Zuhura the African Lioness: Performance Poetry, Digital Media and the Transnational Tangle in World Literature

Abstract

It is time to rise Let them see you rise Let them see you rise The poet Zuhura Seng'enge concludes her performance with these lines from her poem Warrior Unleashed. She holds the microphone steadily in her hand as she articulates the words with theatrical emphasis, slowly moving closer to the audience, her steps in rhythm with the instrumental music that punctuates her words. As she repeats the last line after a dramatic pause, "Let them see you rise", carefully enunciating each word, Zuhura nods her head towards the audience, a gesture expressing complicity as well as collective agency. As soon as she ends, with a polite "Thank you very much", the audience breaks out in loud cheers and How to cite this book chapter:

Spiritual Relationality in Swahili Ocean Worlds

“…This textual orientation was often related to literacy in Arabic, but from the 1890s, Swahili scholars also started publishing their own books, journals, and newspapers, increasingly in Swahili. Even so, it is important to recognise this cultural connectivity in terms of "multi-directional flow" (Bang 2018: 564), which becomes clear when Swahili literature is appreciated as world literature (Helgesson 2020;Uimonen 2018). The Swahili renaissance was a period of "remarkable cultural productivity" and the "apex of classical Swahili poetry", characterised by increasing Arabisation of Swahili language and culture, since Arabness was equated with civilisation (Prestholdt 2018: 523).…”

“…In contemporary world literature studies, Swahili literature is seen as an illuminating example of "Indian Ocean literature", which insists on "different universalisms", while inviting "a more pluricultural reading of the Indian Ocean through deep time" (Helgesson 2020: 93). 5 This multi-directional orientation is also evident in contemporary forms of digitally mediated performance poetry, which mix poetry, music, and theatre in creatively entangled ways (Uimonen 2018).…”

Muse and Power: African Women Writers and Digital Infrastructure in World Literature

“…Zuhura combines different media and artistic genres in her aesthetic performances. I have elsewhere discussed her creative combination of orature, literature, theater, and music in terms of a transnational tangle in literary production, drawing on cultural strands of various spatiotemporal origin (Uimonen ). Since the launch of her first poetry collection in 2016, Zuhura has formed “The Conscious Band,” a trio (Zuhura with two musicians) that performs together.…”

“…This emphasis on “entanglements” and the perpetual “wiring of the world” could be used to describe digital infrastructure just as well as electricity. I have elsewhere discussed the entanglements of digitally mediated literary worldmaking in terms of a transnational tangle, building on a conceptualization of the world as a network of networks (Uimonen ). The notion of networked tangles is comparable with the idea that the material world consists of “knots or nodes in an energetic weave that crisscrosses different states of matter and life” (Anusas and Ingold :549).…”

“…Based on onsite interviews and online interaction with a select number of writers in Tanzania and Nigeria (2016–2018), the article offers some empirical insights into digitally mediated literary crafting . Theoretically, the article aims to make a contribution to current anthropological debates on infrastructure (Larkin ; Anand et al ), especially electricity (Anusas and Ingold ; Boyer , ; Howe et al ), by way of digital media in African literature (Nesbitt‐Ahmed ; Uimonen ) and world literature studies (Cheah ; WReC ). Looking at the enabling and mediating capacities of digital infrastructure, it argues that the literary worldmaking of female African writers offer analytical insights into the embodied practices and cultural imaginaries of digitally mediated creativity, thus drawing on art and literature to broaden the scholarly understanding of infrastructure.…”