Border as Reparative Geography: Shailja Patel's Eastern Africa

ABSTRACT: Can poetry be a tool to fix broken emotions—for the poet and the audience? Can performance art help returning to a distressed geography in the hope of restoring the damage that colonial violence has left behind? Shailja Patel's genre-defying collection gives an affirmative, however complex and ambivalent, answer to both of these questions. This article commits to the challenge of thinking with the formalism of performing repair across Eastern African borders. I argue that Migritude , as performance, poetry, and political manifesto, holds conflicting emotions about Eastern Africa as a cross-border region in its complex, longue durée of cycles of loss and recuperation. To draw near this geography, to love it again, Migritude embraces its affective discord with brutal sincerity, and hands it over to its audience without much damage control. Somewhere between Patel's design and the unpredictability of the outcome of her dramaturgy, a poetic act is created that momentarily heals its battered land, the geography that she has left behind and the one that she has come to reinhabit alongside fellow Eastern African citizens. By achieving this effect, Migritude 's political theatrics brings home a worldly drama, with a gesture to acknowledge the diverse and interconnected fabric of Eastern Africa and a remedy for its abused past.