, attorney, and editor, she is also the voice behind The Mourning Bird, unmarked graves, and Obligations to the Wounded. Her literary career is marked by a series of prestigious accolades, including the 2024 Drue Heinz Literature Prize, selected by Angie Cruz, and the 2022 Tusculum Review Poetry Chapbook Contest, chosen by Carmen Giménez. Her words have resonated globally, appearing in publications such as Overland, adda, Waxwing, and Contemporary Verse 2, and even finding their way to Netflix.
Through her multifaceted storytelling, Kalimamukwento brings a uniquely diasporic perspective to contemporary African literature, artfully weaving together the linguistic textures of Bemba and English. Her work is deeply rooted in Zambian culture, yet universal in its emotional reach. As Cheswayo Mphanza describes, Another Mother Does Not Come When Yours Dies is “foundational work” for contemporary African letters, offering readers a nuanced, introspective journey that defies easy categorization.
With her fearless exploration of grief, memory, and identity, Mubanga Kalimamukwento is a literary voice that demands to be heard. In this latest work, she transforms personal loss into a powerful meditation on the ties that bind us across time and space. Another Mother Does Not Come When Yours Dies is more than a book—it is a lyrical homage to love and survival, an invitation to wade into the depths of remembrance and emerge transformed.
Prepare to be moved by this breathtaking exploration of resilience and legacy. Another Mother Does Not Come When Yours Dies releases on April 22, 2025. Pre-order your copy now in our store (i.e: not amazon).
Read a poem from the collection below.
vertigo
Or my mother, 23 and bursting at the seams with hope. She is a daughter of independence, bled from her mother in the blur that is Nzambi enzi, Rhodesia and Zambia. There is my father, filled with the arrogance of the freshly educated in a time when not many like him are. Together, they trade words in the language which university tables have woven into them. They spill laughter and scatter birds from rooftops. My mother, 23 and foolish, misnames the flutters which swell in her gut “love”. My father, 29 and broken, flees the weight of this responsibility. The doctor scribbles Gravindex one on scrap paper, and just like that, at the tail end of January on a Friday drenched in rain, 1988, a daughter, bursting at the seams with dreams, is born. She is a daughter of Hope, bled from her mother in the blur that is the GRID age, multi-party democracy and Zambia.
& then there I am, filled with the arrogance of the freshly educated. I think I know better, now that I am fluent in the language which university tables have woven into me. When I spill my laughter onto Chachacha, I let it float with dust devils, across the blistered tar and listen to its echo expand between the buildings as fat as all my most foolish dreams. I am 24 and I know better, even as I misname the flutters which swell in my gut “love”—as the man I marry shrinks in the face of this new responsibility. Gravindex one, say the doctors, and just like that, on the tail end of April, a brittle Monday, 2013, a boy is born. And I, drunk with the madness of birthing and loving and terror, dare to hope, together, may we trick fate.
About the Author
Mubanga Kalimamukwento is a Zambian poet; her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in the Tusculum Review, Contemporary Verse 2, and Passengers Journal and has been translated into Italian by Menelique. She won the 2021 Deborah Keenan Poetry Scholarship and the 2022 Tusculum Review Poetry Chapbook Prize, selected by Carmen Giménez.
