Under The Sign of Migritude: Italian Review

Swept away this morning by a review of my work I received from Italian journalist / writer / blogger Alessia Capasso.

Read it in Italian on her blog.

Here is the translation she sent me - with apologies for her "imperfect English." I find her rendition moving, powerful and poetic in its imperfection. The greatest gift a poet can receive is to know that her work speaks across language. And I love the way she totally nails the political roots of Kenya's post-election violence.

Shailja Patel: A Life Under The Sign Of Migritude

By Alessia Capasso

Rome, 6 October 2008

From the 3th to the 5th of October the Festival Internazionale has been in Ferrara. One of the guest of the Festival has been the Kenyan artist Shailja Patel: poet and activist. She is a revolutionary, too. Revolutionary is her manner to live poetry. Revolutionary because of the topic she proposes to her public. During 2006 I had the luck to meet her in Nairobi, during a poetry slam organized by Kwani?, an organization that promotes African literature and arts, especially in Kenya.

It has been one of the best night in Nairobi. A white wonderful woman close to an ebony skin girl, white and black Kenyan middle class seated at the same table with young hip hop fans, African students and Italian cooperants, old Europe professors close to Somali supporters. Shailja was the godmother of that night. She has Indian origins, lived in Kenya, studied in Great Britain and United States. She is the personification of the word she invented, the money of the new world: MIGRITUDE. In this neologism two metals are fused in: migrants and attitude. The attitude to be migrants. Cause of origins, costrictions, poverty, in order to work and look to the future. A word that substitutes itself to the colonialist world neologism: negritude.

Moreover, the great innovation of Shailja is the way her poetry stays at the centre of a tale, strictly connected to her body, her voice, her gestures. Reading her work is possible, but if you can see her during one of her shows means entering in the roots of the tales she narrates. The tales start from her mothers' saris, flying on Maasai Kenyan women, landing down on the American dream. From USA, the tales restart their travel. She does not stop in front of the defeat of who reject a woman for her skin colour, for the dress she has, for the surname destiny gives her.

MIGRITUDE is not properly a poetry book. I could define it a MODERN EPIC IN POETRY FORM. Some parts of it are available in Italian on the website of the editor lietocolle.

I contacted Shailja some months ago, in January 2008. The wind of poverty and ethnic hate was blowing on Kenya. It burned a lot of houses. It pushed people in old hates, which have not tribal origins. They have been cultivated in the house garden of parliamentarians, politics, ministries, business men, international officials. That hates have grown really fast, giving their fruits of violence and death, thanks to the best fertilizers the History knows: corruption, misery, absence of brotherhood, people and environmental exploitation.

Shailja, in that period, was part of the Committee, Kenyans for Peace, Truth and Justice. The committee has worked for an agreement of a politic unity, without forgetting the hard responsibilities of single person and of their parties.

I am writing of Shailja, not only in order to promote her wonderful work, but also because I think I am debtor with her. That night in Nairobi, in front of her explosive power, despite I did not understand every single word, I laughed and cried for a poem. Hearing her in a language not mine.