By, Julia Natasha Watthey, MBA (with Interview Conducted by CTFG)
More than a decade after her first visit, the literary activist reconnects with UVI for a conversation carrying the warmth, candor, and laughter of a family reunion
“Not every poem has to be a sonnet; every poem should tell a story…”
Dr. Kadija George Sesay
What a pleasure to listen to Dr. Kadija George Sesay ruminate on the importance of Black publishing and creative expression. The prolific and enormously engaging Dr. Sesay is a writer, poet, teacher, convener, researcher, and editor who approaches Black literature as an exercise in community-building. Within that work, she has a special place in her heart for Black speculative fiction and for storytelling rooted in communities across Africa, the Caribbean, and the wider African diaspora.
In a recent discussion hosted by Howard University and the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, Dr. Sesay explored Pan-Africanism and the trends and aspirations shaping Black publishing.
For nearly 40 minutes, Dr. Sesay spoke to a virtual audience of scholars and university leaders from around the world, moving easily between personal philosophy, literary references, and thought-provoking questions. The result felt less like a formal lecture and more like an elevated conversation you might have at a dinner party with some of your favorite people.
At the heart of her message was an urgent proposition: Black writing, scholarship, and collective expression can be radical acts. Telling our own stories is itself radical, Dr. Sesay suggested, even when we believe we are just sharing a really good story.
Storytelling, she says, is essential to how communities remember, understand one another, and imagine their futures. A gifted orator and writer, she carries her own work far beyond the page and deep into communities. With an irrepressible passion, she gathers, honors, and illuminates the stories people carry.
There is something of both a healer and a visionary in the way Dr. Sesay helps others recognize the power of their own experiences and, in doing so, moves them to tell their stories.
For her, every work published, every song sung, every story told, and every tradition carried from one generation to the next forms part of the larger story of the African diaspora. “How do I find out more about my culture?” was the question that first propelled her. Opportunities to study Black literature and culture were not easy to find, but the search opened her world and grew into a lifelong passion for literature by Black writers.
Speaking with warmth and the authority of someone who has spent a lifetime doing this work, she made clear that storytelling carries responsibility as well as joy. She reminded those gathered that the power of our voices carries forward the lessons of our ancestors.
With the knowingness of someone who understands what is lost when stories go untold, she invites us to give full voice to the creative wilds of our imaginations and fascinations, our lived experiences, and our visions of what might come next. All of it. She wants us to tell our stories and then tell some more.
And when a Black publisher brings that work into print, she says, do not wait for someone else to tell the world. Part of our purpose, she reminds us, is to use our own networks, families, and communities to spread the word. “That is the strength of our future, and how it must happen,” she said.
The call to tell, share, and remember Black stories is inseparable from Dr. Sesay’s scholarship.
“For Dr. Sesay, preserving Black history also means helping students recognize the historical value of their own lives. Letters, photographs, writings, recordings, and family histories are more than personal keepsakes; together, they become part of a community’s cultural memory.”
She describes Pan-Africanism as activism woven into everyday life, a philosophy each person must become comfortable defining for themselves. Like rivers and streams, its expressions may meander and bend, but the current remains constant: equality and unity among people.
The more she reads, she said, the more clearly she sees why exploring Pan-Africanism in Black literature is essential to “learning and futuring.”
Black newspapers, magazines, and journals preserve difficult histories, including stories Dr. Sesay described as “disturbing and traumatizing.” They also hold records of achievement, wisdom, and lived experience. Remembering, then, is not simply an act of looking back. Through storytelling, communities across the diaspora can recognize themselves in one another’s experiences, give voice to what they know to be true, and imagine what might yet be possible.
“We don’t fully understand each other’s stories across the continent and diaspora,” she said. By listening more closely to one another’s lived experiences, communities can move toward a stronger future.
For Dr. Sesay, Black print culture helps make that recognition possible. It is both archive and passage, carrying histories and ways of knowing across oceans, borders, and generations. Communities must document their social and cultural histories, she believes, so that people separated by geography can learn from and understand one another more fully. Such publications, she said, offer “stories and wisdoms unlikely to be found anywhere else.”
In Dr. Sesay’s words, they preserve “our stories written about us, by us.”
There is an ease about Dr. Sesay. Her deeply thoughtful delivery is punctuated by bursts of delighted laughter whenever she speaks about what she loves. Her glasses, warm smile, and occasional furry hat suggest someone comfortably buoyed by life’s currents, keenly aware of where those currents have carried her and welcoming whatever comes next.
Her commitment to storytelling extends to her own family, whom she encourages to find their own ease in telling stories. She brings her two nieces to book events and speaks excitedly about educating her young nephew. You can imagine her guiding the next generation into story with her attentive spirit and remarkable gift for connecting creativity to purpose.
