Bwagamoyo

The most telling - and compelling - line of a man's body is that place where his neck joins his shoulder. From which the head extends, retracts, responds. It can be beautiful in its cleanness and purpose. Its strength and flexibility, its balance and alignment. It can disturb in its distortion and strain, its rigidity or collapse.

I like to think that if I could see that line in its entirety, if I could enter the living braid of muscles beneath - trapezius, levator scapulae, sterno-cleido-mastoid - it would tell me everything about a man. Where he intersects with his reality. How he meets, receives, and inserts himself into the world.

Opening lines of Bwagamoyo (The Father): Part II of Migritude, An Epic Journey In Four Movements

I coined the word Migritude as a play on Negritude and Migrant Attitude. It asserts the dignity of outsider status. Migritude celebrates and revalorizes immigrant/diasporic culture. It captures the unique political and cultural space occupied by migrants who refuse to choose between identities of origin and identities of assimilation, who channel difference as a source of power rather than conceal or erase it.

The four works that make up the Migritude Cycle draw on my spiritual and cultural heritage, as a 3rd-generation East African of Indian Gujurati descent. Conceived as an Epic Journey In Four Movements, Migritude references the earliest religious teaching imparted to Hindu children: that of the First Four Gods. The Hindu child is taught that her first god is her Mother. The second god is her Father. The third god is her Teacher. The fourth god is The Guest.

Part I of the Migritude Cycle, When Saris Speak (The Mother), is a 90-minute spoken word theatre show. And now, a bilingual (Italian - English) book. It uses my trousseau of saris, passed down by my mother, to reveal how imperialism and colonialism, in India and Kenya, were - and continue to be - enacted on the bodies of women. It explores what diasporic daughters receive and reject from their mothers; delves into the relationship of migrants to the motherland, the mother tongue, the severing of those relationships and the forging of new transnational identities. Letters from my mother form an important part of the script, bridging the spaces between generations and continents.

Part II of the Migritude Cycle addresses the second archetype in the Four Gods theme: The Father.

This work will explore constructions of masculinity and race under colonialism. It will examine how the architecture of Empire is codified on the bodies of men: brown, black, and white. The context is the history of the Swahili coast, and the life of my father, who was born and raised under British colonial rule, on the island of Pemba, in the archipelago of Zanzibar.

The working title of the show is Bwagamoyo – drawn from two Swahili words: Bwaga – to dump, and Moyo – heart. Bwagamoyo was the original name given to two specific locations on the Swahili Coast: the town in Tanzania where slaves were brought from the inland and held for shipping, and a small island in the Zanzibar archipelago that was a holding prison for slaves. Both are now known as Bagamoyo. The original Bwagamoyo was a chilling admonition to the kidnapped human beings to literally dump their hearts, meaning their humanity, at these spots, since they would no longer use or need them once they left as slave cargo. Bwagamoyo is an equally apt metaphor for the socialization of boys into the kinds of manhood shaped by colonial power.

In this second 'movement' in the four-part journey of Migritude, I'm exploring new territories of form and language. It's being conceptualized and written as:

- a stage production,
- a text for publication, and
- a production for broadcast,

in order to have it reach larger audiences, and audiences underserved by live theatre and performing arts.

So, to return where I began, I check out men's necks these days. And I follow the small boy who skips through my brain, as he runs down a dirt road in Zanzibar at dawn, carrying empty milk cans. Stops to stuff himself on fallen mangoes - you've never tasted mangoes that juicy, and sweet. Each day, I try to carve out hours to drop down into the delicious, terrifying dance of fitting idea to image to word. The belly-fluttering pleasure of unrolling story, history, imagination, into something that lives and pulses.

Copyright Shailja Patel, 2008. All rights reserved. No part of this posting may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

My 888th birthday

was last Friday. Eighth day of eighth month of eighth year of the century. Just to ramp up the 8-power, I was born at 8am in the morning, and weighed eight pounds and eight ounces.

So 8 has always been my special number. Clearly the world agrees. Didja see the amazing fireworks Beijing laid on for me?

Thank you for all the lovely birthday wishes I received. And the poems! Poems written just for me put a smile of delight and wonderment on my face.

Yes, I had an utterly blissful 3-day birthday weekend. Filled with large and small pleasures.

I hiked a trail fragrant with jasmine and red earth. Played with monkeys and butterflies: powder-blue, saffron, crimson, pistachio. Startled a young antelope in the bushes. Sat beneath beautiful trees and made birdsong-infused images in my sketch pad of all I want to create in the year to come.

