African Writers' Evening

The first African Writers' Evening of 2011 took place last Friday (25 March) at the Southbank Centre. Hosted by the irrepressible founder of these open mic events -  Nii Ayikwei Parkes, it was a new venture for the well-loved events that have in the past taken place at the Poetry Cafe. The intimate Poetry Café events will still continue, but the Southbank venue enables a wider and bigger audience to see and hear new and newly established poets and authors perform and talk about their work to what is still very much a close knit and welcoming audience.

I loved the way that Nii recognised that on a joint panel the audience will steer their questions to the author or work that they already know most about, and so this time the young poets came up and performed their chosen work one-by-one, followed by their own question and answer session.

First up was Luul Hussein, still at school she plans to study journalism at university. I have to tell you that she is awesomely talented. Her poem Rocking-Side-to-Side, about unrequited young love, made you laugh at its poignancy and exhale when you recognised the punch line (and title) is actually all about teenage suicide. While Luul was an assured performer, she was also a sweetly shy and engaging interviewee, who is already clear that life was 'a battle for happiness' and it was 'hard -  'you got to get over it' when asked where she gets her ideas from.

Kayo Chingonyi was already at the stage where you could easily see Luul will be at in a few short years. He was a terribly confident performer who changed styles and rhythms throughout the five poems that he performed.  My favourite was Red Shift - about an ageing of a man with an obsession for the colour red. Think of all the words that you know that describes that colour - and I am sure that you won't think of them all - but Kayo managed to include every one in this short poem. It is a gorgeous riff on red that ends with sense of sheer exhausting incompleteness. Brilliant.

The keynote of the evening was Nadifa Mohamed, the author of Black Mamba Boy, who had appeared at an African Writers' Evening a while ago. This is where Nii's accomplished programming really came alive, because Nadifa was returning not only as a published author, but also with a long list of prize nominations to her name and as the current holder of the Betty Trask Prize. Black Mamba Boy has been hugely acclaimed, and it was lovely to hear Nadifa read from a work that clearly means so much to her. Sadly she has decided that this will be her last reading from the book, and so she allowed the audience to select the bits that she read out. That was a beautiful touch that worked well, with what is clearly an intimate work for her, based as it is on her father's upbringing in Somalia and his travels cross North Africa to Europe during the 1930s.

The next Africa Writers’ Evening will take place in May. 

Follow African Writers’ Evening on Facebook: www.facebook.com/africanwriters and on Twitter/AfricanWriters

This article also appears in the April edition of Lime magazine.