Event

Migritude / World Premiere!

7TH ANNUAL HECHO EN CALIFAS FESTIVAL 2006 presents the world premier of Migritude, written and performed by Shailja Patel.

Migritude, Shailja Patel's one-woman spoken-word theater show uses her trousseau of saris to unfold stories of women's lives in the bootprint of Empire. A third-generation Kenyan Asian, Shailja covers the spectrum from comedy to pathos to a powerful indictment of colonialism.

Migritude explores global themes; heritage, war, freedom, by making intimate family treasures public. Similarly, it expresses universal experiences of colonized peoples through the journeys of my own diasporic Indian family. Three cross-continental migrations shape the story: the early 20th-century migration of Indians to East Africa; the mass expulsion and emigration of East African Indians to the global North from the 1970s onwards, and my own emigration from Africa, to Europe, to the US. The sequence maps my personal transitions as a migrant: from survival to self-expression, invisibility to activism, model minority to radical artist.

2 shows: 5pm & 8pm
$10 adv. / $12 dr.