Shailja Patel

Shailja Patel (born 1970) is an Indian-Kenyan poet, playwright, theatre artist, and political activist. She is most known for her book Migritude, based on her one-woman show of the same name, which was funded by the Ford Foundation. CNN characterizes Patel as an artist "who exemplifies globalization as a people-centered phenomenon of migration and exchange. She divides her time between Nairobi, Kenya, and Johannesburg, South Africa. She is a founding member of Kenyans For Peace, Truth and Justice, a civil society coalition that works for an equitable democracy in Kenya. Her book, Migritude, was published by Kaya Press in 2010. Quotes History buried becomes history repeated. A whole generation of Africans have been denied the truth of their own history, and so we do not really know ourselves, or our countries. Reclaiming those erased or hidden histories is vital political and creative work, and is central to my purpose as a writer. my father speaks Urdu language of dancing peacocks rosewater fountains even its curses are beautiful. He speaks Hindi suave and melodic earthy Punjabi salty rich as saag paneer coastal Kiswahili laced with Arabic, he speaks Gujarati solid ancestral pride. Five languages five different worlds yet English shrinks him down before white men who think their flat cold spiky words make the only reality. Seal the borders of my body to pain, seal my eyes, mouth, belly to any hunger not my own. I rename myself America. No love no grief in the world but mine. Ready is never a question just a reminder to breathe and jump. May the redness overtake them. Many red ants feast in their groins, scorpions nestle in their beds, blood vessels explode in their brains, organs rupture in their bellies... May they never escape the redness of their hands, on their dicks, the bitter nausea of it on their tongues, the have of it before their eyes, the drum of it in their ears. There is a reason that people seek out poetry, even if they’ve never read a poem in their lives, even if they think poetry is something totally esoteric or trivial or irrelevant. In the most powerful moments of our lives, in moments of love, passion, birth, death, marriage, all the great rituals of our lives, suddenly people want poetry. Nobody has ever read a financial statement at a funeral. Nobody has ever read a political essay at a wedding. So, some part of us really knows that poetry has this incantatory value, this ability to create a kind of power and feeling that is a mystery in some ways, but that is the magic of poetry. I’m an empiricist, with a background in political economy. I don’t “believe” in poetry’s power to do things – I observe what poetry actually accomplishes. Society is changed for the better by movements, collective action, legislation, technology, new knowledge. Poems can feed our hearts and spirits as we do that work, can articulate visions of a better reality, can share knowledge, can build and renew courage, can give voice to suffering and rage. But poems by themselves are not change. In an interview First they said If it really happened, report it to the police. Don’t you know how serious such allegations are? You can’t just come to the community without official charges. Then they said Why did you have to go to the police? Don’t you know how trivial such allegations are? You should have come to the community instead of filing charges. A poem on how this works We are so used to decentring ourselves and marginalising ourselves that we don’t even recognise that we’re doing it. Before you claim a word … you have to earn its meaning’ has to do with the materialism of words. Words as matter. The concept of personal and communal honour that lies in keeping your word; your word being ‘good’ — meaning solid, trustworthy, a promise that can be counted on. Walking your talk. As a writer, I believe fiercely in the integrity of words — I don’t use words like ‘love’ or ‘truth’ or ‘justice’ lightly. The saris in Migritude as word materialised — yes. They are the circulation of global capital, of histories erased. And in the making of the show, I also experienced them as generative — tellers of stories, texts in themselves, palimpsests of art, weaving, culture, trade, Empire. My job as a poet is to tell the truth. To tell it, as Audre Lorde wrote, with as much beauty and clarity as possible. I want my work to enter listeners through the heart and gut. My job as a poet is to wake myself up and take responsibility for learning the truth. That means doing hard work, looking beyond headlines, being willing to interrogate data, structures, systems. Then, it's my job to create the conditions, in my poems, where others can wake up to those truths. It may not feel good. I'm not here to make people feel good. When we open ourselves up to really feeling, both deep happiness and deep pain, genuine unmanipulated awe at the beauty and violence of life, we emerge larger. More human. More porous, more connected to everything. That makes us braver, gives us hope, no matter how dire things are. She talks about her job as a poet Migritude is a word I created, to capture the unique political and cultural world of 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. It grafts the in-your-face energy of "migrants with attitude" onto the legacy of liberation and resistance defined by Négritude, the movement led by Leopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire in the 1930s. Migritude is political history unpacked in poetry. It is an accounting of Empire enacted on the bodies of women, from India to East Africa to Afghanistan to the US, unfurled through a collection of saris given to me by my mother. In an interview External links