A declamation contest in Colombia shows how, for Afrodiasporic communities, the poem is not static. Carmén Gónzalez Chacón, Cuban poet and cultural promoter, and Emilia Eneyda Valencia Murrain, teacher, researcher, cultural manager and founder of Amafrocol.

“Poetry is not touched on orally when we are talking about an educational framework,” says the writer. Poems that are only written do not go through the experience of the corporeal. Instead, the body that declaims lives the poem and gives life to new poetry, says the poet Liliana Riascos, winner of the contest in the adult category. ‘We make poetry because, just because, we sing,’ says the teacher Carmen Gonzáles, “ Poetry was what made people who went hunting, who sang to sow.” ‘Poetry was everything: it was everything, those who wrote it.’ ‘In the West, poetry is a niche of people who do it to distance themselves from other people’