‘Daughter’, the poem that opens the book, is an ars poetica, introducing key themes that recur throughout the collection: the interplay between memory and the present, the duality of experience, the body as a site of stories, the search for maternal connection, and the smooth movement between worlds and languages—namely English and isiXhosa. Functioning also as a manifesto for how the rest of the collection will operate, the poem begins with the expressive intention of the poet: 

there are corridors in my memory
i shall now take you into
dark rooms in which i am blind and see everything
where big hands pin me down 
feasting on me    dead    breathing
where my blood becomes the venom
where no one saves me  

Beyond intimating the dark recesses of her paradoxical ‘blind’ memories—memories she both resists and cannot escape—Qhali finds an adequate language, both emotional and critical, for expressing rape and gender-based violence. One of the first poems that showcases her gift for compression is her first journal entry dated 17 January 1994, titled ‘The Pregnant Tree in Our Village’. If ‘this [Ukulila] is the story of a woman / moving between time / between worlds’, then the two characters in ‘The Pregnant Tree’—the mythical Mamorena, mother of kings, and the speaker—embody the universal, historical realities of women across times: from the inevitability of gender-based violence to the necessity of resilience. Mamorena, for instance, is punished by the gods for what is out of her control in the death of one of her ‘six kings’ or sons: 

one died on her back
three months old and where he died
a pregnant tree pushed out
right from the center of her back 

These two poems, ‘Daughter’ and ‘The Pregnant Tree in Our Village’, serve as introductions to themes developed throughout the collection. In the entry for 17 June 1994, titled ‘Dear Qamata, Why’d You Give Tata Small Hands’, ‘umama’ is a real-life allotrope of the mythical Mamorena who becomes a victim of the male ego of her husband: 

tata’s hands are too small
to hold umama
so he cuts her up to make her fit
he cannot have umfazi
bigger than him living in his house 

Rife with underlying critiques of the status quo, the phrasing of the poems are illuminatingly precise: ‘too small’ not only signifies the physical anatomy of ‘tata’s hands’, but also the smallness of his character. In the same vein, Qhali brushes off both the dismissive vice and the irascible folly of old men towards women young and old with the brusque force of a single, qualifying word. Its precise criticism reaches the heights of satire in the prosaic journal entry for 1 June 1994, titled ‘Dear Qamata, I Need to Pray with Makhulu Now’: ‘and tata says children must keep quiet when big people talk.’ Not old, not wise, but big people. Indeed, a mocking yet sufficiently economical clapback.