Berry Heart wraps the year in style

Berry Heart’s year has been awesome. Not only has she graced three international festivals in Ghana, Kenya and South Africa this year, but she also collaborated in the international work, ‘A Poetry Anthology for The Hazara,’ which was published in January 2014.

But her greatest feat this year is the invitation to perform at the ninth International Poetry Festival Kritya2014, planned for Trivandrum, (Kerala) on 16, 17 and 18 November 2014. The festival theme is Enlightenment through Poetry and Arts-Enlightenment is an awakening – waking up to a new awareness of oneself, of others, and of the entire universe.

Surely the sky is the limit for this fresh face of the local literary arts that started off with Poetavango Festival in Maun, where she’d render a poem about how she wanted to marry the President. In India, Berry will be the only poet from Africa performing alongside other poets from Finland, Iceland, Ireland and Malaysia. She was picked by the director of the festival, and author of four books, Dr Rati Saxena, who extols our lady of the spoken word as “an eminent poet of modern times.” She has been asked to submit ten poems for the festival.

Two of the pieces that she submitted are her famous poems titled Child of my mother and Mmammoledi. To give the Indian community a better grasp of the poem, they have been translated into Hindi and Malayam. In addition the poems will be included in the festival’s Poetry Anthology to be published during the week of the festival. Berry and Dr Saxena will also collaborate in a studio recording.

Berry has once again joined forces with her Art Director, Moratiwa Molema and the two will deliver a multi media and cultural poetry performance. Moratiwa will not only deliver the multimedia performance, but will also do a bit of poetry in her Indian costume! University of Botswana (UB) Poetry Society hosted a farewell performance for the two a day before their departure where they sampled some of their works. They depart the country this Friday and will return after a week. A highly charged Berry Heart told Style in an interview that the invite to India was an affirmation of the growth of her brand. She said as an ambitious person it has fuelled her to work even harder.

“The more the blessings come your way, the more you want to achieve the impossible,” she said elatedly. Her greatest honour, she tells Style is being invited to read the poems of one of Marc Delouze (France) who first published his works in the early 70s. “It’s such an honour and I want to impress him. I would love to work with him after the festival because as someone who has been around the block for so many years, he has so much information to share with us the young generation of the literary arts,” she explained. Kritya is a trust, formally registered in January 2007 in Kerala, India with a view to advance and enrich art, literature and culture.