As Antigua and Barbuda prepares to mark 192 years since the abolition of chattel slavery, international performing artivist Kim Poole has arrived on the islands to launch a deeply collaborative new musical exploration rooted in Carnival culture, set to take center stage at the annual Emancipation Watch Night gathering.
The event, scheduled for 8 p.m. on July 31 at the nation’s Botanical Gardens, will see Poole share the stage with Sir Hilary Beckles, Chair of the CARICOM Reparations Commission and one of the globe’s most prominent reparations historians. This unique gathering weaves together live music, collective cultural memory, critical historical reflection, and the ongoing global call for reparative justice for African diasporic communities across the Caribbean and beyond.
For Poole, the invitation to perform marks far more than a single appearance: it is the opening chapter of a new creative journey shaped by the landscapes, people, and sounds of the Caribbean. Long known for her genre-defying Soul-Fusion style, Poole’s work has always reflected the lived experiences and encounters of her travels, drawing from soul, African diasporic rhythms, spiritual expression, spoken word, jazz, movement, and cultural storytelling. Rejecting the idea that musical traditions exist as rigid, isolated categories, she lets the places she visits and the people she meets guide the evolution of her sound.
Antigua and Barbuda offers an especially rich creative landscape for this evolution. The nation’s musical identity pulses with the layered traditions of calypso, soca, steelpan, communal drumming, Carnival processions, sacred gatherings, and centuries of shared African-Caribbean memory. Poole says she has arrived not just to perform her own work, but to listen closely—to local musicians, intergenerational cultural bearers, traditional storytellers, and the vibrant rhythms that move across the islands during Carnival season.
This spirit of respectful exchange sits at the core of Poole’s identity as an “artivist” — a term that merges artistic practice with activist values. Her performances consistently connect musical expression to urgent conversations around identity, collective freedom, cultural inheritance, and shared communal possibility. For her, the stage is both a space for unapologetic joy and a platform to confront the unresolved histories that continue to shape the lives of African-descended communities around the world.
Poole’s appearance at Emancipation Watch Night carries layered symbolic weight. While Beckles will bring historical and intellectual context to the reparations movement, Poole’s performance will center the movement’s emotional, spiritual, and creative dimensions. Together, their presence underscores that reparations cannot be reduced to policy and scholarship alone: it must also be understood through collective memory, cultural expression, lived experience, and art.
Timing her arrival to coincide with Carnival also situates Poole’s work within one of the Caribbean’s most enduring traditions of cultural resistance and survival. Far from just a festive celebration, Carnival serves as living testimony: its music, masquerade, movement, and public gatherings carry the legacy of enslaved people who turned systemic oppression into radical creative expression, reworking ancestral memory into new forms of collective freedom.
For Poole, these traditions are not material to be borrowed or appropriated; they are living cultural languages that demand respectful encounter, curiosity, and collaboration. The rhythms, stories, and energy she absorbs during her time in Antigua and Barbuda will likely form the foundation of future compositions, as she continues building a body of work rooted in cross-cultural exchange across Global Africa.
As the nation gathers to commemorate 192 years of emancipation, Poole is ready to both contribute her unique voice to the commemoration and absorb new creative inspiration from the islands. What begins as a single performance may well bloom into something far larger: the birth of a new evolution of her Soul-Fusion sound, where the spirit of Antigua, the energy of Carnival, and the enduring music of freedom converge.
