On beauty
Where two or three are gathered there is poetry And to think I woke up feeling tired this morning. I wrote the poem above during a writing workshop I curated at the African Women in Dialogue (AfWID) Conference hosted last month. Part of the workshop was to write short poems inspired by Rafiq Kathwari’s short poem “On receiving father from JFK after his long flight from Kashmir” which I came across in one Padraig O’Tuama’s substack . In other words I began this month buzzing from the energy of the conference. However, the word conference is misleading for what the last week of January became for me. When 1000 women from 55 African countries gather for a week it is hardly a conference or gathering (though these are useful short-hand). It is monumental. Historic. While this was the third time AfWID was happening, it remains to be a never-been-done-before feat. For a week I was surrounded by hundreds of African women wearing the brightest and most beautiful clothes. They carried the...
