Shailja Patel: Dressed in scarlet she strides danger zones

Shailja’s words have no borders. Her muse is a huge gust of power that carries them everywhere also after print. My copy was left with my friend at the Polish embassy in Nairobi. Months later, it found its way back to me. I treasure it. This is part one of ‘Migritude, When Saris Speak published’ by LiettoColle in both Italian and English.

It is autographed:

“ Sister in the word, Comrade in the struggle. Your courage feeds my hope, May my words seed your soul.” - Shailja.

I have read ‘Migritude’ many times. Literature that grips the heart and mind and hurts whilst speaking beautifully is sacred. Each time I am challenged by the way ‘Migritude’ opens the cruel bowels of the world and yet leaves me proclaiming hope and love. It is crafted so fabulously so that its text is like an illuminated manuscript with each letter crafted with intent and purpose. Her performances, like at the World Social Forum in Nairobi, are impeccable. Gripping. Concentrated. Renewing.

In ‘Migritude’, Shailja Patel bares her soul, mine and yours, the world’s. And out come storms of life that fill every cranny you know, a gust that nobody should stop. If you have read ‘Migritude’ or watched Shailja Patel perform it, you know that experience.

Indeed humanity stands there naked in her eyes. She undresses it using fabrics. The power of woman is almost magical. She talks about weavers and takes your breath away with insight and originality. When she finishes we slowly return from the world she takes us to as an audience but we are changed. Then everyone gets up to give a standing ovation. It is mesmerising.

Each time I read this book, I am left the promise that I will return to those pages. A librarian told me that that poetry books are short and easy to read and so she expected me to return Anna Akhmatova’s poetry in a couple of days. I found that I wanted to keep the book longer. I did. I returned it and bought my own copy, to keep with me.

There are authors who want us to stay with them. They create homes for us in their words. Today’s reading of ‘Migritude’ has touched me deeply, lured me, possessed me. I am responding with these words. It is a book you can read and still find something you missed in your earlier reading.

The persona is the author who is courageously interpreting her life and those of others. Thunderous. A sari may speak conformism to you but do not expect any stereotypes here. She is striding without a sari! If you are looking for those who conform for the sake of respectability and safety, telling a story without their own guts, do not look here. She has come a long and bold journey. She is part of the journey of all too. How many other writers kept the dream of humanity alive in a people thrown out of a country overnight, writing about them? Staying with them in the imagination?

Shailja Patel is gazing at nooks that many feared to look at. Then she will make you touch them with the pad of your finger. She is defining a people the world, not just East Africa, has failed to understand in many ways. She is speaking of a fear which many of us could never have seen through her own eyes. She deserves a great hearing because she is not enclosed in speaking for one group, she is in sync with all those who have experienced such rejection; she speaks for them.

“The image that haunted my childhood: a man on the Nairobi railway platform who held his toddler child and cried. Cried aloud, through a wide open mouth. Soldiers had boarded the train just outside of Kampala, dragged his wife off while we watched. Too terrified for the child on his lap, the carriage of mute numb people, to resist.”

Beauty is always within the work. Holding imagery at its highest level of brilliance, she tells us that she makes the work “out of the sari that wraps me in tender celebration. Like the mother I discover. I make it our for the mother I got in all her wounded magnificence.” She has known wounds “that’s left my throat choked!” From an early age she knows many negative words which have the suffix ‘ion’ and which deprive people of a nation.

Repression: “how can you ever walk in a sari if you stride like that?”

Oppression: “And we know with the hopeless rage of third world citizens African passport holders that the sum of their lives and labour dreams and sacrifice was measured sifted, weighed found wanting by the INS” .

Humiliation: “Darkie sing us an Indian song!” “Two Pakis….. . Sorry ladies. We only do teas for hotel guests.” Right from the familiar circle a child knows at age six and before, life’s pains are present.

“So I make this work with rage
Every smug idiotic face I’ve ever wanted to smash…”

‘Migritude’ is a work of art that is so wrapped up in the art and history. It awes you with its power. She first goes straight to the depths of global injustice. The poet talks about “mousoleen” named after Mosul in Iraq.

“A fabric so fine, you could fit a 30 yard length of it into a matchbox. Egyptians used it to wrap mummies.”

This is a poet who takes a position on issues. She is not the type that anyone can groom to be their mouthpiece. She will tell it from her mind and heart. The failures we call success come up one by one and the poet makes you place them correctly after centuries of acceptance of superficial facts as history. And she is not alone. She is a sister, a daughter, a lover, a mother, a migrant, a troubadour with a trousseau and she is in the we. “We carry the visions of whole peoples. We push ourselves to breaking point to manifest them.”

