WITH 20 events spread across four days, October 27-31, the 2022 Lagos International Poetry Festival, LIPFest, is set to reclaim its space in the Lagos culture calendar.
Captured as a feast of words, ideas, music, camaraderie, and community, the festival will feature lively conversations and performances, workshops, readings, and parties with your favourite poets, writers, thinkers, and artists,” stated the organisers, promising that this 7th edition will return the festival to its boisterous character.
Due to the effect of the Covid lockdowns, the LIPfest, the leading poetry feast on the West African coast, had resorted to mostly online activities in the past two editions.
However, for this edition premised on the theme, ‘Babel: A New Language,’ the festival will hold in various venues including Terra Kulture on Victoria Island, Freedom Park on Lagos Island, among others.
“The festival opens with its first in-person event with an exhilarating evening of poetry, spoken word, and music, featuring Titilope Sonuga (Nigeria), Omar Bin Musa (Australia), Nadine Aisha Jassat (Scotland), Siphokazi Jonas (South Africa), and Nigerian singer Ric Hassani,” the orgaisers.
Other highlights are:
Keynote Panel: Babel… A New Language Join Mukoma wa Ngugi, Sylvia Arthur, Kola Tubosun, Aja Monet, and Raymond Antrobus, as they consider how the technology of language underscores our sense of identity and facilitates our understanding of the relational universe.
Africa Aloud: An Evening of Poetry and Spoken Word
Africa comes alive in beauty, language, and song, as an assembly of some the continent’s finest performance poets take us through an evening of spectacular performances.
The workshop series to be headlined by among others, award-winning writers and poets as Rudy Franscisco, Titilope Sonuga, Dami Ajayi, Romeo Oriogun, and Chekwube Danladi.
American Slang: A range of American poetics with Join Aja Monet, Rudy Fransisco, Amy Shimson, and Joel Franscois.
Babel: The Concert: Wave-making afrobeats sensation Fave is joined by a constellation of wordsmiths from across the world in the festival’s big night of spoken word, poetry, and music.
Church of Poetry – hosted by Henneh Kwaku Kyereh: Join a congregation of poets and enthusiasts for a soft morning of reflection and camaraderie. Bring a poem, bring a bottle, and read alongside Sunnah Khan, Toni Kan, Amy Shimson, Sboniso Dlamini, Henneh Kyereh Kwaku (Host), Dami Ajayi, Elizabeth Johnson, Efe Paul Azino, Obii Ifejika, Aja Monet, Mukoma Ngugi, and others.
Poetry After Dark: Festival Party Hosted by Debris Stevenson: Come rave with all your favourite poets at the festival’s closing party hosted by Debris Stevenson. We party into the night silent disco style, stopping intermittently for raunchy metaphors sultry words. Don’t miss Poetry After Dark.
A New Spelling of Our Names: Four brilliant queer poets explore the power of poetry to deconstruct and reinvent the language of sexual and gender liberation from an African/diasporic perspective.
There will also be Book reading sessions:
- Homebound and Other Stories with Puja Changoiwala, Jolyn Phillips and TJ Benson
- Language and Memory: with Raymond Antrobus, Omar Bin Musa and Elizabeth Johnson.
- Geographies of Place and Feeling with Mukoma wa Ngugi, Dami Ajayi, and Toni Kan.
- Call and Response: In Conversation with Nature Feat – Su’eddie Agema, Umar Sidi and Samuel Osaze
Film Screening: #WeAreDyingHere chronicling the journey of three soldiers forced to survive in a war that they did not choose. As the war against women rages around them, they attempt to find solace to process their pain under the constant threat of their enemy lurking in the shadows.
The festival will also witness the launch of the maiden edition of Maroko, which is dedicated to work of of poets and writers from Africa, the Caribbean, and from across the black diaspora.
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