Podcast: Shailja Patel on “Migritude”

by Victor Dlamini on October 15th, 2007

I recently travelled to the coastal city of Durban to attend some of the performances at Poetry Africa 2007. In this episode of The Victor Dlamini Literary Podcast, I bring you a conversation I had with the phenomenally talented Shailja Patel, who performed at the festival. I’m also pleased to bring you, in addition to our chat, part of a private performance that Shailja gave at a dinner held on the Berea Ridge.

Shailja Patel has already added to our lexicon with the word “migritude” – which she coined for the title of her signature performance piece – but it is as a spoken-word theatre artist and poet that she truly seizes the imagination. Shailja brings to performance poetry a very strong sense of language and an uncanny ability to make historical connections that reverberate across the ages, linking what seems intensely personal with the overtly political.

It was the creation of “Migritude” – her one-woman show, from which the performance I’ve recorded derives – that moved Shailja’s work from the page onto the stage. With “Migritude” she has brought the lives of the migrants from the political “South” into the very centre of socio-cultural dialogue. Her performance at Poetry Africa 2007 stunned the audience.

“Migritude” has been performed to packed houses across many continents, and excerpts from it have been heard on radio in the US, the UK and Africa. Shailja’s work has been translated into several languages, and it has also been published in journals and anthologies as well as in online galleries. The journals and anthologies include Women’s Lives: Multicultural Perspectives, Sow’s Ear Poetry Review and the CD, Best of the Berkeley Slam Poets.

Shailja has been invited to speak at a number of global anti-war rallies and she has performed at more than 30 colleges, universities and festivals – including keynote addresses at student conferences at Yale and Brown Universities. She has two collections, Dreaming in Gujarati and Shilling in Love. Shailja makes her home in both California and Nairobi, Kenya. A certified yoga instructor, the poet who writes such supple lines received a degree in Economics and Politics from the University of York.

Shailja Patel links

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