Intersectional Island · Poetry

Poetry is not a luxury, as Audre Lorde has invited us to see it. Based on the experience of Black women, poetry is rather a survival strategy. It brings light into one’s own feeling and reveals new knowledges that are not rational, academic, classist or westernised. It is a call for breaking up with white patriarchal canon because we can write our own poetry. We talk about language as power. Her disruptive relationship with language. Her lover but also her enemy, just like in a telenovela. We also talk about mindfulness, transforming ideas into actions and how Yaknel began her quest towards reading more Latin American women authors. What we absorb consciously and unconsciously shapes everything we do. What we read, what we see, what we hear, what and who we surround ourselves with… Knowledge is thus not only confined to books. It is also the experience and the background we brings with us. Is fiction really fiction? Or are the stories we tell also the stories we end up living? Should we consider categories as limitations? Or can be categories openings and new beginnings? How to navigate our lives between intuition and structure? How to find this dance between openness and connection? Where is there a common place to meet?