“Learning to Wear a Sari Is a Rite of Passage”: Shailja Patel’s Inventory of the Migrant Body in Migritude

This chapter introduces Patel’s Migritude as a body-shaped memoir whose self-discovery narration is harmonized by the saris she has inherited from her mother. The five and half metres of cloth that configure the “sari”, the Indian female garment par excellence, envelop Patel’s body in a minute dissection of her existence as a “migrant”. A Kenyan-born of Indian descent, educated in both the UK and the US, Patel literally performs her story of displacement on a stage. The physicality of the theatrical ambience is translated into the written version by detailing how Migritude was gestated. Theatre performance and writing merge into Patel’s sari-clad body, understood as the inventory that Gramsci signalled as the first thing to do in the human crusade to know oneself. Otherwise put, Patel unravels the infinity of traces that the historical process has deposited in her by positioning her migrant body within a genealogy of female resilience that defies national demarcations. Unlike négritude and coolitude, the contemporary experience of displacement that migritude accommodates articulates a sense of rootedness that is essentially and necessarily transnational.