ZamaShort #12 ‘Did You get Married to Her when I was in the Mental Hospital?’ by Abigail George
ZamaShort #12 ‘Did You get Married to Her when I was in the Mental Hospital?’ by Abigail George
Award-winning poet Abigail George takes you on a vivid contemporary odyssey in the poetic form of a prose poetry collection through psychological landscapes of her inner and outer world. In living with a diagnosed bipolar condition, George burns star bright and black-hole dark, but her writing has always remained, sustained, and mattered, giving us this rare eloquent and vital insight.
Abigail George is a poet, essayist, novelist, blogger, editor, playwright, and short story writer. She was the awarded the 2023 Sol Plaatje European Union Poetry Prize for her poem, ‘In a Lonely Search for Walt Whitman and Chris Abani’, nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and twice nominated for Best of the Net Award. Her latest book is Songs For Palestine: Struggle Poems. She blogs at African Renaissance and Mentally Sound.
“Oh, God, what amazing poetry this is! I love every single poem and every single word. Every poem walks you in a corridor that leads into the author’s subconscious spaces, revealing a shadowy world of bitterness, broken love and fragmented thoughts. With the influence of the author’s bipolar condition and a family plagued by cancer and lack of love and unity, Abigail is able to produce a narrative poetry that utilises raw and deep-cutting images, fragmented stories and half-asleep-and-half-awake musings and reflections to weave a body of poetry that leaves the reader dazed, mouth-gaping and gasping for more.”
— Dr Christopher Okemwa, Senior Lecturer, Kisii University, Kenya.
“A lyrical, stream-of-consciousness dive into the writer’s experience of love, loss, hope and despair. It is a dive that stretches from her bedroom, to her community, to Palestine. The self and the world, past and present, are in contest. But from that contest comes the beauty of the book's poetry. And that's what it really is - poetry.”
— Kevin Goddard.
“Abigail’s writing is a treat, rich in imagery and metaphor. She crafts the kind of sentences you wish to bookmark and return to. In this short story, the chapters are offered up in splinters that read like captivating prose poems, often mirroring the protagonist’s fractured psyche, while creating an authentic visceral experience of the complex emotional landscape unfolding within.”
— Adiela Akoo, South African Poet & Author.
“A raw, emotional journey through heartbreak and longing. With visceral imagery that explores the pain of lost love, weaving themes of memory, grief, and self-discovery. George writes unflinchingly on the effects of mental illness on family dynamics, and the fragility of the human psyche. Navigating breakdowns, relationships, and the struggle for self-love. Set against the backdrop of societal expectations and personal trauma, this is a testament to resilience and the healing power of creativity. A powerful work that will resonate with readers who have known darkness and the struggle to find light.”
— Thobeka Kenene.
“A brave, claustrophobic, and ultimately transcendent piece of literature. It is a “lullaby” for the broken and a manifesto for the power of the written word. Abigail George proves once again that for the marginalised and the “mad”, writing is not just a career—it is a holy act of reclamation.”
— Henry Lombard.
“A haunting and deeply confessional work, Abigail George’s poetry moves through memory, illness, and longing with lyrical intensity. What emerges is a fragile yet courageous portrait of a mind searching for love, meaning, and survival in the aftermath of emotional devastation.”
— Tuoyo Palmer, poet and educator.
“South African writer Abigail George discovers kinship with the griefs of the broader world while processing her life through streams of consciousness. Mental health and wellness become recurring themes in the work, rendered effectively through the raw, nonlinear poetry that echoes her thoughts.”
— Cristina Deptula.
“Writing about one’s life is challenging in the inevitable revelation of deep-seated secrets. Abigail George has no compunction in the sheer honesty with which she integrates her compassion for Gaza and Palestine with her own desperately yet joyously wretched experiences. [This] compliments her inspiring previously published, Songs for Palestine: Struggle Poems. Inspired by great literary figures who shared her condition, she moves between the state of the world as reflected in Gaza and her state as two-year old, teenager, young and midlife adult and her futile search for love and her forlorn fear of abandonment. She ultimately finds companionship in her readership, despite her assertion that she doesn’t write for the world but for herself. In this story, she achieves both as she exchanges a mental institution for the armchair from which she writes with fearless freedom in easy-going words, if in complex metaphors.”
— Doreen Musson, author and freelance social researcher.
“Abigail's voice cuts deep into the veins of memory and relapse. A razor-sharp confession from the Eastern Cape fog—addiction, madness, Gaza mirrored in one woman's shattered mirror. No pretty lies here; just the cold mineral water of truth served alone.”
— Ayanda Billie.
“Abigail George takes the reader on the big dipper of her poetry, riding us through shocks and thrills in the carriage of her life with mental illness, a stigma she was branded with at age 16. En route, we become as Eve, but abandoned by Adam, teeth tearing apart the apple of knowledge alone; we become akin to Lady Macbeth, trying to wash the blood Netanyahu has spilled – nothing is separable from anything else, and the language relentlessly stirs the pot of our inescapable oneness. This is a writing-witch’s brew, cooked to nourish and forever transform your understanding of
mental illness, womanhood and writing.”
— Silke Heiss, Hiku Hike Harvest.
Released 1st April 2026.
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The ZamaShort imprint series is solely focused on the amazing powerhouse that is the short story. We give each short story its own publication so that it may be read and enjoyed fully as a stand-alone publication. As per the StoryTime Publishing mandate initialised in 2007, ZamaShort continues to champion and add to the ever-growing canon of African literature excellence and diversity.
