There is a throughline of continuity that Kgositsile aims to draw from the cultures, customs, and sense of community instilled in his homeplace by his mothers and bring to the cultures and politics of Johannesburg and those of the larger Black world. This is a non-linear line that he conceptualizes as a coil. The coil enables his poetics and politics to operate within cosmologies of Southern Africa and their conceptions of the human, temporality, spatiality, knowledge, and intersubjective relationality. The coil, harnessed for its etymology – to ‘gather together’ –, locates the aspirations and objectives of Kgositsile's life and work in an ongoing intergenerational interlocution contiguous with the structuring of the human as an onto-triad comprising of the living dead, the living, and the not-yet-born. This coil has been fashioned to suture Black America to Black South Africa, their oral/aural and literary traditions, histories, and politics. In his work, he devised several working terms and phrases that I have tasked myself with developing as critical theories from elsewhere with which we can disrupt and rupture the dominant, dehumanizing, hierarchical, gendering, differentiating, and mechanizing Europatriarchal terms of order. I have termed these poetics of possibilities. Much ink has been spilled pontificating on the crucial need for decolonial theory and concepts, but very few worlds, archives, vocabularies, practices, tools, material steps, processes, procedures, and approaches have been offered as interventions in these discourses.

My book has brought these poetics to the surface as an offering at this critical juncture in which the field of Black studies is preoccupied with imagining the human and the world anew to upend anti-Blackness and challenge the dominant paradigm of western civilization and its cosmologies of being, knowing, and doing. Kgositsile's work and the poetics of possibility it offers are crucial on many levels. This book draws from his work written in the 1960s and 1970s, critical decades that occasioned mass decolonization in Africa and the rest of the third world. Even though South Africa was not one of those countries that witnessed independence, I contend that Kgositsile, due to the internationalist nature of his work, should be read in the canon of decolonial theorists and poets of this era who sought to provide critical analysis of imperialism, culture, and liberation.