To Incite: Political Voice

 

“We stumble on the romance of origins, Same stories we all love like sleep, poured in our mouths like Milk. How far we’ve travelled now, still we stoop at a welcome Fire and hum, to a stick stringed with hair, our miscalculations, We return to the misology in heat and loneliness.”

— Dionne Brande

 

Every laceration on the outside strengthens cords on the inside and political voices, garbled at first, find their register.

In our bid to move from the classroom to the streets after one year of reflective conversations, PSVI has shifted to a transformative workshop model. Our community of mentors can incite without burnout and our young folks to engage without the weight of assessment.

 

PSVI has just published The Garret:

A pamphlet to incite a conversation on narrative captivity.

 

Anchored in the space occupied by Harriet Jacobs -- hidden from the life of a slave inside a pent roof atop her grandmother’s house this text constructs an architecture of oppression through the testimonies of violence across the Global South. It lays bare the narratives we are forced to inhabit to survive, the limits of resistance set by the stat, and the words that layer on top of each other to protect power and reclaims the art of storytelling. Produced in the legacy of liberatory form (a pamphlet) and a revolutionary pen (Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl), The Garret demands a reckoning with captivity before considering the possibility of emancipation through narrative work. 

Curated transformative workshops aim to curate political voice in its most nascent form. PSVI has tailored workshops for young folks across West Africa and the Caribbean, Sri Lanka and is currently collaborating with the Ford Foundation, AWID, and We are Purposeful to develop a series of workshops on strategic political action, curating political voice for girls and women, and understanding narrative captivity.

 

Available Workshops

  • Exile, Errantry, Empire: Poetry as Movement (Cynthia Dewi Oka)

  • Docupoetics: Working within Archives (Cynthia Dewi Oka)

  • Occupation and the Body (Nimmi Gowrinathan and D’Lo)

  • Dismantling Whiteness: Emerging Political Voices (Nimmi Gowrinathan)

  • Writing Violence and Exile (Maaza Mengiste) 

  • Diasporic Black Ecofeminist Stories (Sheriden Booker)