Poéfrika Interview

Poéfrika is a weblog of creative, Africa-inspired writing, run by Rethabile Masile, who comes from Lesotho and is now based in France.

An interview with me has just been posted on the site. You can read it here.

Video: Violence, Politics, Civil Society

Historian David Anderson, Professor in African Politics and Director of the African Studies Centre at Oxford, was at NAI last week to deliver a talk he titled, with deliberate provocation:

Violence and Politics in Kenya's Uncivil Society

He made some useful points in his narrative of the events since the post-election crisis. But I disagreed strongly with two of his major arguments: that political participation in Kenya is driven by what he terms "competitive authoritarianism", and that the Kenya crisis was generated by an election that was "too close to call."

In my response, I addressed some of his major ommissions: the underlying economic drivers of the political crisis, the long-term issues that fuelled the violent conflict in December 2007 and January 2008. And highlighted other important factors in the debate on Kenya's current political impasse - including the recent sex strike called by a coalition of Kenyan women's organizations.

Watch the video here.

First 45 minutes: David Anderson
Next 20 minutes: My response
Next 30 minutes: Q and A

Two rave reviews

of my work in this week's Pambazuka News.
Click on the links below to read the full articles.

Like A Goddess Rides A Tiger
-- Phanuel Akubueze Egejuru is ‘totally enthralled’ by poet Shailja Patel’s performance about Zanzibari musician Bi Kidude at an Africa Literature Association conference in April. She describes here her experience of watching what the Igbo call "oha kara lama", an event whose memory travellers carry and disperse in distant lands.

Rebel And Renaissance Woman
-- Phanuel Akubueze Egejuru is awed by Kenyan poet Shailja Patel’s ‘eye-popping phraseology’ in Migritude, a volume of work on migration and its impact on human relationships. ‘Too delicate and too good to be touched’, Egejuru warns that the book may make painful reading for those who experienced direct colonisation, as Patel takes the reader ‘through years of exploitation…in Africa and Asia’. It is however ‘a must-read’, devoured by Ejeguru in one sitting, which ‘forges fresh expressions that invigorate and inspire budding poets to take risks and experiment’.

Shadow puppetry

has always intrigued me.

These photos were taken by Karim Kerrou as I prepared for my performance at the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation's welcoming reception for me.

They make me want to do a whole show in silhouette......

Will someone please buy us tickets to Sweden?

begged my friend Pablo Dosh in a mass email yesterday.

"Shailja just sent out following announcement about the premiere of Migritude II: Bwagamoyo -- the sequel to Migritude I -- in Sweden on June 3rd.

"And Andrea and I won't be there! SO unfair. After all, we saw the Migritude I premiere in Berkeley. Shouldn't the universe somehow allow us to attend all of her premieres?"

Only Pablo would even imagine travelling to Sweden for a performance with a six-week old baby and three-and-a-half-year-old toddler.

He goes on to say:

"Reading about Bwagamoyo makes me want to drop my current day's work agenda and write poetry.

"Reading:

The most telling – and compelling – line of a man's body is where his neck meets his shoulder.

"... this week when the spot where my neck meets my shoulder is killing me -- a combination of a minor car accident (got rear ended) three days before Mateo's birth, followed by three weeks of holding an infant in all kinds of weird positions -- makes me muse over what stress/pain/ambition I carry in that line where the neck meets the shoulder. And over everything I'm trying to do right now, be a father and spouse, fundraise for Peru, turn in my tenure file next week, be healthy -- I am increasingly reaching out to friends to lean on.

"I really (REALLY) wish I could see Shailja's show."

I wish you could too, Pablo. But you know I'll be channelling your unbeatable combo of Montessori confidence and Purple Power backstage, don't you? And I urge everyone reading this to consider relaxing Pablo's neck and shoulder muscles, just a fraction, with a donation to the amazing Building Dignity project for social justice in Peru.

Bwagamoyo: World Script Premiere, June 3

For every living creature that is male nine are sacrificed...the bodies are hung in a grove near the temple in Uppsala.
-- Adam of Bremen, German Church historian, 1070

I want to make a dragon's head, an angel, a devil. All experimentation implies great risk.
--Ingmar Bergman, legend of modern cinema, born and raised in Uppsala

The most telling - and compelling - line of a man's body is that where his neck meets his shoulder.
-- Shailja Patel, Bwagamoyo:The Father

What does the tortured masculinity of Ingmar Bergman have to do with Kenya's post election-violence?

How do Nordic myths of male sacrifice gyrate the hips of small brown boys in colonial Zanzibar?

And why do the ancient burial mounds of Old Uppsala evoke Obama's economic vulture, Paul Volcker?

Find out on June 3rd, at the historic Slottsbiografen, Uppsala, Ingmar Bergman's first cinema.

I will deconstruct nine chokeholds of masculinity, with flashing blades of poetry.
Ritually hang them.
Then resurrect them with a song of redemption.

It's going to be unforgettable. A high-wire risk-taking experimental performance / staged reading, that Bergman would approve of. There may even be real blood.

It's the world script premiere of Bwagamoyo: The Father, the second movement in the four-part epic journey of Migritude.

If you're anywhere within reach of Uppsala, you don't want to miss this. It'll never happen again, this way, in this particular space, so charged with significance, history, and power. It's not a show. It's a one-time creative event that you can be a part of.

Details on venue and time on my Calendar.

Presented by the Uppsala University Summer Symposium of Literature and Theory and Nordiska Afrikainstitutet Cultural Images Program.

Go Achebe!

Before I am accused of prescribing a way in which a writer should write, let me say that I do think decency and civilization would insist that the writer take sides with the powerless. Clearly, there's no moral obligation to write in any particular way. But there is a moral obligation, I think, not to ally oneself with power against the powerless. I think an artist, in my definition of that word, would not be someone who takes sides with the emperor against his powerless subjects.

Chinua Achebe, 2008, foreword to Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles by Richard Dowden