Koroga Enchants!

Kenya Tue 24-08-2010

Koroga Enchants!
By Keguro Macharia

Enchantment is something that we encounter, that hits us, but it is also a comportment that can be fostered through deliberate strategies. One of those strategies might be to give greater expression to the sense of play, another to hone sensory receptivity to the marvelous specificity of things.”

—Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life

In May 2010, photographer and poet Wambui Mwangi invited fellow photographers and poets Nyambura Githongo, Stephen Derwent Partington, Tony Mochama, Sitawa Namwalie, Ngwatilo Mawiyoo, Phyllis Muthoni, and Keguro Macharia to believe in the enchantment of collaboration. She proposed a limited-term experiment. Poets would respond to photographs provided by the photographers and photographers would respond to poems produced by poets.

The experiment acquired the name Koroga.

Soi Distant

Night runners
singing your song

Night runners
Dancing your dance

Night runners
Casting your spell

^{Poetry by Keguro Macharia}

^{Photography: Andrew Njoroge}

Koroga invoked the domestic particularities that suffused the first set of invitational images—domestic ornaments and common Kenyan interjections (haiya, ati, aterere, asi); extended these domestic particularities into the heart of the home, the kitchen, where so many of us experience our country’s diversity and other cosmopolitan imaginaries as so many flavors; and called to the magic of everyday life, the spell of art and the enchantment of collaboration.

Koroga has become a recipe, a call and response, a journey through Kenya’s domestic and international histories, a siren song that draws friends and strangers to its facebook and blog manifestations, and turns strangers into friends. A site of enchantment, delighting and surprising collaborators and audiences.

At the heart of Koroga is a deep desire to understand how art shapes our social imaginations. Poets have responded to a range of images that capture the density and play of contemporary living, the beauties and tragedies that surround us. Photographers have captured the inchoate desires that bind us as artists and Kenyans. Combined poets and photographers have told stories masked by our political blindspots, found inspiration in parched lands. Water from rocks.

Nairobi’s Jacarandas have been placed alongside soil erosion. Nairobi’s working class juxtaposed against Maputo’s working class. Kiosks and municipal workers jostle alongside tea pickers and street children. Kenya emerges in its rich, enchanting diversity. Enchanting not because these images and poems are sanitized, but because, like all true enchantments, they help us see differently, to feel differently. They provoke us to be different. Art as intervention. Art as historical record.

Picking Tea

Said the little girl, why are we poor?
Replied her Baba,
Let's go;
its best to pick tea
while the leaves are still crisp,
before the dew drops dry.

A few steps later he added,
The manager might pay a bonus
if the harvest is better this season.
I should get you shoes.
You could do with a pair.

She gripped her Baba's hand for support up the muddy path,
for what little warmth, on a misty Ndaka-ini morning;
wondering, why are we poor?

^{Poetry by Phyllis Muthoni}

^{Photography: Andrew Njoroge}

From the beginning, we agreed that Koroga would be public. We would risk sharing our poems and our photographs. We would become vulnerable to each other. Photographers would trust that we would respond to their images. Poets would trust that photographers would respond to their poems. In making Koroga public, we shared more than finished products. We shared a process, modeled collaboration.

This collaboration has extended into how we work together. We have shared meals and dreams, learned to see with new eyes. Poets have expressed several times that they now see differently because of the project. See the “marvelous specificity of things.”

As we extend Koroga into other publics, taking along our digital audiences and hoping to cultivate new ones, moving into exhibition and festival spaces, we hope our audiences become enchanted. Awakened to the possibilities of art and collaboration.

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Your Comments

SAMOSA Festival 2010: Wonderful idea. Seems like Kenya is really ripe for this cross-collabaration of ideas and art and culture. SAMOSA Festival 2010 is also doing something similar, but with Poetry and Art - The Word & The Craft - Poets recite, as artists sketch their interpretation & feeling on the canvas. Let us celebrate diversity in medium, expression & identity