Like a goddess rides a tiger

In thirty years of attendance at African Literature Association conferences, I have never been so totally enthralled by any literary artist ‘performing’ her work. This year, I watched Shailja Patel, a new face at ALA, thrill the audience with her performance of her Drum Rider.

Most appropriately, she was ushered on to the microphone with a griotic rhapsody by Alhaji Papa Susso, to the accompaniment of a kora and an African village made xylophone. An apparition in a white boubou, armed with a colorful khanga, Shailja stepped to the microphone to begin her bombardment of the aesthetic feelings of her unsuspecting audience. She introduced the subject of her poem – ninety-year-old Zanzibari musician, Bi Kidude, a veritable Mzee who claims to be one hundred and twenty.

Shailja mimed the greater portion of the first movement during which Bi Kidude sets up for her drumming:

‘Twisted a soft worn khanga round her hips / The woman harnessed her hips to the drum / Rocked it aslant between her straddled legs / Settled into position.’

Shailja’s physical theatre invoked a drill sergeant commanding his soldiers to fall in line and stand at ease. I saw people in the audience, like me, jerk their bodies straight, thrusting out their chests, to Shailja’s command. Her streams of freshly-coined words took the audience to ‘Planet Kidude‘, to re-live decades of trekking the length and breadth of Tanzania to perform even as Bi Kidude:

‘fought off terror, insults, mockery / the soul-destroying silence / only the strongest fire survives.’

The poet captures the strength and ruggedness of this old woman who:

‘has walked more miles than most of us have driven.’

But who is also soft, as she wraps her music round the lives of the powerless, to whom her drum gives voice:

‘in language of street and market poetry buried in the bodies of women.’

Shailja concludes the description of Kidude with a comet-shower of similes:

‘I have never seen a woman ride a drum before / like a goddess rides a tiger / like creation rides the cosmos / I have never seen an artist / male or female / own their instrument like / it grew out of their belly, like it was welded / to their thighs.

The poet’s reaction to Bi Kidude’s drumming equals my reaction to Shailja’s performance. I have never seen any poet perform her work this way before. What makes Shailja so captivating is her weaving of insightful, biting commentaries into her poetry. Thus, the dancers:

‘slipped into movement / as a bhajia slips into hot oil / rises to the surface / starts to sizzle.’

These dancers become the avenue for denouncing society’s abuse of women. As they work their hips via Shailja, I watch members of the audience, like me again, work their hips in synch with the performer. It is a heart-rending presentation of these dancers dancing:

‘for all women whose bodies have been stolen from them.’

But the poet gives them back their lives. She makes them:

‘thrust their succulent buttocks out/ with democratic largesse’

as they tease the on-lookers and reclaim other abused women, such as waitresses trapped in uncomfortable uniforms, or skinny ‘women who check their bodies daily for criminal fat’.

They also dance for those who succumb to reconstructive surgery, starvation, for they have been brainwashed to believe that:

‘beauty equals self-annihilation’.

The poet left no underdog woman unspoken for. She made the dancers do it for those infected with HIV by:

‘a man who values her life / less than his gratification.’

In the end, the dancers stake a claim for the natural woman’s right to be whole and wholesome as they:

‘shake the bounty /of women’s bodies back into the world.’

Like others spellbound by the performance, I nod until the back of my neck creaks and hurts. The final movement comes like an explosion, with its irreligious utterance:

‘I believe in Bi Kidude/the way I don’t believe in god.’

‘Wow!’ I exclaim, only to listen to the most hilarious pre-conditions that could reconvert the poet to god. I stop myself from laughing out loud at an outpouring of qualities that god cannot even aspire to possess. But if god managed somehow to meet the poet’s demands:

‘then maybe I would believe / in that god. That god who is only a name / for the genius in all of us / that makes us our own imam and prophet / our own divinity / I would call the faithful to prayer: Bomba Kidude! Kidude Saafi!’

Like Bi Kidude, Shailja’s was the performance no other artist would want to follow. Fortunately it was a fitting precursor for the keynote speech by the famous Ghanaian philosopher, scholar and Princeton Professor, Kwame Anthony Appiah.

Shailja’s performance is what the Igbo call ‘oha kara lama’ - an event whose memory travellers carry and disperse in distant lands. Just as the poet became a believer in Kidude, I became a believer in Shailja’s poetry. I couldn’t wait to get home and read her Migritude, which I devoured in one sitting and gulped down in one mouthful.

* Phanuel Akubueze Egejuru is professor of English Loyola University, New Orleans, USA.
* Kenyan poet Shailja Patel performed Drum rider: A tribute to Bi Kidude at a conference held by the African Literature Association in Vermont (USA) in April 2009.
* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/.