There is a great risk in the translation of decolonial poetics: namely, of reducing this forging of novelty to a mere relationship of influence, or, at best, a subversion of the Occident. As the complexity of the global is poetically remade in the poets of the Global South, it is necessary they be disseminated in the very languages and spaces of the North that they would remake.

Although Freire never met Cabral in person, he visited Guinea-Bissau and spent much time dedicated to understanding Cabral's ‘revolutionary’ educational concepts ideals. When asked about Cabral's utopian views, he replied: 'The revolution that doesn't dream is doomed. So is doomed the revolutionaries who don't dream. The question that arises from the dream is just to know how they [revolutionaries] will fight to make the dream viable.'

It’s described as haunting. And I know it well. Led by our relatives, our ancestors, we do feverish work, memory work, detective work. But the compulsion is not just to fill in gaps. Doesn’t just stop at the finding.

I feel more at home reading about the quintessential British experience than in books by writers of colour. Perhaps this is, in part, because of the continuing influence of the British Empire. I am Sri Lankan and, in Sri Lanka, the roots of colonialism run deep, so much so that those roots are still very visible in the education system.

I am sitting down to write this on Human Rights Day, a national holiday commemorating the 1960 Sharpeville massacre. It is a day that evokes memories of state violence and institutionalised racism, of the apartheid government’s determination to brutalise and dehumanise non-white South Africans, but it also points to more recent processes of nation-building and (as yet unrealised) healing.