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Paper short abstract:

How do poems from Zanzibar challenge literary narratives of “the African Indian Ocean"? Last year, in cooperation with the State University on Zanzibar, we invited 25 poets to compose Indian Ocean poetry. Their verses suggest a critical vocabulary questioning dominant views in Indian Ocean debates.

Paper long abstract:

This contribution seeks to draw perspectives on "the African Indian Ocean" from contemporary Zanzibari Swahili poetry. Although the Indian Ocean has been characterized as a highly diverse multilingual space, mostly English, French and Portuguese literature and typically the novel have been considered to imagine and narrate African Indian Ocean existences. How do literary practices from Zanzibar add to, challenge and change perspectives on belonging, translocal identities and nostalgia? Last year, in cooperation with scholars from the State University on Zanzibar, we invited 25 poets to compose poetry on the Indian Ocean. Their poetry project Zanzibar's oceanic relations from a multitude of astonishing perspectives, which, in my reading, provide us with an alternative and a critical vocabulary questioning dominant views in Indian Ocean literary scholarship and debates. On the one hand, against a romanticist and sugercoated view, they portray the ocean as an exploitable source of income, providing fish and natural resources as well as attracting tourists, promising a better future. But on the other hand, they depict the struggles of fishermen and also worry about the ocean’s ecological fragility, the rising cultural tensions and power struggles linking it to earlier histories of colonial domination. Highlighting the importance of thinking about the African Ocean from a specific place and through culturally specific media and genres, I will show how poetry is deeply engrained in local, specifically Tanzanian, Zanzibari and coastal traditions of poetic discourse and semantics as well as influenced by international rhetoric and government policies.