My job as a poet is to tell the truth

INTRODUCTION

I am thrilled to be named Kenya's poet for Poetry Parnassus. This festival at London's Southbank Centre will bring one poet from each Olympic nation to London in June this year, "to recreate the poetic spirit of the ancient Olympic Games." It is believed that this will be the largest ever international gathering of poets.

It is particularly meaningful for me to be Kenya's poet because the selection was based on nominations from the public. A call went out in the global media in 2011, for people all over the world to nominate their favourite poets from each country. So I won this honour through the votes of people who love poetry, and love my poetry. My heartfelt thanks to everyone who nominated me.

Below is an interview I did on Poetry Parnassus with Steven Fowler of the UK's Maintenant Poetry Series.

THE INTERVIEW

STEVEN FOWLER: In its sheer scope the Poetry Parnassus offers a unique opportunity for you to interact with fellow poets from every corner of the globe. How do you think this collective experience will benefit those who attend, to be exposed to so many different traditions of poetry, to hear poetry in so many languages?

SHAILJA PATEL: I hope it will change the discourse from Poetry to Poetries. Plural. Multiple. Widely divergent. Constantly evolving. I hope it will delight and challenge audiences into engaging with poetries outside their comfort zone.

STEVEN FOWLER: You clearly conceive of poetry as a medium of change, one in which your activism can find voice and reach people who perhaps otherwise would not be reached. Is this true do you think?

SHAILJA PATEL: George Orwell said: "In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." We can't have enough revolutionary truth-telling in this time of global crisis, and poetry is the natural vehicle - a distillation of language and perception to their purest, most intelligent and powerful essence.

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.

STEVEN FOWLER: Could you discuss the collection Migritude, which seems to be a fusion of memoirs, poetry and political polemic?

SHAILJA PATEL: 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.

"Because I was born to a law / that states / before you claim a word you steep it / in terror and shit / in hope and joy and grief / in labour endurance vision costed out / in decades of your life / you have to sweat and curse it / pray and keen it / crawl and bleed it / with the very marrow / of your bones / you have to earn / its / meaning"

- - - from Shilling Love, Migritude

STEVEN FOWLER: The Parnassus is one of the largest poetry events to ever take place, over one whole week with over two hundred poets in attendance. The nature of its design, to bring one poet from every country participating in the Olympics, means, to a certain extent, you are a representative of your nation and its poetic culture. How do you feel about that idea?

SHAILJA PATEL: There are 40 million Kenyans, and therefore, 40 million Kenyas, and 40 million Kenyan poetries. To imagine that I, a single poet, could represent that spectrum, would be absurdly reductive, ignorant, and arrogant.

The idea of 'representing my nation' also reinforces a dangerous and obsolete nationalism at a time when Kenyan nationalism is being invoked to justify Kenya's military invasion of Somalia. The South African poet Sandile Dikeni says, aptly: "The nation-state is an 18th-century European construct". I am a radical internationalist. I work for the dissolution of borders.

What I can represent with integrity is a Kenyan dream. A dream that 99.9% of Kenyans share with 99.9% of the world's population – a dream of truth, justice, equality. A dream of a world free of class apartheid, a world where all forms of life are cherished, and every human being is of equal value. A world where history is re-written from the bottom up.

The Kenyan poetries I align myself with rarely, if ever, make it onto the page. These poems are the testimonies of Kenyans made refugees, in their own country, by corporate multinational landgrabs and ruling class rapacity. Women who sleep in cardboard shacks, wake in flooded tents, and do whatever they have to do to feed the children. These poems are the recountings of torture by survivors of Britain's gulag in Kenya. They are the chants in the blood of hundreds of Kenyan women demanding justice after being raped by British soldiers. These poems are the dirges of Somalis fleeing from famine, bombed by Kenyan warplanes. These poetries of witness, of embodied resistance, are the heartstopping, world-changing Kenyan poetries I am proud to make visible and to amplify.

STEVEN FOWLER: Performance seems central to your poetics, is it a vital part of your writing methodology, the thought of the work being performed?

SHAILJA PATEL: For most of human history, poetry has been oral. The sound of a word creates a world. I write by hearing the spoken music of words, by feeling them in my body. When I read a poem-in-progress out loud, it shows me where and how it wants to be edited.

STEVEN FOWLER: The parnassian ideal that really centres the Poetry Parnassus project reaches back to the Poetry International festival held in London in 1967 which sought to address notions of free speech, community and peace through the artform of poetry. Do you believe this tradition needs to be maintained in 2012?

SHAILJA PATEL: There could not be more potent moment to revive the Parnassian ideal. The global Occupy movement is a collective act of poetry on a planetary scale. Poetry Parnassus could speak from the heart of Occupy, be the platform for a poetic re-visioning of our global societies, a poetic dismantling of the militarism and capitalism that are destroying all life on the planet. Poetry Parnassus could be the birthplace of a poetics of transformation.

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