Often alone, she does not lose herself. “I have been unprotected. I have been naked and exposed. I have been clothed and armoured.” But she carries on. “We do not start anything we will not finish. We don’t stop until we’re done.”

She does not lose her connection with her body. With anybody. With everybody. Not her father. Not you. You will not stop seeing those calluses on his fingers which this daughter would have too. The poet brings deep insight into issues of race, gender, sexuality and hope in being. This is where the world is a microcosm.

“It began as a teardrop in Babylon. Where the sunlight came from Astarte, shameless goddess of the fecund feminine. The boteh.”

So moving are the words about the people whom the world calls migrants. So deep and significant for the world today. Often invisible and not seen as anything else but a burden, what do they have to offer?

Her mother is inside history in the present and past. She is our mother in any part of the world, who protects what is most valuable in us. A Madonna loving like a virgin. A mother the poet describes in one of the strongest metaphors one encounters in a description of a mother. “… in all her wounded magnificence”. A mother we can all relate to for we love her, she wants the best for us and yet we must move on and seem to cast away some of what she thought dearest. A moment of recognition that many know with its pain.

“Mother, I will never live the cocoon of safety you dreamed of for your daughters. Do you see? I will always be called to stride across danger zones, to shout forbidden words to other fugitives.” Things may change. Mother will learn to cross some of the borders because mothering is powerful in recognizing being. Later the poet reads from her mother, a letter that reflects that change. Mother writes:

“Since you have stubbornly refused to get married, it seems your mangal sutra has to come from your mother instead of your husband!”

Twice in this work, the poet says of her, “… in all her wounded magnificence!” and one does not get tired of that description which opens up an entire meditation.

The poet is off to make words which snake this world. She heals the world too. It is a lifelong and strong commitment. In Shailja Patel’s world famous recitals, you can touch her dedication. You can touch her thread of life in the arts. Her golden thread around her wrist. This poetry is written in her blood and with her blood.

“Something is bursting the walls of my arteries something/
is pounding it’s way up my throat like a volcano/
rising/ finally/I understand/Why I’m a poet”

“This work which filigrees and inlays all your legacies. This work which snakes across borders, dodges visa controls, this is my intention, declaration, lifelong execution.”

She is a poet bringing out all those voices we strangled and put into suitcases in Idi Amin’s times in Uganda. The disappeared. She is a poet opening the wounds that we want to superficially heal. She is the cutting edge of a sharp knife which we need to cut the lies out of our fabric and make sense of history. She promised you no less. “Have you ever sliced a heart on a curve? Which piece would you keep?”

Shailja tears apart the way history is written and taught by the powerful, a subject in which much manipulation of thought is introduced. She scoffs at that. She shreds all that she was taught in Hospital Hill School, Nairobi Kenya. She wants history open with its intestines, blood and oxygen. Singing about Shaka Zulu to the tune of these are a few of my favorite things. The kernel of violence in so many is sown? The choice to teach ignorance in the name of history is painful, a strategy. So that Kenya is Gikuyu and Mumbi. So that Mau Mau is not a struggle of Kenyans but of the biggest tribe. So that tribalism is comfortable. So that the so called “Other” is always on the run. It has not only started now. It is not done alone by some strange dictator suddenly coming out of nowhere.

She knows about sealed documents. The many the British have hidden away. She quotes Caroline Elkins in ‘Imperial Reckoning: The Untold story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya’. Blood and rape. The shameless murders and extirpation of a humanity hidden away from the eyes of the world. And how it continues in the politics of the day in Afrika.

“British Foreign Office Documents describe Idi Amin as: A man we can do business with.”

Shailja Patel knows and she is not half-engaging. She takes them on for many who could not. “I know what I carry in my suitcase. I carry a family. I carry my history. Over my saris, I wear my sisters”

Suitcases. People always on the move. ‘Migritude’ is the home of very deep pathos. A people who can only call the world home when it is impossible to thrust roots anywhere. It is a very personal story, felt in every breath and everyday.

“I learn like a stone in my gut that/third generation Asian Kenyan will never /be Kenyan enough/ all my patriotic fervor/ will not turn my skin black/of immigration spikes/my mother straps my shoulders back with a belt/ to teach me to stand up straight.”

“Rath thodi ne vesh ja ja, the proverb I grew up on. The night is short and our garments change. Meaning: Don’t put down roots. Don’t get too comfortable. By dawn, we may be on the move.... Travel with children. Travel many days later especially to America and the hours and hours in queues waiting for visas, dehumanized. And still. “Invest only in what we can carry: passports, education, jewellery.”

