soundtrack for a stormy morning

as I try to focus on work for a couple of hours, although I really really want to go out and play, despite the wind and rain :-).

Alexandra Montano's L'Heure Exquise.

Xandra was one of the other artists in the lineup for La Casita, at NY's Lincoln Center, where I performed last summer. The first time I heard her, I was riveted - a voice like translucent honey shot with sunlight. Which is an equally good description of the lovely warm human being who contains the voice.

a poem shd happen to you

like cold water or a kiss.

Ntozake Shange

you don't choose poetry

You get swept off your feet. But if it chooses you, you have to live in it.

Deborah Garrison

Mississippi Masala

Funny how watching one film, (Ballet Russes, this evening, with Bill and Laura) clarifies your thoughts about another. In this case, Mississipi Masala, which Laura asked my opinion on a few weeks ago.

I found Mississipi Masala a brave original attempt to tell a story that hasn’t been touched by other filmmakers, black or South Asian. And to expose the racism and class-identity-torments of South Asian immigrants to the US.

Unfortunately, I’ve never seen less chemistry on screen between any two romantic leads, than there was between Denzel Washington and Sarita Choudhury. Beyond their shared affinity for amusement park rides, it was hard to see what brought them together, let alone imagine what they'd talk about once they'd crossed the stateline. I could buy them as each other’s escape route, but not as each other’s journey, or ultimate destination.

The most convincing and fully realized relationship in the film was actually between the parents – the bitter exiled Ugandan-Asian lawyer (Roshan Seth), and his pragmatic wife (Sharmila Tagore) who ran a liquor store to feed the family. She managed to seep love and anguish for both husband and daughter, through her efficient, hold-it-all-together exterior, without ever appearing mawkish.

There was a moment that made me cry. When Mina, the main character, is confronted by her parents over her relationship with a black man, and shouts: “This is America! No one cares!” Her mother says quietly: “We are your parents. If we don’t care – who will?” The line captures perfectly the tragic interweaving of parental love with fear, ignorance, prejudice, the survival imperative to preserve and control. And the damage done all round when the tightly-woven strands are not identified for what they are, and separated.

What If?

What If? A Journal of Radical Possibilities, was the first to publish my poem, Eater of Death, alongside work by Amiri Baraka and other crucial voices of post - 9/11 dissent.

Publisher Christy Rogers continues to seek out brave, iconoclastic, under-the-radar art, commentary, and frontline dispatches from global struggles for alternative futures. She likes material that challenges everyone’s preconceptions, including hip Lefties.

Instant Efficiency Booster

Fuchsia-raspberry nail polish. 5 minutes to apply, and then for the rest of the week, 10 tiny flashes of color at my fingertips make me smile when I’m tired or distracted. I think Pretty Nails! and they restore my focus, send me back to work with renewed energy.

my parents go online

I've just received the first email my parents have ever sent. Can the Second Coming be far behind?

My sister Sneha, and her partner, Chris, are visiting Nairobi right now. One of the missions I charged them with was to get my parents to an internet cafe, to make the first pinprick holes in the wall of their resistance to computers and email. The email I got is from Chris's gmail account, and I can just see them standing over him dictating it, contradicting and interrupting each other every 10 seconds :-)

It says:

Dear Shailja,

We have just seen your website and think it is fantastic. We are anxiously awaiting your performance in Nairobi in February.

We hope you are enjoying your friend Poonam's visit and having a good holiday week.

Sneha and Chris are off to Mombasa tomorrow. If you need anything from Mombasa, please e-mail Sneha or Chris. Only do not ask them to bring a madafu as it would be too heavy.

Happy New Year and God Bless!

Love,

Mummy and Daddy

Footnote: A madafu is a green coconut filled with coconut water that tastes like nectar. Every year, as children, we went on an annual one-week family holiday to Mombasa, on the Kenyan coast. It was the only time my father ever took off work. The almost unbearably exciting moment of arrival, after 5 hours of dusty driving, was when the air turned salty, and the first madafu stand emerged from the shimmering heat waves at the side of the road.

