If anything, I’ve learned that the work of the artist is not to arrive but to remain porous. To reimagine, to return, to make space for what hasn’t yet been spoken. Not a redreaming out of restlessness, but a redreaming as survival. As care. As listening.
“I asked the two if they knew where Okot p’Bitek’s grave was. They didn’t, and neither did they know who that was…”
One Sunday evening in 2010, I was at the dinner table, set up with my phone and earphones, indulging in my end-of-week ritual: listening to the classical music show on Capital FM from 9 to […]
i’ve watched leaves raining down from their mother tree,
yours was a droplet of salt on our wounds.
In a Nebraska grocery store, packets of corn yellow
at me from the shelves and I’m back to the planting
season, when the rains have appeased the land.
everything I am
is wanting & needing/
every bone, every
hollow, this image/
is a god fashion-made for you/
But you can see me there.
In the picture of the birds.
In the church of avian beings.
Small, colorful, and endangered.
Much of the progress made by Black British writers has come through the kindness and mentorship of other diasporic writers. Writing can be a lonely endeavour, and there is always strength in unity. Collectivity can also shift power dynamics with the mainstream, often tipping them a little more in our favour