The intent seems clear from the very first page, a cautionary statement that states to the book’s reader that ‘Scar Tissue Armor’, the debut poetry collection by Gakunde Prayer, isn’t a smooth ride.
This book contains sensitive material related to death, grief, love, heartbreak, and mental health.
Rather, the book finds truth in the strength of heartbreak, weakness in love, empowerment in womanhood, and a healing armour from ache. Before reading the opening poem, you might cry at the end of it all.
Gakunde, 24, pen name Kunda Cooks, released her debut collection in August to a room full of friends, enthusiasts and a world relenting to cope with the intrusive galaxy of emotions often hard to pinpoint.
In her Kezem jumpsuit, a wrapped top tiered long sleeves, and wide-leg pants in coordinating black and white colours, Gakunde blossomed with each performance, with her seemingly cracked voice —a tone indicating she might herself cry.
Her rinsing prose style eludes the formalities of stanzas, rhyme scheme and metre, instead, she offers a storytelling amplitude, with often tidy short poems that even the poetry buffs can easily relate to.
You appear in my dreams and I no longer call it a sign.
This is a great relief and a great sadness.
‘Scar Tissue Armor’ concerns aesthetic pursuits and bodily trouble, deeply felt personal losses and the jangle of harm and horror in the world. The author avowed the book was written over three years, and a different title later changed.
“I didn’t fully plan this collection of poems to turn into a book at first,” Gakunde said, “But eventually, with my support system, I realised a theme that I wanted to follow.” The theme: To make anyone weep.
He did not make my demons disappear,
he did not play pretend,
where we closed the room
and never opened it again.
Braced and fueled by her alter ego, Kunda Cooks, the author confessed poetry being “a drug” for her. Whether sad or happy, to make sense of it all, “I write poems.” She said, “However, as Prayer, I’m a happy person, but Kunda Cooks [the alter ego] loves sadness and sorrow, and that’s what this book became. I hope people don’t start asking or assuming I’m depressed.”
A feat readily seen in the many acupunctures of pieces slayed in her collection. A sorrowful character going through life taking in all the pain for the real soul, Gakunde, to shine the light. A Mr. Robot split-like scenario.
“I usually cry while writing my poems, because I feel too much putting everything on paper,” Gakunde uttered, “Sometimes I even sob rereading my work after months because it takes me back,”
It’s like waiting for the last bus home at the wrong station,
these memories are slipping right through my fingers
and already collecting dust.
My youth is running fast like river water
and fading away like footprints on a sandy beach.
How do I tell people that it’s hard to look forward to the future
when my heart feels heavy at the thought of losing my past?
How do I word this PERFECTLY to my mother
without potentially earning myself another therapist session voucher?
Youthful heartbreak notwithstanding, I suppose it must be possible to get through life without ever having confronted love or desire as truly capsizing events — as mental, moral or practical ruin. Some of us manage to consign such interludes to the list of a life’s wrong turns: the “bad place” in which you found yourself, the lure of a “narcissist,” the deranging effects of misplaced longing.
One task of literature is to help us grow out of whatever consoling pieties or therapeutic nostrums our cultural moment supplies, and consider instead the larger forces (libidinal, existential, historical) that move through our pitiful affairs and inflated passions.
‘Scar Tissue Armor’ offers the solace, as the author describes, in knowing you’re not alone in these moments of despair, pain, love, and the inflicted overthinking addiction to someone and the could-have-been scenarios.
Honey maybe just for this moment, we can fall in love so recklessly without worrying about who is going to pull from the other first or if our kisses will taste the same 5 years down the road, if we both decide to stay. Deal?
Scar Tissue Armor is available through Instagram DM (@kunda_cooks) easily in Rwanda, and soon on Amazon at a Rwf 15k price.
In these searching, stunning poems, Gakunde metaphorizes human emotions to literal scripts that, in the end, celebrate the multitude of feelings we all go through, and tell the world, you now have a shield from the scars and the longing question we ask ourselves — Am I doing okay?
As you go along the 114 poems in the debut collection, you start to wonder about the struggles Gakunde had to go through to sentimentally be courageous enough to share this, to which she morbidly says, “It took a lot of courage and vulnerability to be ready. I kept the pieces for myself for a long time until I realised I wanted people to hear them, to connect. It means more now that everyone can read these pages.”
It would be hard to spread it thin or to identify reality from imagination in these poems. When asked whether some pieces were fictional or personal, often after each vivid teary performance, her answer was always, “I guess we’ll never know.”
