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Of Memory and Faith: Re-Writing Religion, Doubt and Belief | By Megan Ross and Nome Emeka Patrick

A poem is a voice when you’re here alive; it becomes an echo when you are dead. The thing is we are all edging towards attentiveness as poets, we are constantly saying to the world, “here is language” and the world holds up this language acknowledging its effect. This can’t be done without attentiveness, even if the attentiveness is minute.
– Nome Emeka Patrick

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Negotiating Boundaries: Translating Pain, Language and History | Alexis Teyie and Echezonachukwu Nduka  

Writing, to me, has become a sort of engagement that reassures me of life and the beauty of imagination, while validating my experiences and that of others in our collective struggle to make sense of life in all its glories and shortcomings. I write because my thoughts are better expressed in writing. I love the art and craft of writing, of listening to and sometimes questioning the voices in my mind. – Echezonachukwu Nduka

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Topographies of Beauty: The Body as a Landscape of Memory and Reclamation | By Hauwa Shaffii Nuhu and Isabelle Baafi

But ultimately, I’m so thankful to that poem, because through writing it, I came to realize that everything my body has ever done, from its first cell division, to its first breath, to the fact I can feel it shelving the slice of cheesecake I just finished – everything has been to keep me alive. And in a world that has not always cared about that, and in contrast with a mind that has not always wanted that, I’m humbled and grateful for its faithfulness.
– Isabelle Baafi

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Poetry is Feeling and Feeling is Poetry: On Trauma-Mapping and Healing Through Writing | By Lillian Akampurira and Nica Cornell

I’m telling the truth about how I feel and experience the world. When that resonates with another human being, it is such a gift. But when it comes to my poetry, specifically, that isn’t why I write it. I write it to heal. In it, I am finding the words for pain. It doesn’t mean that it doesn’t continue to have its echoes and effects. There are certainly moments when visiting a poem is a kind of picking at a scar. – Nica Cornell

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In Conversation: Blood, History, and African Poetics | By Sihle Ntuli and Sarah Godsell

The journey through history – personal, global, and planet – through one beautifully simple poem is to me the height of the poetic craft. Your juxtaposition of pleasure and death held in a historical and present casing of exploitative labour, slavery, and environmental destruction, is palpable in the air around the poem. I suppose that it is this layering that led me into African poetry – Sarah Godsell

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