Who are the Women of Xolebeni?
Who was Dulcie
September?
What are
dirty/pretty things?
Or vulva
volcanoes?
Whatever its theme,
each poem in this collection featuring the work of 40 black women
poets from Africa and its diaspora reflects the lives of most, if not
all women, womyn and womxn - particularly those born Black and poor
by design in a post-slavery, post-colonial world.
Wild
Imperfections opens with poems honouring different generations of
ancestor women, like Sarah Baartman and Rosa Parks - born at
different times yet all of them cultural and political mirrors to
Black girls and women.
Questioning and
disrupting patriarchy, these poems speak about birth and death,
fertility and infertility, rape and genital mutilation, war, exile
and forced migration, but also revel in joy, desire, and the
expression of sexuality and the erotic.
But what is a wild
imperfection? And can the language of these poets recreate a space
for the 'wild' and 'unruly', the 'loose' and 'dirty', the 'witches'
and 'bitches' who are perfect in their brokenness and who are no
longer seeking permission for their rage, their joy and their
healing?
