(Pics supplied)
Siphindile Hlongwa, the curator of the Poetry Africa festival, says: “With just weeks away from the launch of the Poetry Africa Festival, we are proud to honour Lefifi Tladi as our featured artist. An acclaimed activist and celebrated artist who played an important role in the rise of the Black Consciousness movement. His multidisciplinary approach to art has resulted in the creation of paintings, sculptures, music, and, of course, poetry. He is one of many poets on the programme who bring their multiple lives and a myriad of disciplines to their work”.
(Left: Cheryl Boyce-Taylor)
Bash Amuneni is a Nigerian architect, storyteller, and performance poet who is also a TEDx speaker and general manager of the Abuja Literary Society.
Listed amongst the ten most influential performance poets in Nigeria, local poetry enthusiasts will be eager to hear his style and how his abiding interest in humanity’s expression of love impacts his work.
The Italian poet, writer, narrator, and musician Claudio Pozzani created the Genoa International Poetry Festival, Parole Spalancate, the oldest and biggest poetry event in Italy of which he is still the director. His poems have been translated and published in more than ten languages, and he has produced poetry and music collections and published two novels.
From the USA, Allia Abdullah-Matta, a poet and Professor of English at CUNY LaGuardia and the Graduate Center/Africana Studies Program, will share her work, which addresses the culture and history of Black women and Black bodies and voices in fine art and poetry. Palestinian poet and essayist Mosab Abu Toha considers his documentation of the war from Gaza in verse and essays a bulwark against erasure. Currently living in Cairo, his second book of poetry, Forest of Noise, will be released serendipitously by Knopf later in October.
In addition to the illustrious list of international poets, South African homegrown poetry champions will be celebrated. Dr Phillippa Yaa de Villiers has taken time from lecturing creative writing at Wits University, Johannesburg, where she has carefully incubated many writers' creative careers. She is a Distinguished Alumnus of Rhodes University and has been an actor and teacher at the Market Theatre Laboratory. Her work has been published in several quintessential anthologies, including New Daughters of Africa, Yellow Means Stay, and Relations. The depth of her literary work is explored in Our Words, Our Worlds: Writing on South African Poets, Notes from the Body: Health, Illness, Trauma, and The Creative Arts: On Practice, Making, and Meaning.
(Right: Uhuru Phalafala)
Uhuru Phalafala is a writer, researcher, archivist, and scholar. She will also step aside from lecturing at Stellenbosch University, focusing on critical race studies, Indigenous epistemologies and cosmologies, social movements, and jazz. Her books The Collected Poetry of Keorapetse Kgositsile, 1969-2018, and Keorapetse Kgositsile & the Black Arts Movement: Poetics of Possibility are both invaluable additions to the cultural archive of the continent. Healer, poet, and co-founder of Impepho Press, vangile gantsho dedicates herself and her work to creating and supporting spaces that encourage healing. She is the author of two poetry collections: red cotton and Undressing in Front of the Window, and she has also been published in various literary publications around the globe, including New Daughters of Africa. Anthologist, poet, short story writer, and translator
Makhosazana Xaba has published four collections of poetry, the most recent, The Art of Waiting for Tales: Found Poetry from Grace—a novel. Izimpabanga Zomhlaba is her translation of Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth into isiZulu, and she is a patron of the Johannesburg Review of Books, where she hosts long-form interviews with contemporary South African poets. The roll call of honour is lengthy, but these are only a few of the illustrious poets on the roster, which audiences can look forward to listening to and learning from.
“The festival will be presented both as a live and online event. The hybrid nature of the festival means that no matter where you are, you can share in the many online webinars,” says Hlongwa.
The first online session hosted by Adam Levin will be with members of the South African Poetry Project (ZAPP) who will speak about the range of projects they have undertaken to promote a love of contemporary South African poetry in schools and local communities. The ZAPP team will be joined by poets Malika Ndlovu, Quaz Roodt, and Thabile Moleko as they discuss the importance of celebrating and creating platforms for local poetic voices on stage, in classrooms, online, and in books.
Poetry & Academia (fading legacies) is an online panel hosted by Ongezwa Mbele, featuring poets Nic Makoha (Uganda/UK), Wise Rebel (Suriname), Cherly Boyce-Taylor (US), and Bash Amuneni (Nigeria/UK). Poets who teach and work in the academic sphere. Including Dr Raphael D'Abdon (University of South Africa), Dr Pieter Odendaal (North-West University), Siza Nkosi (University of Fort Hare), Dr Phillippa Yaa De Villiers (University of Witwatersrand), and the Isizulu department (UKZN), they will discuss their roles and that of poetry in the academy.
Moving beyond the Ivory Tower, Word from the Continent will showcase four poets, Beverley Nsengiyunva (Uganda), Siphiwe Nzima (Lesotho), Teamhw SbonguJesu (SA), and Chilufya Chileshe (Zambia), and celebrate the richness and diversity of African poetry, highlighting voices from different regions of the continent. Conversations about the continent will continue in Afrofuturism in Verse: Imagining Futures Through African Poetry when Ongweza Mbele explores the intersections of African heritage and futuristic visions with disruptors and poets: Xabiso Vili, Thuthukani Ndlovu, and Nastio Mosquito (Angola).
Leaving Africa and showing solidarity with poets in Palestine will be. Poems from the River to the Sea, where poets Mosah Abu Toha (Palestine), Dshamilja Roshani, and Afeefa Omar share hope and their vision of peace for the region. Other online sessions deal with publishing, slam poetry, the healing nature of poetry, and a close reading of the poems of Dennis Brutus. Online sessions take place from October 6 to 11, and the full programme can be found on the Poetry Africa website.
Physical boundaries of time and space are all relative when finding language to weave together in poetry. For purposes of this programme, boundaries are crossed, broken, and reimagined as poets from all corners of the globe gather to share the secrets of survival and thrive together.
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About Poetry Africa
Poetry Africa is an annual international poetry festival
curated and presented by the Centre for Creative Arts at
the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban each year during October. The
festival features Spoken Word & Publish Poets in performances and dynamic
engagements which includes panel discussions, campus and school visits, poetry
exchanges, book launches, open mic sessions and a slam jam competition. The
festival provides a vital platform for celebration and critical reflection
about the contribution of poets in the movement for social change both
nationally and internationally. At the University of KwaZulu-Natal, the Poetry
Africa festival supports academic scholarship in contemporary poetry. The
festival is a dynamic player in the cultural economy of the broader eThekwini;
and plays a vital role in advancing the city’s status as a UNESCO City of
Literature.
NB: To link to the Centre for Creative Arts website, click on the logo advert to the right of this article.