Idi Amin is not the only person who rejected East African Asians. Some intellectuals, citizens and politicians in Kenya still bear a grudge against them. And everywhere most of them have gone, they have only flourished. In England, they rate among the most successful people in all that they strove to engage in after Amin Dada. Uganda beckons them back. Humanity and inhumanity. Where is the learning?

The writer takes us from Babylon to Uganda, to Kenya, to America and India, East, south, north and west without losing her compass. Her direction is humanity and she fails not. I know I can say that we shall never hear the last of ‘Migritude’. That when finally this poet calls her work done, we shall only be beginning to see the immense classic Shailja has delivered to the world. It is a work for the screen.

Turning history inside out, smelling it out, touching it…She asks again and again:

“How many ways can you splice a history?” Shailja is so great at questioning. The question mark ought to be the biggest part of the alphabet in history. Otherwise we shall not know how “musoleen” became “muslin” and “Kashmiri” “Cashmere”.

It is not easy to define the poet. Take your power Shailja, probe us. Press hard. Provoke us son and daughter of Patel. Make us throw up as traditionally, and you are African in every sense, that is the only way the people are healed … showing their wounds, pus and blood out! You make us cry and cringe and act. Activist! You make the British Empire tremble. And you read them your poetry on every stage, reciting it too at the Cultural Olympiad 2012, untamed.

Capitalism is the force you would like to see in the past and dead. “There was a force called capitalism. .. In 1813, Dhaka musoleen sold at 75% profit on the London market, yet was still cheaper than the local British fabric. The British weighed it down with 80% duty. But that wasn’t enough. They needed to force India to buy British cloth. So down the alleyways of Dhaka stamped the legionaries- British, this time, not Roman. Hunted out the terrified weavers, chopped off their index fingers and thumbs.

How many ways can you clone an empire? Dice a people, digit by digit?”

So that the calluses on any mechanic’s hands mean a lot to you. You went to see children in poor areas of Nairobi learning how to box on a podium created to claim their land taken by a bank. You defended the local activist without wings, using your own flights, paying the price. You are.

And I learn. Now I know why in Eldoret Loreto school uniforms ( I was clad in one) and those of many other top schools of the rich were bought at Gulabs. The empire extended. You tell me that: “In 1846, Britain annexed the vale of Kashmir, fabled paradise of beauty, and sold it to Maharaj Gulab Sing of Jammu for 1 million pounds.”

When Shailja Patel pens, she is a surgeon on power in the world and its visible rottenness in our lives. In ‘Migritude’ she compresses history into thoughts that choke us with their truth. It is alive in us like biting red ants.

At a time when support for contemporary literature from Kenya has fitted into a description of those who would eschew history, remaining empiricist on a curious observation of tribe on tribe with the well heeled cheering on so that the wounds of colonialism and capitalism are bandaged, Shailja Patel defies.

She is a free spirit. She is raging. Her volumes following upon this one may take long to complete as she perfects her recitals and publications but one day we shall all have to acclaim her poetry.

‘Migritude’ is a complex weaving, a work of genius. The poet is genuine in her vision of the world. It is not possible to be honest today about the failure of the economy, sexual abuse and be passive. Be a casual observer. One has to engage beauty and as Professor David Rubadiri used to say in class, find out what is “heterogeneously yoked together” as the metaphysical poets did. A simple route fails. Shailja Patel holds up a thousand mirrors in one big reflection of the intricacies of power. True that the media concentrates on tragedies as her mother writes and says but also true that you cannot see the beauty of life and not rage at the pain in which she is abused.

Shailja Patel is a forerunner in the art of speaking truth to power in slam poetry and has influenced many, from rappers to writers and poets who sing with this openness. She set the pace. There is not time for navel gazing here. She is out there and speaking! See how she deals with rape here, Rape is rape is rape is rape.

“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.”

Somewhere in my imagination when I walk the planet barefoot, I meet Shailja Patel in many places. I know her. She is that woman with unmatching headgear like the one Maya Angelou writes used to wear to school and which her son as a child told her not to wear it. A scarlet cape will be draped on Shailja’s sari even when it does not match. No, not in a sari, in jeans. She is that person who shares a little flour cake in Kibera with three others. She is still wearing “a pure wool scarlet cape that hangs down to her knees. Sleeves like wings,” because she carries her sisters in her. Because she does not need to be black to be African; because no one needs to be any colour to be anything.

All of us are crossing borders. She is bending examining gun shot wounds in Palestine and Israel. She is in hidden places in Nairobi, Kampala, California and Israel reading documents and writing on. She is striding without a sari on. She is reading justice. Speaking justice. Living justice.

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* Philo Ikonya is a Kenyan poet and activist.

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