BEFORE THE LIGHT HAD A NAME

What do we inherit before we are old enough to understand it?What survives when the things that shaped us are gone?And what if the light we spend our lives searching for was already there?Before the Light Had a Name is a poetic journey through inheritance, grief, identity, love, faith, healing, and becoming. Across thirty poems, Mmolawa Kitso explores the rooms we grow up in, the memories we carry, the losses that change us, and the parts of ourselves we must return to before we can truly move forward.From ancestral memory and childhood to heartbreak, absence, self-discovery, forgiveness, and faith, these poems move between darkness and illumination-asking what it means to survive without becoming hardened, to remember without remaining trapped, and to love without losing yourself.Divided into five sections-What We Inherit, The Architecture of Loss, The Rooms Within, What Survives, and The Light-the collection traces a gradual movement from what was given to us toward what we choose to become.This is a book about the things that break us open.About the people who remain.About the selves we leave behind and the selves we return for.And ultimately, about discovering that light does not begin when the darkness ends.Sometimes, it was there all along