poem on my mind today

Berryman

by W.S. Merwin

I will tell you what he told me
in the years just after the war
as we then called
the second world war

don’t lose your arrogance yet he said
you can do that when you’re older
lose it too soon and you may
merely replace it with vanity

just one time he suggested
changing the usual order
of the same words in a line of verse
why point out a thing twice

he suggested I pray to the Muse
get down on my knees and pray
right there in the corner and he
said he meant it literally

it was in the days before the beard
and the drink but he was deep
in tides of his own through which he sailed
chin sideways and head tilted like a tacking sloop

he was far older than the dates allowed for
much older than I was he was in his thirties
he snapped down his nose with an accent
I think he had affected in England

as for publishing he advised me
to paper my walls with rejection slips
his lips and the bones of his long fingers trembled
with vehemence of his view about poetry

he said the great presence
that permitted everything and transmuted it
in poetry was passion
passion was genius and he praised movement and invention
I had hardly begun to read
I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can’t

you can’t you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don’t write

thoughts on home

Faustin Linyekula, Congolese dancer and choreographer, at the YBCA 3 months ago:
"For many years in exile I thought: Perhaps my only true country is my body."

My friend John, on the indoor pollution of his flat, and the resulting asthma he's struggling with:
"It's bad enough to lose your home. But to lose your true home - your breath - is terrifying."

On Kenya Airways flights, all the announcements and info are in both English and Kiswahili. "Local Time At Destination" is rendered in Kiswahili as "Saa Ya Kinyumbani Ya Mwisho Wa Safari."

Which translates literally to: "The time of the home at the end of the journey."

Monsoon Wedding

For the last 2 days, I've been playing the soundtrack from Monsoon Wedding, one of my favourite CDs of all time. Singing: aaj mausam bada / beiman hai bada / baiman hai aaj mausam, to mock the rain, each time I step out the door. No other CD I have rides the spectrum of emotion so fully, from the aching poignancy of Aaj Jaane Ki Zid Na Karo to the get-your-groove-on of Babbe Karade Ishq, all in the space of 40 minutes.

For a while after that film came out, it was the Generic Line To Hit On An Indian Woman. As in "You're Indian, right? I gotta tell you, I loved Monsoon Wedding!". I got adept at a blank-stare response: "Monsoon Wedding? Umm - is that a song? Excuse me, I need the restroom."

Which bugged the hell out of me, because I'd loved the film too. Few things are more annoying than having to disown what delights and nourishes you, when it's co-opted in an attempt to fetishize you. Monsoon Wedding made me cry. Twice. First when the father of the bride expels his elder child-molesting brother from the family, just as the wedding guests are arriving. He chooses truth over the facade of family honor. Then again, when he crumbles into sobs in bed, utterly vulnerable in his shorts and vest. The film doesn't protect us from his heartbreak, both over losing his brother, and having failed, as a surrogate father, to protect the niece who was sexually abused.

I couldn't count the number of Indian weddings I've been to. They were a standard weekend feature of my childhood - sometimes two or three in the same weekend. As a teenager, I loathed everything about them. I sulked in the corners of wedding halls, muttering about grotesque ostentation and perpetuation of the patriarchy. As an adult, I have a more nuanced critique of the complex sociology and gigantic industry that feed the production of Indian weddings. But I'm also better able to tap into the dreams they represent, the archetypal myths they re-enact, the pleasure of ritual and festivity. Monsoon Wedding did a fabulous job of capturing both, right down to the tongue-in-cheek irony of the bride and bridegroom being the least important, and least developed, characters in the story.

I went to see it, when it came out in the Bay Area, with my partner at the time. Walking out of the cinema, I asked him: "So, do you think they'll be happy together? The two who got married?"

"Are you kidding?" he said. "Did you totally miss the significance of that scene where he asks her to meet him at the gym, early in the morning, and she's half-asleep? He's a morning person, and she's not. They're doomed, I tell you. Doomed. Like, don't their families check that out before anything else?"

Years later, that still makes me laugh.

people who rock

Leland Thunes , master massage therapist, gifted musician, amazing human being.

I first met Leland at the Front Street Chiropractic Clinic in San Francisco, where I got treated for carpal tunnel syndrome. His therapeutic massage work dramatically reduced my symptoms. As we talked, I learned that he’s also a musician, plays regular live gigs, writes scores for films, is training in acupuncture, runs Bay to Breakers every year, has just founded a jazz trio, gets more done in a day than I do in a week, and attributes it all to PMA – Positive Mental Attitude.

