Submergent Poetry

Featuring a gule wamkulu mask almost submerged in water, “Submergent Poetry” is a series of nine photographs of performance and rhyming text taken in Lake Malawi to speak to the urgency of expression of those whose land, water, and air are destroyed by extractivist racial capitalism. The ecosystems and livelihoods along Lake Malawi have for years been threatened by corporations seeking to drill oil from the lake in collusion with the government. At a time when floods have become the order of the day in the region due to climate change, “Submergent Poetry” therefore plays with the words “submerge” and “urgent” to document the urgent poetry and resistance of those in the global south who are increasingly being relegated to “the doldrums” by regimes of profit.

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