Moving Forms: Individuals, Institutions, and the Production of Slam Poetry Networks in Southern Africa

In late 2016, nineteen-year-old Zimbabwean-South African poet vusumuzi mpofu posted the text of a slam poem entitled “Foreign Searching for Rain” to his personal Facebook page. The poem uses mpofu’s personal experience of economic displacement to trace the joint history of Zimbabwe’s failing economy and South Africa’s growing xenophobia. The post drew dozens of likes, comments, and shares in its first day. By the time mpofu performed the poem at an open mic in a local café, his audience knew it so well that they responded in anticipation of upcoming lines. Several people audibly inhaled after the simple setup, “I leave Johannesburg, traveling further south, to Cape Town,” anticipating the emotional follow-up: “My mother’s presence calms the storm in me. She is a home in motion, housing the broken boy.”¹ Together with many of mpofu’s friends and fans that night, I experienced the performance—otherwise typical of the work performed at Cape Town open mics—as a digital piece come to life, and our shared knowledge of it drew us together in sympathy with the performer. The poem’s digital life had molded its meaning prior to its performance, shaping its audience into a community linked through mpofu’s words.

Figure 1.

Vusumuzi Mpofu performing at Grounding Sessions, The Drawing Room, Cape Town (November 22, 2016). Photograph courtesy of the author.

The production, circulation, and reception of Mpofu’s poem—inspired by slam poets on YouTube, developed in local workshops, performed at small open mics, and now published on YouTube—speak to the role of multimodal encounters in producing the seemingly global genre of slam poetry. Mpofu’s performance style, characterized by conversational rhythms punctuated by dramatic imagery, exemplifies the style of slam poetry that has become increasingly popular in Africa over the past decade.³ Moreover, the poem’s circulation reflects the multimodal nature of slam poetry itself: printed and performed, audio and visual, verbal and bodily. In each case, audience interactions and expectations shape the form’s meaning and reception, producing a networked poem that builds on the globally popular genre. In these encounters between form and function, each element of poetic meaning-making is transformed, creating a globally recognizable form that nonetheless varies in its aesthetics and production: consistent length and tone mark a poem’s exposure to audience judgement, but the forms of the poems allow variation in rhythm, rhyme scheme, and message that mark the poems’ different influences.

This article explores the decade-long rise of slam poetry in southern Africa, situating it at the crossroads of literary culture, shifting media paradigms, and the ascent of what Doreen Strauhs calls “literary NGOs” (LINGOs).² In doing so, it asks: How does a literary form move? What institutional and infrastructural support facilitates the geographic spread of a particular literary form?

Slam poets and the institutions that support them negotiated a place for poetry performance in contemporary urban landscapes by bringing locally conventional attitudes toward poetry into conversation with spoken word styles from the Global North. In the process, they used available technologies and genres to shift the structure of the form itself. Slam poetry is transmitted both digitally and in performance, in each case responding to the norms of individual platforms and aesthetic communities. For instance, where local events often require cohesive twenty-minute sets, the disjointed structure of a YouTube feed encourages briefer excerpts and soundbites. New media standards have influenced slam poetry’s form, cementing the three- to five-minute standard for slam poetry. At the same time, slam competitions’ emphasis on participation produced new poetic communities, centered on urban youth organizations that take advantage of the form’s openness to produce a wide range of poetry and to center themselves firmly in what they see as a globally salient, culturally valuable form. Throughout, social media circulations shape live performance venues and genres, transforming poetic form through both the direct action of institutions and the indirect influence of internet platforms. Even as...