Normally, people like this make me slightly nauseous. I have to eat a bar of chocolate to get over the inferiority complex they induce in me. But Leland so genuinely walks his talk, so generously shares his gifts and knowledge, that every time I see him, I get a hit of creative energy – not to mention PMA. After a recent session with him, I felt as if I had a new spine, and I got down drafts of two new poems on the BART ride home. Leland's massages remind me that the natural state of my body is balance, fluidity, energy - if I just treat it with the respect it deserves. They educate me about the skill, knowledge, awareness, and sheer physical labor that go into the craft of bodywork.

You can hear Leland play tonight at Kelly's Jazz Club, 1313 Park Street, Alameda, Oakland. Cross street, Encinal.

You can contact him for massage or music at 510-533-0861.

ipod advice?

My friend Punam, visiting from London, wants to buy an ipod to take back with her. Does anyone out there have advice, thoughts, recommendations, experience, to share?

new Migritude page!!

Check it out here - or just click on Migritude in the Navigation Bar.

Concept by Kim Cook (Topline)
Design by Sterling Larrimore
Photos by D. Ross Cameron
Webpage created by Vivek Prabhu

There are days I can't quite believe how lucky I am to have the support of such generous, gifted and skilled professionals for Migritude.

my soundtrack this morning

S.O.U.L. S.Y.S.T.E.M.'s Lovely Day

Ignore the rest of the Whitney Houston dreck on the link :-)

When Lea and I taught workshops at Project Pride earlier this year, Lea brought her boombox in and led warm-ups to that song. It electrified a room full of tired, resistant women, some heavily pregnant, some new mothers, all of them grappling with enormous challenges. The moment the music spilled out, it brought the laughter back into their hips, the life back into their faces.

I was bopping round the kitchen this morning, singing it to Punam, and she said: "You're such a California girl now! What happened to the driven, dead-serious, corporate Shailja I knew in London?"

Blur

Sometimes I pity those with perfect vision:
twenty-twenty crew who'll never fall
unawares into Monet landscapes
stroll onto Pisarro streets.

The permanently naked-eyed
take for granted the intimate shock
of meeting a stranger's glance unbarriered;
miss the subtly sexy
removal of specs
a moment before the kiss,
the comical passion
of fogged-up window panes.

Surprises must be rare for non-myopes;
no purple birds on market stalls
that sharpen into paper lanterns,
motley troops of misshapen dwarves
that turn into backpacking preschoolers.

They see every blemish on every face
right from the start,
stride a world spiky
with clear hard boundaries.

hives

How often do you get to watch your face transform itself before your eyes?

I have an allergy to shrimp. It makes me break out in hives all over my face and body. Once or twice a year, I forget, and order something with shrimp in it, as I did at the Sunflower Vietnamese Cafe, 16th and Mission in SF last night.

It begins with a prickling at the base of my tongue. Then heat under my skin. I can feel the bumps rise and swell, change the shape of my face. Unfortunately, it's always happened in restaurants, so I can't watch the whole process in a mirror. Captured up close, it would be an incredibly compelling piece of performance art. I just sit there, breathe deeply, think "I can't believe I forgot again!" and try desperately not to scratch.

When I do get to a mirror, I'm riveted by this new face - all its contours and surfaces totally unfamiliar. Something made out of red plasticene lumps, with eyes, nose and mouth stuck on as afterthoughts, pushed into the mass of angrily glowing eruptions.

It's like the Incredible Hulk transformation - except I go red instead of green, and don't swell up enough to burst my clothes. I'm so fascinated by what's happening in my dermis, what battle is going on in my body, that it almost makes up for the crazy itching. It's amazing to walk down the street in a different face; to meet peoples' eyes and wonder what they see.

By morning it's all gone. I brush my hair and ask the mirror "Where did you go, other face?" Just a slight tingle at the edges of my scalp to remind me of the mysteries under my skin.

dreamed the moon on fire

I was with my sister Shruti on the Ngong Hills escarpment in Kenya, overlooking the Great Rift Valley. As children, we made regular family excursions to the viewing point, on full moon nights, to watch the moon rise over the Rift.

The moon had risen and we had a journey to go on. I was impatient to leave, but Shruti said "It's not time yet." I watched a gauzy cloud swirl around the moon, like a chiffon scarf, and thought "We're going to be late!" Then I looked at Shruti. The wind streamed through her hair, blew it straight back behind her. Her face in the moonlight was so radiant and certain, my irritation dissolved.

