AWID in Capetown

In four days time, I'll be in Capetown, for the 11th Annual AWID Forum. I'll perform for over 1,500 activists, from women's movements and networks around the world.

I'd expected to be a mass of nerves at this point, as I usually am before big performances. But my opening plenary performance is on Day 2, when the theme is how to build stronger, more powerful and sustainable movements. It's a question I've been exploring, in different ways and different communities, for almost my whole adult life. To have this conversation with leading thinkers, activists, makers of change, from every region of the globe, is a mind-blowing opportunity.

Forget nerves. What rises in me is a warm tide of anticipation, excitement, can't-wait-ery. This is the audience I write for. This audience is the reason I write.

Election Night Snapshots

Several times in the past 8 months in Nairobi, I've told friends who credit "Yes We Can" to Barack Obama, that the phrase was actually coined by Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez, co-founders of the United Farmworkers of America labor union.

7pm, November 4th, La Peña Cultural Center, Berkeley:
This is a gathering place for so many of the communities I call home - activist, internationalist, performing arts, social justice. I am surrounded by friends, keep bumping into people who saw my shows here. It really feels like a homecoming. Over 300 of us pack the theatre and restaurant to watch the live election coverage on big screens.

Indra has brought a gigantic round loaf of bread, with Barack Obama's face on it. It sits in the middle of the table, like a communion loaf. We joke about whether it would be bad luck to cut it before the winner is declared.

7.30pm:
He's got Pennsylvania. He takes Ohio. We're all jumping and yelling, throwing victory fists up at the ceiling. How much of a landslide could this be? What if he takes Florida, Nevada, Kansas, Arizona, Missouri? What if ALASKA goes to Obama, humiliates Palin beyond recovery?

7.50pm:
Polls are about to close in California. Obama has 210 electoral votes to McCain's 107. There's no question he'll get California's 25, so it's in the bag. I want to call my parents in Nairobi and tell them, but I don't want to deprive them of the suspense and anticipation.

Then it flashes up, fills the whole screen. No warning.

The 44th president of the United States: Barack Obama.

For a moment, I think: Whoops. They're flashing the pre-prepared "Obama Victory" graphic. Of course there's one for McCain too. Someone at NBC is gonna get fired for this.

It stays up. We are all on our feet, laughing, cheering, laughing, hugging, crying, laughing, saying ohmigod ohmigod, and It. Is. True.

8pm:
I keep saying: Before 8pm! I just didn't expect it to wrap up so quickly.

I think: This is what we deserved, what we worked for, in Kenya last year. This is how we were waiting to feel on December 27th - and it was taken from us. It still hurts.

9pm (or thereabouts):
Before Obama went to Grant Park for the victory speech, he emailed his list to say thank you.

He said gay and straight in his speech. Without missing a beat.

The loaf of bread is passing hand to hand. People break off small pieces to eat around the crust of Obama's face on the top.

We chant Sí Se Puede in time to each repetition of his Yes We Can. We are almost levitating on the buoyant joy, the triumph and relief.

Camera pans in on Oprah crying in Grant Park.

Camera pans in on Jesse Jackson crying in Grant Park.

People are leaving for the Oakland Convention Centre, HQ of the Obama campaign. Horns and joyous whoops sound from the street outside. We begin to clear the theatre for dancing.

A musician comes on stage - leader of an Irish band from the Starry Plough Irish Pub next door. Apparently, Obama has an Irish ancestor on his mother's side. He gets the whole crowd in on the chorus to their Obama victory anthem:

O'Leary, O'Reilly,
O' Donnell and O'Hara
There's no one as Irish
as Barack O'Bama

9.30pm:
Berkeley is a giant open air party. Cars horns fill the streets, students run down the middle of Shattuck Avenue, counter to the traffic, arms flung wide in jubilation.

I think: Kisumu must be 10 times, 20 times, crazier than this right now. And Kogelo ? My god.

10.30pm:
I'm hungry now to see and hear what's happening in Kenya. I'm trawling Kenyan news sites for live footage. I can't get through to my parents. I call a Kenyan friend, political exile in the UK. She tells me tomorrow has been declared a national holiday in Kenya. She shares my sadness about how this should have been our experience too, in Kenya, on December 27th .

Ten minutes later, she sends me this poem. I offer it to you with her permission (she asked not to be named):

OBAMA MORNING TO SHAILJA

Yes, we can because
It is written in blood
In history
On your hand
We will because
The time has come
and cannot be held back
by old
greedy
men
so passe
We can
because
we owe it
to us
and we are many
we are bold
and bolder still
and our time too has come
and we will
we will
god knows
we will

the waiting the waiting

Unfocused doesn't begin to describe me today.

I've exerted huge discipline not to call friends who are working the polls in Missouri, Nevada, Arizona.

I've had out-of-the-blue calls from two exes I haven't heard from since the Kenya crisis. I think it's because we feel like we're living a major moment in history. And we reach instinctively for the ones who have shared our other major moments.

I just want it to be 6pm, so I can head to the Election Watch Party at La Peña. Dozens of friends will be there. That's where I was on election night 2004. I remember biking home through the dark streets at midnight, gutted over the losses, yet infused with the power of community.

La Peña presented Migritude's world premiere in 2006. I am a part of La Peña history, and it is a part of mine. Can't think of anywhere else I'd rather be tonight.

Drum Rider in Finnish

Drum Rider appears in the current issue of Finland's Kääntäjaa-översättaren journal, translated into Finnish by Taija Mård. The onomatopoiea of the title makes me grin: Rumpuratsastaja

The double-page spread on my work includes this article by the translator:

I hear the rumbling of drums, I feel the heat of Zanzibar on my skin, I’m stunned by the swaying hips, I sink into the lines on the old woman’s face. My throat feels tight, a tear squeezes out of my eye, along with the audience of hundreds I burst into applause that have no end. Shailja Patel has just performed her poem Drum Rider: A Tribute to Bi Kidude, at the opening ceremony of WALTIC.

Writers’ and Literary Translators’ International Congress, held last summer in Stockholm, was proud, and we participants edified, to have on stage this woman poet from Kenya with Indian looks and perfect English accent.

Patel has received many awards for her work, and her poems have been translated into many languages; used in high schools, colleges and workshops from South Africa to Japan; exhibited on the web on such respected forums as International Museum of Women, Museum of the African Diaspora and New York University’s Asian Poets Collection.

When Patel then performs her poetry, it’s not a reading nor even a recitation but a dazzling one-woman theatrical performance. No wonder that she has performed around the world, in arenas in New York as well as in different parts of Africa, in different festivals and conferences as well as at universities. Usually she receives standing ovations and curtain calls, and afterwards people go and thank her personally. And so did I here up north, at Folkets Hus.

Later during the week we heard Patel’s presentation of the poem – and due to numerous requests, its repeat performance – and about the conflict situations it has aroused. Such work is dangerous stuff in many corners of our planet. Patel has been forced off stage in the middle of Drum Rider, because one should not say that god could be a 95-year-old ebony black Swahili woman, let alone say out loud the word clitoris!

Bi Kidude is a living legend, the renowned master of Taarab and Unyago music from Zanzibar. She started performing in the 1920s and is now almost 100 years old. She, too, is internationally known, and she has received the prestigious WOMEX award for her achievements in the field of World Music.

Of her Shailja Patel wrote the poem. I am now proud and honoured to be her bridge to Finland and Finnish. You hear the rumbling of drums, you feel the heat of Zanzibar on your skin…
Taija Mård