Juju: Poems and Watercolors brings together text and image to form an urgent, tender record of survival, solidarity, and the quiet power of making something together when making anything at all may feel impossible.
In the darkest months of the COVID pandemic, writer and feminist theorist Silvia Federici and artist Begonia Santa-Cecilia began a private exchange across distance and isolation. Federici sent poems. Santa-Cecilia replied with watercolors. What started as an intimate correspondence became a lifeline, an act of shared breathing amid fear, surveillance, grief, and mass death. Words and colors offered a way to stay alive to one another when the world felt brutally narrowed.
Only later did the two friends recognize what they had made together. A singular book born of crisis and care. Part dialogue, part visual poem, it is a testament to creation as a form of resistance and mutual aid, an affirmation of everything that cannot be controlled. Each page vibrates with the insistence that art, friendship, and collective imagination open cracks in seemingly closed realities, reminding us that this world is not the only possible one.
Juju: Poems and Watercolors offers a rare and revelatory gift. For the first time, readers encounter the poetry that Federici, one of the most influential radical thinkers of our time, has written throughout her life but never published.