Suddenly, flames shot out of the moon. They leapt through the cloud scarf, devoured it, until the whole moon was exposed, blazing with fire, but somehow still cool and luminous. I laughed out loud at the wonder of it, cried "Shruti, look! The moon's on fire!"

"That means it's time," said Shruti. "Now we can go."

one of my favorite smells in the world

Freshly chopped ginger, garlic, and green chillies, simmering in hot oil with cumin seeds and black mustard seeds. I made squash soup with this as a base for lunch today - just sniffing it as it cooked filled me up.

fair trade coffee in my neighborhood

One of my local hangouts, Spasso's Cafe on College and Claremont, just went all-fair-trade coffee. Yippee!

Other local (or local-ish fair-trade-coffee joints):
Gaylord's on Piedmont Avenue
The Beanery (or is it the Roastery?) on College and Ashby
Nomad Cafe on Shattuck and 60th? 61st?

Why you really really want to drink Fair Trade coffee:

(From Britain's The Guardian, 2003 - not a lot has changed)

Grinding down Uganda's coffee

John Kafuluzi is sitting on a wooden box outside his adobe hut, surrounded by his family. On John's knee, a listless child, his youngest, just 18 months old, drifts in and out of fevered sleep. She has malaria, as do three of her siblings. Her brother, a couple of years older, has the tight swollen belly of the malnourished.

Inside the hut, just visible through the half open door, an old man is lying on the floor on a thin mattress, the fragile bones of his wasted back rising prominently each time he takes a shallow breath. Peter Kafuluzi, John's father, who has farmed coffee here near Uganda's Lake Victoria for 45 years, is dying but they cannot afford medicine for him. The collapse of the world coffee price has left them without an income.

Our translator is trying to explain to John how much a cup of coffee sells for in a London cafe. "One cup, 5,000 Uganda shillings?" A confused smile flickers across his face, registering disbelief, but then his eyes fill with tears. "No, you mean one kilo, no, no, this is painful to hear. I got only 200 shillings a kilo for my coffee this year." John's eldest sons Bruno and Michael had to drop out of school because the family could no longer afford the small fees. They have been working the fertile red soil all morning instead, although some of the coffee bushes are now neglected. They had hoped to be accountants or doctors and break the cycle of poverty. But all the money they had saved went on medicines last year and they had to sell their cow.

In 1994/5 when the price of coffee was high, Uganda earned $433m from the crop. In 2000/2001, its revenues from coffee slumped to $110m even though it sold more coffee.

The fall in price has not been passed on to the final consumer. So where do all the profits go? An Oxfam report, Mugged, has looked at the chain in detail. Coffee processing is dominated by five transnational companies: Kraft, Nestlé, Procter & Gamble, Sara Lee and Tchibo (which sells mainly in Germany).

At the beginning of 2002, a Ugandan farmer received 14 cents (US) for 1kg of beans. The local middleman who transported it to the mill took 5 cents profit as did the miller, and the cost of transport to Kampala added a further 2 cents, making the cost of the coffee when it arrived at the exporter's warehouse 26 cents. The exporter, operating on a tiny margin, added 19 cents to the kilo, taking the total value of a kilo up to 45 cents. Freight, and the importer's cost and margins took the price to $1.64 by the time it reached the factory of one of the giant roasting companies. But by the time the same kilo was sold in the shops in the form of instant coffee it is was worth $26.40, 7,000% more than the farmer got for it.

sunrise thoughts

Are love poems still true after the relationship ends?

And why are there still green figs on our fig tree, stuck resolutely to the ends of the now-bare branches?

pre-dawn

Both the most magical and terrifying of times. I often wake up scared, at 4.30am, mind churning with all I didn't get done the day before, project deadlines looming, what I'm behind on, what I don't know how to handle. And bigger fears: Does any of it matter anyway? Is that ache in my jaw an incipient root canal? What's going to happen as my parents get older and we're all thousands of miles away?

I've found that if I get myself out of bed, dive right into the piece of work I'm most scared of, before my mind has woken up enough to resist it, it morphs from monster into malleable challenge. Then the first morning light trickles into the kitchen. I go through the house and draw all the curtains open, take a cup of herbal tea out onto the back porch and watch the sun rise. At that moment, everything I am most grateful for - the health and wellbeing of those I love, the privilege of doing work I love, the wealth of tools to do it with, rises around me, like dew off the grass, and I am utterly delighted that I'm not still in bed.

