Young love relived Innibos
Menzi Mkhonza brings high school nostalgia to the Innibos stage with poetry from his anthology
When reading your childhood thoughts in journals once kept, be it poetic or otherwise, the hardest parts seem to have been the easiest and could have been explained in one sentence.
This is what Menzi Mkhonza discovered after six poems he wrote in high school actually told two similar stories. That is what he did at the Boma art theatre, accompanied musically by singer and Lowveld High School grade 12 learner, Nelly Mkhabela.
The first story came from the poems “She is the One Who Holds my Heart”, “Painting a Portrait” and “If You Were a Sentence”, and the second came from “The Life I Once Lost”, “The Eulogy” and “The First Time I Fell in Love”.
The stories are from his years at Lowveld High where he felt pressured to be in love. This brought life to the anthology, The Pressure of Love.
“I wanted love so much, but I wasn’t getting it,” Menzi said. “I was then inspired by my friends’ stories about relationships and my inability to be in one, and realised most of them aren’t what they seem.”
But one can only imagine that it is all it’s cut out to be, entertaining the idea of what love would be like if it were perfect, hence the addition of music in his performance.
“The musical elements come together and work perfectly,” said Nelly. The audience could be taken back to their own feelings and thoughts of when they were young and had their own thoughts about love.
