words like rain

from my friend Aryeh, who is working with Artscorp in El Salvador.

Quien dijo que todo está perdido
Yo vengo a ofrecer mi corazón
Tanta sangre que se llevó el río
Yo vengo a ofrecer mi corazón
- Fito Páez

Who said that all is lost
I come to offer my heart
So much blood has filled the river
I come to offer my heart.

three terrific photos

of Migritude in Vienna in March this year.

Check them out on the Her Position In Transition site. Scroll down alphabetically to Migritude - or just watch for the flash of red!

my voice coach says

the voice needs to be moved and caressed like bread dough.

Knead it. Move the pitches, the resonance. Tap into lower pitches frequently, but don't hold there. Keep it flexible, silky.

Watch the glottal stops. You don't need glottal attacks for emphasis.

When you get excited, don't lose your sense of space behind you, and depth.

The larger you get, the deeper you need to get, and the more space you need behind you.

Zap meaning at the audience, rather than force. Let them come to you.

Don't pull your voice out from above. Rest in the throne of yourself. Think skeletal alignment. Float the spine up. Don't clench the abdomen - relax and re-engage, relax and re-engage.

I keep thinking

I am wasting time. Keep thinking I am not doing enough. Castigate myself for appointments cancelled, tasks I could've, would've, should've ticked off my list today, but didn't get to - because.

Because the dance of green leaves with sunlight outside my window was too compelling. Because I couldn't release the pain of the article I read on child soldiers in Uganda, the Congo, Liberia. Because a crescent moon hung in the scented summer sky and lured me into the hills. Because the promise of "ethics training" for US soldiers, as a palliative for the massacre in Haditha, makes me want to throw up. Because Babbe Karade Ishq on my CD player snaked up my feet into my hips, lifted me out of my desk to move to the beat. Because I'm scared to make this call, send this email, submit this piece of work.

Then the poem comes. Rises out of a moment in a bookshop, an instant on the street corner. Unfurls in my torso, unclenches my fingers, rolls itself onto paper. It is messy and fragmented, it needs work, it is whole and perfect in its reaching.

And I learn all over again what I forget daily:
Nothing is wasted.
Nothing is unintentional.
You are exactly
where you are meant to be,
doing what you are meant to do.

Yess! Amen!! Thank you!!!

I do not believe the political poem can be written with truth and effect unless the self who writes that poem - a self in which sexuality must be a factor - is seen to be in a radical relation to the ratio of power to powerlessness with which the political poem is so concerned.

I am slow, for instance, to believe that the political poem can be written by a self that is not politicized, even radicalized. Once again I find it hard to accept that a radical self can function authoritatively in the political poem if the sexual self, which is part of it, remains conservative, exclusive and unquestioning of inherited authority.

From Object Lessons: The Life Of The Woman And The Poet In Our Time
Eavan Boland

paging Stella Ngatho again

I noticed that several hits on my site in the past week have used the search keywords: shailja stella ngatho

So it seemed a good moment to resurrect my search for this Kenyan poet who's vanished into history. I used her poem, "Footpath", in the work-in-progress showings of Migritude in Berkeley (December 2005) and Vienna (March 2006).

This opening piece, the poem about the path, has come in for more criticism than any other part of the show. From "I just didn't get it," to "slow and unfocussed" to "new agey", the comments tell me it just didn't speak to people as it spoke to me.

"Footpath" is a poem I studied in school, for my O-level literature curriculum. I remember the heated debate we had in class about who the narrator was - a child? a new bride who's just left her mother's home? I forgot all about it after O-levels, but a few months ago, it suddenly began to chant itself to me as I walked the hills of Rockridge thinking about Migritude. It became a hypnotic invocation, and I was surprised at how much of it I remembered. I had to wait until I went back to Kenya in June to check the text - I couldn't find it anywhere online or published in the Western world.

When I read it, it seemed to capture every stage of the migrant journey, driven by the displacement of whole peoples by colonialism. It starts with the longing for the mother (security, warmth, the restoration of things as they were) and the realization that survival is threatened (there is no more food and the water has run out). Then the realization that she has to go in search of the mother, negotiate difficult, unfamiliar, different terrains (the way migrants do, believing that if they just pass each test, surmount each obstacle, their will be triumph, restoration at the end of it). The recognition that the mother will not return no matter how far she travels (the way we accept that the motherland, mother-tongue, who we were, is forever gone). And then the choice to reclaim and redefine what is hers, to find the mother in herself, to see her choices (path of the crossways, path of the bridge). The final taking on of responsibility for the world she inhabits, for where she is, for the battles she must engage in. To find her own light, her own fuel, her own power (there is no firewood. And I have not found the lantern).

I've searched for information on Stella Ngatho, the poet. Other work by her. Nothing. Her anonymity is part of the message the poem carries for me - she symbolizes a whole generation of post-colonial African women whose voices have been lost, whose stories are invisible. I see her as a young woman, in the 1970s, writing her poems, submitting them to journals and collections, reaching for community and resources to put her work out into the world. What happened to her?

bollywood oh bollywood

I bristled and huffed yesterday when someone I know made a joking reference to Busby Berkeley Bollywood. It brought out all my diaspora Indian chauvinism.

Bollywood may be trite, syncretic, mongrelized, commercial, over-the-top pop culture. But it's OUR syncretism. We INVENTED the giant kitsch-song-and-dance-ensemble! Every Hollywood imitation, from Busby Berkeley to Moulin Rouge, is just a feeble emulation.

raw, real, death up close

Everywhere I turn these days, I see a new memoir of being a soldier. It's the fresh hot publishing product - the personal story of a young American who joined the Marines, joined the National Guard, joined the Army, and went to the Gulf.

Only to discover - shock, horror, disbelief - that War Sucks. That military life is - gasp - dehumanizing in the extreme. That military training goes against every principle and ethic of human society. That people subjected to military training, and the numbing, brutalizing drudgery of war tend to lose parts of their mind and grip on reality. Not to mention their ability to see and feel other human beings.

What bugs me about all these memoirs is that they present the obvious as if it was new information. As if anyone with half a brain cell didn't know that in order to train people to kill you have to break their capacity to think and choose for themselves and connect to other human beings.

All the jacket covers carry the same trite blurb: Raw. Real. Unflinching.

And build up to the ultimate clincher: She saw death up close! He saw a fellow soldier shot!!

Raw and real is what Iraqis live with every day. What people around the world live with under US bombardment or military occupation.

another rejection letter today

This one was from The Multi-Arts Production Fund.

I'm particularly bummed because I met their program officers in New York in January. They were very enthusiastic about Migritude and encouraged me to apply. I was leaving for Nairobi in two days. I spent the next 48 hours in frantic email communication with collaborators and my amazing friend / grantwriter J. I asked huge last-minute favors of them to pull it all together, and get it in before the deadline. I remember panting through the Village, the morning of the day I flew, to hand-deliver my work sample DVDs at the MAP Fund offices.

That's 5 rejections so far this year. Funding rejections, that is. I don't want to even start counting the number of presenters / festivals / venues that have turned Migritude down.

I keep reminding myself of Van Gogh, who didn't sell a single painting in his lifetime.

Under Whose Name?

My latest article on Plagiarism in Africa is up on Pambazuka News.