Exploring Literature and Community: Speaking in the Afro-Literary Series
Can creativity move beyond mere aesthetics to serve as a functional mechanism for community restoration and do we use what we know to imagine better futures for ourselves?
We gather information about ourselves every day: our loves, losses, griefs, relationships, fears, desires, histories, migrations and the conditions in which we live. We document these experiences, tell stories about them and carry them into our relationships and communities.
But what do we do with what we know? How do we interpret it? How do we make meaning from it? How do we use it to imagine something different?
These were some of the questions I brought to my recent session as an invited guest speaker for the Afro-Literary Series, a transnational programme produced by Piece My Peace Africa on August 20 2026
I think about this movement as:
Information → Interpretation → Imagination → Possibility → Action.
Information gives us an account of what exists. Interpretation helps us understand it. Imagination allows us to ask what else could exist. That movement matters because a future cannot be acted upon until it can first be imagined.
Speaking with writers, artists and cultural advocates across Africa and its diaspora, we explored how creativity can help us process experiences beyond representation.
This is also part of what I explore through Third Space Poetics. I am interested in what poetry can do beyond the page: how rhythm, cadence, image and narrative can hold difficult experiences, preserve histories, create recognition and provoke new ways of thinking. I do not see literature as separate from the realities that produce it.
Our discussion also brought the question of healing into sharper focus. Healing does not always mean returning to a previous state. For individuals and communities shaped by displacement, grief, violence or uncertainty, it can mean finding another way to understand what has happened and refusing to let the past exhaust the possibilities of the future. Creativity gives us a language for that work.
I am grateful to Titi Kushimo and the Piece My Peace Africa team for inviting me into this conversation and for building a platform where literature, fashion and contemporary Pan-African cultural identity meet.
