| dc.description.abstract | My MA mini-thesis in Creative Writing is a collection of 33 poems titled Learning to Exhale. The
poems are centred around a character – a black African woman who is sharing her experiences
of mental illness. The poems revolve around memory, forgetting and remembering; going back
to the moment when the woman realises that she is ill, understanding it from the present while
working to find ways to express what bipolar disorder is and how she experiences it. The
collection also highlights her search for words and meaning to describe these experiences that
are highly traumatic. This is to create a language of expressing the indescribable. This means that
the form and structure is experimental, combining differing styles and form to show different
voices, different states of mind that swing from depression, mania to suicidal thoughts. | en_US |
