Only connect: Politics and Emotions.
A Review of Shaelja Patel’s Performance, Migritude , part II
The Kenyan political activist and performance poet Shailja Patel is a guest writer at the Nordic
Institute for African Studies in Uppsala, Sweden, and on the evening of June 3. she gave a
performance in Slotsbiografen, Ingmar Bergman’s old cinema In Uppsala. Those who have seen
Bergman’s autobiographical film, ‘Fanny and Alexander’ will be able to conjure up images of the
town. The audience numbered about 100 people, almost filling the small, old cinema; an amazing
number considering that it was an alternative performance, featuring poetry, and in a foreign
language.
The performance was advertised as ‘Bwagamoyo The Father, part II of Migritude’. The word
‘Migritude’ is a portmanteau fusion between Negritude and Migrant Attitude and is meant to
‘reclaim and celebrate outside status’. The Migritude Cycle is a work in four parts, based on Hindu
teaching which tells children of the first four Gods: The Mother, the Father, The Teacher and the
Guest. The first part of the cycle, The Mother, has been both published as a book and performed on
stage. What we witnessed on that warm summer evening was the script premiere of the second
part: The Father.
Shailja Patel’s performance is a bricolage of poetry , letters, local references (Slotsbiografen,
Uppsala), meditations on a variety of subjects (masculinity, the migrant condition, position of
women, Kenyan politics, the injustice of it all and the redemptive power of touch and love) and a
performative aspect, adding carefully selected symbolically charged actions to the words. The
demands of this genre are that it gives an appearance of a somewhat haphazard collection of genres,
items, thoughts etc, but that underneath this there is a unity created not by logics or arguments, but
by association and sympathetic or intuitive understanding. Shailja Patel’s performance came across
as a stream of consciousness monologue; The underlying unity was provided by angry criticisms of
the nexus patriarchy/ dictatorial states, and this nexus was seen to operate on three levels: the
national (Kenyan) level, the individual level (Shailja’s father) and the level of the body (the 9 points of
the male body): an almost Shakespearian construction. To this was added simple, but effective props:
9 ropes with a hangman’s noose, hung up at strategic moments in the unfolding narrative and a stage
table, turned upside down to create a prison.
The principle which moved the text forward was intuitive shifts between the three levels. This often
works very well, ‘The heart is a second brain in our body. It generates an electromagnetic field
5000times greater than that of the brain……The wounds of history can only be healed through the
heart…History buried is a guarantee of history repeated.’ In this way an exchange of letters around
the violence of the flawed Kenyan election in December 2007 combines effortlessly with a child’s
game to learn the body parts and a personal reminiscence about the violence of a father whom the
artist both hates and loves. The blend adds up to a lived life, a strong platform in the world. It aims to
not only tell, but to persuade. It does have a message. ‘In the end, we may never achieve justice.
Only arrive at a flawed and fractured love. But the unremitting quest for justice, the naming of
violation, is what makes love possible.’ This is a strong and important message, and it generated a
good deal of discussion between the audience and Shailja Patel, particularly on the subject of her
threats of violence to her father when he beat her for the last time. By the implications of the genre
this threat also foregrounded the treatment of political violence and raised the question of whether
it should be met with equal violence or not, and here, perhaps, the personal and the political levels
did not quite mirror each other. There is another problem with the analogy between private and
public or the psychological and the political. On the private, psychological level statements are
intended to gain a certain general, if not to say universal value: The patriarch, male violence, human
nature. On the political level, on the other hand, the issues are tied to particular events and people:
The Kenyan election debacle, Kibaki, Ngugi and Kivuitu, and here the debate is tied to time specific
events which not everybody knows about and about which there is no consensus or absolute ‘truth’.
The pattern of intermingling the personal and the political can work very well, but the political is
time and place specific to a degree which the personal is not, and for that reason it seems better to
look at the genre as a pattern with certain slots which can be filled in according to time and place.
Shailja Patel did this very well by including references to Bergman and Uppsala, but I wonder
whether the letters concerning the Kenyan election did have the same impact on the Swedish
audience on June, 2009 as they undoubtedly had on a Kenyan audience at the time of the crisis.
My doubts were, however, contradicted by the evident involvement in the performance by the
audience, and Shaelja Patel’s show demonstrated the strength of performance poetry, its ability to
captivate, involve, create discussion and most of all, to move. It also demonstrated the guest writer
program’s ability to reach outside the confines of NAI and be a voice in the cultural life of the town.
Kirsten Holst Petersen