twenty yellow roses

on my desk, in my bedroom, made me smile this morning.

I have a thing for yellow flowers anyway. And yellow roses are my favourite. They exude sunlight, dreamtime, song.

kicking coffee

Or, since someone I'm close to has recently been giving me a hard time about using violent language :-), maybe that should read: gently releasing coffee from my life.

The time has come to let go of my two-cappuccinos-a-day habit. My last cappuccino was 48 hours ago. I'm primed with backup options as soon as withdrawal symptoms strike (headaches, other aches, tiredness, irritability). Green tea and rooibos teabags in my pocket, deep breathing and stretching routines marked on my calendar. I'm practising replacing "coffee" with "tea" in my vocabulary. As in:
Let's do tea tomorrow afternoon.
Wanna meet up for tea next week?

They say it takes 4 days to a week max for the cravings to pass. Then, you find you have loads more energy. You sleep better. You eat healthier. You're no longer leaching potassium and other vital nutrients out of your body, and putting in way more dairy than it needs.

Update on Flora Terah

For everyone who responded to my appeal to fight election violence against Kenyan women, here's an update on Flora Terah.

From Raychelle Injete, another Kenyan woman who has volunteered her own skills and resources to support Flora:

The election violence issue is now of great concern to all Kenyans. Flora's case has caused the press to be sensitive to the cases of other women candidates who have faced a similar fate. She is getting a lot of coverage as she goes to see other women who are being physically assaulted by their opponents. The "Terah Against Terror" Campaign has attracted a lot of local and international attention.

We are in the process of setting up a website, www.floraterah.org. We will inform you when it goes live.

On behalf of Flora, who is in the field visiting women aspirants who have been assaulted, we wish to request you to kindly pass around the message of her Peace Campaign to as many people as possible, when her site is up, so that we can get overwhelming response to the project.

Women who have been assaulted are now calling on Flora for help and she is doing just that... in crutches.

jacaranda season

in Nairobi is filling my eyes with clouds of purple, lavender. Every blossom a tiny dancing world.

Podcast of me in South Africa

During Poetry Africa in Durban last month, I met the multitalented and phenomenally energetic Victor Dlamini. He interviewed me for the Victor Dlamini Literary Podcast - one of the most enjoyable interviews I've ever done.

See the photos and listen to the podcast here.

Excerpt from the intro:

Shailja Patel has already added to our lexicon with the word “migritude” - which she coined for the title of her signature performance piece - but it is as a spoken-word theatre artist and poet that she truly seizes the imagination. Shailja brings to performance poetry a very strong sense of language and an uncanny ability to make historical connections that reverberate across the ages, linking what seems intensely personal with the overtly political.