“Shailja Patel Speaks Truth and Splits Fictions - Seattlest” |
| Shailja Patel Speaks Truth and Splits Fictions - Seattlest Posted: 05 Nov 2010 03:58 PM PDT Poet, playwright, theater artist, and activist Shailja Patel reads at Elliott Bay Books tonight from her U.S. debut book of poetry entitled Migritude. Part memoir, part political history, the book weaves together family, history, reportage and monologues of violence, colonization and love. "It's political history told through a personal lens," said Patel by phone. "I wanted to capture the idea of migrants and attitude. Voiced and embodied." A third-generation Kenyan whose family originally was from India, Patel now divides her time between Nairobi and Berkeley. But it was her time in San Francisco that most shaped her work. "It was there that I found the slam performance scene," said Patel. "I was very lucky, because I arrived in the Bay Area in the right time. The scene was really coming into its own. I was on the slam scene for about two years. I went to two nationals." (You can get an excellent taste of her style here, performing her poem Eater of Death.) "Then what happened was 9/11. So I started to write larger pieces, more political pieces. It was very important to me that Americans put 9/11 into a larger world political context. What I wanted was for Americans to see Afghanis as real people. To see their equivalent humanity." Which was, you may remember, a very unpopular viewpoint at the time. "It was a climate where it felt very very dangerous to put out anything other than American patriotism. A friend suggested putting up an UN flag, and he just got deluged with hate mail from his colleagues. I got hate mail, I broke up with my boyfriend because we disagreed rather radically. But for every person who hates my work, there is someone who is deeply grateful." In the intervening years, Patel has found gratitude across the globe, appearing on the BBC, NPR and Al-Jazeera. Her work was translated into 12 languages, and she the recipient of a Sundance Theatre Fellowship, an African Guest Writer Fellowship from the Nordic Africa Institute, the Fanny-Ann Eddy Poetry Award from IRN-Africa, the Voices of Our Nations Poetry Award, a Lambda Slam Championship, and the Outwrite Poetry Prize. "What I've learned about writing politically, it gets you a lot of flack. The way out of that is fiction. I've started writing in the third person." Which brings us back to the book. Originally written for the stage as a one-woman show, Migritude underwent several evolutions to make it to the page. "What I had to learn from taking the book from the stage to the page is that I had to write everything," said Patel. "On stage, you have inflection and movement. On the page, you have none of that. You have to recreate it. Thankfully, slam is a great apprenticeship. You have to learn to edit." For Migritude, that learning process took three years as it moved from inception to performance to published. A long time for a lesson, but Patel wasn't bothered. "The idea of disengaged art is not something I've ever been attracted to. The imperative for any engaged artist to say what needs to be said in the format it needs to be said. And let it shapeshift, let it morph." Migritude is out now from Kaya Press, a nonprofit publisher of Asian, Pacific Islander, and API diasporic literature, and is currently #1 on Amazon's Bestseller List in Asian Poetry. Follow Patel on Twitter: @shailjapatel and #migritude 7:00 p.m. // Elliott Bay Book Company // FREE This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
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