The UVI community first welcomed Dr. Sesay in April 2013, when she arrived on St. Thomas to share her new poetry collection, Irki, a Nubian word meaning “Homeland.” During the public reading sponsored by the Virgin Islands Caribbean Cultural Center and the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, she also spoke of her Caribbean connections, African diasporic heritage, and the ways migration, art, and technology were reshaping relationships across borders.
Even then, her gift for thoughtful provocation was unmistakable. Listening to her now, you hear the same insistence that we continually consider how we communicate, what we publish, and where we carry our stories.
That message from her 2013 visit to UVI reverberates through Dr. Sesay’s Fulbright work today. She continues to ask how communities in Africa and across the diaspora might come to know one another more fully through the stories they preserve and share.
She asks each of us to share what we see, know, and imagine in whatever form feels true. The message is simple: Make your voice heard.
To be heard, in Dr. Sesay’s telling, is not simply to speak. It is to act in ways that let others know you stand with them and for the equality of all.
Poetry holds a special place in that work.
“For her, every work published, every song sung, every story told, and every tradition carried from one generation to the next forms part of the larger story of the African diaspora.”
Dr. Sesay drew on Black feminist poet and essayist Audre Lorde’s essay “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” to explain how poetry gives language to hopes and dreams, allowing them to take shape first as ideas and ultimately as tangible action.
“Not every poem has to be a sonnet; every poem should tell a story,” she said.
The progression from language to action runs throughout Dr. Sesay’s work. A publisher of Sierra Leonean heritage, she founded SABLE LitMag, commissioned anthologies of Black British writing, and created forums for writers and thinkers of African descent to connect across borders. She also co-founded the Mboka Festival, a Pan-African celebration whose name means “One Family” in Wolof and whose motto is “One Family, One Africa.”
Together, these endeavors reflect her belief that Black intellectual and creative life grows stronger through connection. And she sees Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) as places where a new generation can experience that same expansive sense of connection and come to understand themselves as global citizens.
Seeing themselves as part of a wider human community, she believes, can transform how young people understand both their abilities and their responsibilities to others. It “helps them to realize that to move forward in humanity, they must look out for the other,” she said.
Her inclusive vision shapes what she asks of HBCUs. These institutions, she said, must preserve the work of writers of African descent, ensuring that such texts remain “essential reading matter” in HBCU curricula.
For Dr. Sesay, preserving Black history also means helping students recognize the historical value of their own lives. Letters, photographs, writings, recordings, and family histories are more than personal keepsakes; together, they become part of a community’s cultural memory. She looks to HBCUs not only to safeguard that collective record but also to help students “maintain their own archives.”
As a Sierra Leonean-British scholar born in London, Dr. Sesay sees particular urgency in this work. She noted that the United Kingdom has no direct counterpart to the American HBCU and that many courses in Black British studies have recently disappeared from higher education. Their loss makes it all the more important, she argues, to find new ways to connect young people to what came before and prepare them to shape what comes next.
She captured that imperative in the words of Burkinabè revolutionary and former president Thomas Sankara: “We must dare to invent the future.”
What, then, should the generation inheriting that future do?
Dr. Sesay’s answer is practical and direct.
Share what you learn. Read the foundational texts. Start conversations with your peers. Create your own “groundings” with your brothers and sisters. The term evokes Guyanese historian Walter Rodney’s The Groundings with My Brothers and the Rastafari practice of communal reasoning, through which people exchange ideas, connect knowledge to lived experience, and learn from one another.
Build networks wherever you go, she advised. When you attend a gathering, do not leave until you have met three new people.
“This is what we are relying on from HBCUs,” she said.
“Seeing themselves as part of a wider human community, she believes, can transform how young people understand both their abilities and their responsibilities to others. It ‘helps them to realize that to move forward in humanity, they must look out for the other,’ she said.”
At UVI, Dr. Sesay’s words carry particular resonance. Forbes recently ranked UVI No. 5 among the nation’s public HBCUs. That recognition takes on even deeper meaning for UVI as the only HBCU located outside the continental United States and as a university rooted in the Caribbean and connected by history and purpose to the wider African diaspora.
That distinction is both an honor and a responsibility, one that calls on the University to put the knowledge, imagination, and leadership nurtured here to work at home and around the world.
Some guests visit UVI and feel immediately familiar. Dr. Kadija George Sesay is one of them.
It is easy to understand why her return feels less like a second introduction and more like the continuation of a relationship. The questions she brought to UVI in 2013 remain alive in her work today: How do we understand home? Who preserves our stories? How do people across the African diaspora find one another? What must one generation carry forward for the next?
For UVI, those questions are woven into the University’s own story.
Dr. Sesay’s voice may be calm, but her invitation is bold: remember deeply, read widely, meet one another, share what you know, and dare to help invent the future.