I walked under the root-doorway of a giant sacred Mugumo (fig, Ficus Thoningii) tree, behind a waterfall, down into prehistoric caves that sheltered the first humans in Kenya, and centuries later, the Mau Mau freedom fighters. Rowed my biceps and triceps to exhaustion, under a soft blue sky, to a soundtrack I never tire of - water lapping the sides of the boat.

Mahmoud Darwish is dead

This obituary in the Guardian tells you what he did.

An email from Breyten Breytenbach, in my inbox this morning, titled La Mort de Mahmoud, offers glimpses of who he was to those who knew and loved him:

Some of us had the privilege, only a few weeks ago, of listening to him reading his poems in an arena in Arles. The sun was setting, there was a soundless wind in the trees and from the neighbouring streets we could hear the voices of children playing. And for hours we sat on the ancient stone seats, spellbound by the depth and the beauty of this poetry. Was it about Palestine? Was it about his people dying, the darkening sky, the intimate relationships with those on the other side of the wall, 'soldier' and 'guest', exile and love, the return to what is no longer there, the memory of orchards, the dreams of freedom...?

Yes - like a deep stream all of these themes were there, of course they so constantly informed his verses; but it was also about olives and figs and a horse against the skyline and the feel of cloth and the mystery of the colour of a flower and the eyes of a beloved and the imagination of a child and the hands of a grandfather.

And of death. Gently, repeatedly, terribly, by implication, mockingly, even longingly - death. We wanted to weep, and yet there was laughter and he made it easy for us and it became festive. Afterwards, I remember, we did not want to leave the place. Light had fallen but we lingered, embracing and holding one another. Strangers looked each other in the eye, fumbled for a few words to exchange, some thoughts. How awkward it has become to be moved! I remember thinking how deeply he touched us, how generous he was. And how light.

[ ] He said he was stripping his verses of everything but the poetry. He was reaching out even more profoundly than he'd ever done before for the universally shared fate and sense of being human. Perhaps he was trying to convey that it was now time to "remember to die."

The next day when we left, when we said goodbye [ ] I wanted to kiss his hands and he refused.

[ ] Mahmoud is gone. The exile is over. He will not have lived to see the end of the suffering of his people - the mothers and the sons and the children who cannot know why they should be born into the horror of this life, the arbitrary cruelty of their dying. He will not fade away. Not the silhouette in its dapper outdated clothes and polished loafers, not the intelligent eyes behind the thick lenses, not the teasing, not the curiosity about the world and the intimacy of his reaching out to those close to him, not the sharp analyses of the foibles and the folly of politics, not the humanism, not the good drinking and the many cigarettes, not the hospitality of never imposing his pain on you, not the voice that spoke from the ageless spaces of poetry, not the verses, not the verses, not the timeless love-making of his words.

I just wanted to reach out to you. Some of you, I know, must be crying as I am now, and some never met him; but, surely, for all of us he was a reference. Maybe we will stop somewhere because we hear a flutter of birds overhead, and we will hold a protecting hand to our blinded eyes as we search the sky.

He will be alive for me in that rhythm of birds. I told him in Arles I want to propose to my fellow poets that we should, each one of us, declare ourselves 'honourary Palestinians.' He tried to laugh it away with the habitual embarrassment of a brother. And indeed, how puny our attempts to understand and approach the inconsolable must be! We cannot die or write in the place of his people, in the place of Mahmoud Darwich. Still, somehow, however futile the gesture, I need to try and say what an honour it was to have known this man a little and what a privilege and a gift his poetry is. And that I wish to celebrate the dignity and the beauty of his life.


I am one of those who never met him. I hoped that one day I would. So I could tell him that I turn to his poems when I am one stage past that place of not finding words - the stage where I have lost faith in words.

So I could tell him that reading his poems at those times has always restored my voice to me. That reading his poems at any time replenishes me like rain.

And they asked him:
Why do you sing?
And he answered, as they seized him:
I sing because I sing…

And they searched his chest
But could only find his heart
And they searched his heart
But could only find his people
And they searched his voice
But could only find his grief
And they searched his grief
But could only find his prison
And they searched his prison
But could only see themselves in chains

From Poem Of The Land,Mahmoud Darwish
(Written to commemorate five Palestinian girls killed by the Israelis, in connection with a demonstration on March 30, 1976, to protest Israeli seizures of Arab land).