Everything Here
It's always easier to distance oneself from the parts of us that we don't understand or cannot control and for me that is my giant bleeding heart that wants to adopt all the puppies in the world and give everyone ice cream to make them all less sad about capitalism.
Africa in its potential and realities is me, it's us. It’s a reckoning with ourselves. It’s a becoming. Movement and stillness. Where past, present, and future bleed into each other.
Sampa The Great has tears, true tears, when the audience flows with her as a whole body. For myself, I felt touched by the courage of an outstanding presence, out of shyness.
Africa in its potential and realities is me, it's us. It’s a reckoning with ourselves. It’s a becoming. Movement and stillness. Where past, present, and future bleed into each other.
All of this has gotten me thinking not only about language and its intricacies but about existing translated poetic work, from English to other languages, and vice versa. What makes a good translation?
At the same time, I read, with the whole world, a terrifying truth: an estimated one million Uighur people are detained in camps, arbitrary, by the Chinese government. So, I heard the poems with a melody of nostalgia and rhythm of un-defeated strength.
