Playing with Saris: Material and Affective Unfoldings of Violence and Resistance in Shailja Patel’s Migritude

Abstract

Shailja Patel’s Migritude engages in strategies of addressing, negotiating, and ultimately opposing violence that all play out along differing visual, textual, and material routes. Migritude can best be described as multi-modal and hybrid; it initially originated as a spoken-word performance and has since metamorphosed and become a conglomeration of art, poetry, and autobiography in book form. It is not only the story of Patel’s own movements across the world, but is also intertwined with her family’s transoceanic migration stories from Gujarat to Nairobi as one possible narrative of the Asian-African diaspora. What lies at the heart of Migritude is a suitcase full of saris which Patel inherited from her mother: working with and through the cloth of the saris, Migritude showcases both female vulnerability and resistance. By transferring the saris’ affective materiality onto the stage and onto the page, Patel engages in processes of visually and physically engaging with the cloth of the sari to excavate stories of violence, trauma, and healing. This essay will outline how Migritude facilitates processes of resistance and of community building via performance, via intermedial and textual strategies, and via the physicality of its stage show. It posits that Migritude can be regarded as a visual and material text that words the oceanic travels of the Indian and African diaspora, and through its textile and textural indebtedness to the violent histories of colonization produces alternative spaces that further the notion of diasporic connectivity and encounter.