This morning, my mind was unafraid and happy at 4.30am. My friend Punam arrived from London yesterday, to stay for two weeks. The joy of having her here makes me much more motivated and confident about blitzing through the work, so I can have time to play with her.

the poem in my mind when I woke up this morning

THE WAKING by Theodore Roethke

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear,
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know,
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.

richness

I’ve been saying to people for months: “I don’t do Christmas.” If they inquire further, I expound on mindless consumerism, Eurocentric Christian cultural imperialism, the driving ethos of capitalism to convince people that buying is essential to feeling.

But this year, my housemate Diana put up a tree. In the spirit of being a good housemate, I made hot chocolate one evening and rallied my other housemates to help decorate it. Diana has boxes of exquisite idiosyncratic ornaments, from glittering pomegranates to silver spacemen, collected over years. As we unwrapped and hung them, we all became children. Dipti dashed downstairs to hunt out her sparkliest bangles, and added them to the tree. I remembered my shiny carnival masks and gave the branches masquerade faces. It was ritual, and I’ve always believed in ritual as a gateway to awareness and insight.

After we’d done the tree, I went online to research Christmas trees. I was thrilled to discover their pagan roots, to learn that they were actually banned for several hundred years by the Christian Church. A phrase I read about Christmas / solstice rituals stuck with me – that they were all intended to “evoke fire in the coldest, darkest time of the year.”

As the days went by, little packages appeared under the tree with my name on them. I thought about evoking fire in darkness. How the tradition of gift-giving might be about evoking abundance in the season of greatest scarcity. Might be the way people reassured themselves, through exchange and community, that they would not starve. That they would keep each other warm and fed until the sun returned.

Every year for the last 3 years, my friend Pablo has collected money to send to community activists in Peru, to fund Chocolatada christmas parties for desperately poor children in the shantytowns. If I have a Christmas tradition, this is it – the images of children who get to taste chocolate once a year, bought with my American dollars. If you would like to contribute to future chocolatadas, send me an email, and I’ll ask Pablo to add you to his list to contact next year.

So there I was on Christmas eve, an hour after I’d said to a friend on the phone, “I don’t do Christmas,” wrapping presents at the dining room table, whisking them out of sight when someone walked into the room. When I got up on Christmas morning, Diana had lit candles all over the living room. Filled a stocking for each one of us. Dipti, Diana and I sat around in our pyjamas, drank hot spiced cider, and opened our presents. Little things, practical things. Walborne for Diana to protect her from flu on her upcoming trip to Wales. Fluffy topaz towel for me who uses towels until they turn into dishcloths. Book on win-win negotiations for Dipti, who shrinks from bargaining for the salary she deserves. And of course, chocolate all round. We talked about our dreams for the year ahead. Dipti cooked Indian lentil pancakes for us all.

The rain put a spanner in my plans to hike with Lisa and Byron. Lisa revels in what she calls “immersion in the elements” , but the wimpier among us (Byron and I) opted for an urban hike in San Francisco, with the option of cafes to duck into. We strolled Chinatown, streets crazy-packed as always, where merchants have never heard of closing for December 25th. Climbed up Telegraph Hill to Coit Tower, and marveled at the Bay spread out before us. I sometimes forget the wonder of where I live – the beauty of mountains, sea, city, wilderness, all quilted together.

We sat at a pavement table at Café Puccini, on Columbus Avenue, drank chai, as fat droplets plopped off the awning onto our heads. Talked about the obscene injustice, the crazy contradictions, of our lives. That we could have a whole day like this, and take all of it for granted, from transport to food to coffee to entertainment to time to play. A day of unimaginable wealth and ease to most of the world. To the Katrina victims still living in tented refugee camps. Or even to the families crammed 10 to a room, 15 to a sink, a few blocks away in the alleys of Chinatown.

When the rain turned from drizzle to waterfall, we came back home. Another luxury; to come in from the wet and cold to dry clothes, warm house, hot tea and caramel shortcake. We watched my Christmas present from Kim, the DVD of A Huey P. Newton story, in the magical shimmer of fairy lights from the Christmas tree. It’s a one-man show, written and performed by Roger Smith, directed by Spike Lee, on the life of the co-founder of the Black Panther Party. Mindblowing performance, mind-expanding content. I’m still musing over the way he wove together politics, irony, personality, humor, electric athleticism. Not to mention his stamina in sustaining voice and character. I want to be able to do that!