Uppsala reception

On Friday evening, the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation
hosted a reception to welcome me as Guest Writer at the Nordic Africa Institute.

It was small, rich, intimate and heartwarming. It felt like a party in a friend's living room - with the bonus of excellent tech support. Two of the DHF staff are musicians, so I had the wonderful gift of working with people who totally got the importance of sound quality for my performance. Anita brought in her own mics for me to use. Karim helped me test three different sound options, then adjusted the one we chose to pick up the most delicate nuances of tone and volume.

In my debriefing notes afterwards, I wrote:

Tonight I was fixed in place, at a standing mic. But my voice became the dancer. I felt her lead me, like a pied piper, on a wild, mysterious up-hill-down-dale-into-the-cave-down-the-tunnel-out-to-the-shore adventure. Repeatedly, she surprised me by doing something she hadn't done before on stage. Each surprise worked, completely, because the mic caught it, transmitted it perfectly. The image that arises, again, is a trapeze artist, or a leaping ballet dancer, who launches her body into space with total confidence that her partner is in place to catch her.

Henning Melber, director of the DHF presented me with a stunning coffee table collection: Swedish Wilderness - The Mountain World of Dag Hammarskjöld. I've always been drawn to mountains. My name, Shailja, is Sanskrit for "daughter of the mountain." I'm looking forward to mountain-gazing before I fall asleep each night, and meeting the images in my dreams...........

The questions that followed the performance were stimulating and insightful - as one would expect from an audience of scholars, thinkers, Africanists, social scientists. They tapped into my own avenues of exploration. How language and movement generate and inform each other. How to bring poetry into academic writing and development writing. How to ground art in data-based analysis and empirical research.

Another gift was the presence of Ewa Ulander, secretary of the Swedish Writers Union, who brought me to WALTIC in Stockholm last year. Click here for photos of me performing at the closing ceremony. I was so touched that Ewa made time in her busy schedule to come from Stockholm to Uppsala. And arrived bearing flowers! Her glowing orange gerberas and sunshine-yellow chrysanthemums are lighting up the kitchen and living room of my Uppsala flat.

Some of the feedback on the performance (which Henning had the wonderful foresight to capture in writing for me):

Moving and powerful, a scream in a whisper.

A potent experience seeped in a layered immediacy. Thank you.

The muscles of language and body, of mind and passion, combine.

Words of truth and pain and faith.

And an email I received today:

You must know that in addition to the power of the words you speak, is the power of speaking them at all.

Tack så mycket to all at DHF - Karin, Karim, Anita, Henning. And to Mai Palmberg, creator and powerhouse of the Cultural Images of Africa program at the Nordic Africa Institute, for bringing me to Uppsala.