Africa Writes Festival - Inherited: All Our Names
Channel: British Library
Date: 2021-11-26

What does it mean to inherit the names given to us? Join us for an evening of exploration, movement and thought into how we embody the names we desire, defy the names that limit us and reclaim the names once lost to us. Special features of the evening is the screening of Sethembile Msezane’s short film ISIMO, where an ancestral matriarchal figure feels and holds the pain of the living, and poet Raymond Antrobus performing from his latest collection All The Names Given translated into BSL dance, plus more.

Sethembile Msezane is an international mutli-award winning artist based in South Africa. Using interdisciplinary practice, Msezane creates commanding works heavy with spiritual and political symbolism. The artist explores issues around spirituality, commemoration and African knowledge systems. She processes her dreams as a medium through a lens of the plurality of existence across space and time, asking questions about the remembrance of ancestry. Part of her work has examined the processes of mythmaking which are used to construct history, calling attention to the absence of the black female body in both the narratives and physical spaces of historical commemoration.

Raymond Antrobus was born in London, Hackney to an English mother and Jamaican father, he is the author of To Sweeten Bitter and The Perseverance. In 2019 he became the first ever poet to be awarded the Rathbone Folio Prize for best work of literature in any genre. Other accolades include the Ted Hughes award, PBS Winter Choice, A Sunday Times Young Writer of the year award and The Guardian Poetry Book Of The Year 2018, as well as being shortlisted for the Griffin Prize and Forward Prize. In 2018 he was awarded The Geoffrey Dearmer Prize, (Judged by Ocean Vuong), for his poem Sound Machine. His poem Jamaican British was added to the GCSE syllabus in 2019.