speaking volumes
Tony Clayton-Lea catches up with Nigerian-born, Longford-raised spoken word artist and writer Felicia Olusanya, aka Felispeaks, to discover an artist using her voice and her platform to start essential conversations.
“I think it’s much harder now than it was last year. The first lockdown in March last year forced me to rest. Apart from the work cancellations, which scared me, as soon as April started, I eased in fine. The second lockdown last year was a bit frazzling, but at least you could travel to work. This year? I don’t know for certain when I will have my next physical gig – and I don’t enjoy walks in cold weather. It’s 50 layers of jumpers just to go to the local shops!”
Felispeaks is bright-eyed and clear-voiced, expressive and firm in her delivery. The 25-year-old spoken word artist and writer – born in Nigeria, raised in Longford and currently residing in Co Kildare – has built up an enviable reputation over the past few years as a voice not just to be reckoned with but also valued. Felicia Olusanya began her creative journey within Ireland’s poetry slam circuit. Many nights of linguistic cutand-thrust honed her skills as a performer, while her fluency marked her out as an artist that called upon personal experience and societal concern to produce potent, perceptive work. She views her work via wellplaced observation points and is of the opinion that the important by-products of much of art – strength and vulnerability – aren’t too different from each other.
“I use spoken word as a medium mostly to express whatever the topic or subject is, or whatever the ideology requires. It really isn’t as clinical as saying it’s about only one thing or the other, as it depends on the poem. Much of the time, when you are performing spoken word, its appeal or success is contingent on the venue, the audience, the general vibe. The work could take on a different tempo or it could fluctuate between angry and sad, tough and gentle.”
How does it work for her, I ask, when she is actually writing a poem? There isn’t an audience coughing, shuffling or applauding, and no sense of the communal experience you can get from live shows. “Most poetry I write is for performance,” she explains, “so if there isn’t an audience in front of me, I can create one based on the poem’s requirements or, indeed, what I need. In that way, I become my own audience. In general, that’s the way the process works. I write the piece in a way I think will benefit myself or whom I’m addressing.”
She aims for objectivity, she adds, “especially with poems that are not about my life experiences or personal struggles. This said, it’s difficult to separate the art from the artist, and so even if the work isn’t about me, I try to place parts of myself into the shoes of the people that are in my poetry. That way, I can speak to that person properly.” Does that succeed every time? “More often than not!”
Her sense of neutrality, however, is filtered with the personal. How could it not? Arriving in Ireland in 2003, having left her home in Nigeria’s southwestern Ogun State, the young Felicia (and her mother) lived for six months in a Direct Provision Centre (Balseskin, Co Dublin). When their application for refugee status was approved, they moved to Longford town, where, she says, throughout her childhood she was oblivious to any level of racism. From 2003 to 2012, she didn’t think she appreciated, she remarks, “the gravity of what was at hand. I knew how big it was to be black in Ireland; I was learning that quite slowly, certainly during my childhood.”
Felispeaks contends the current climate in the conversation about race isn’t too far off from where it was in 2003. The only difference in this Covid-19 era, she suggests, is “we are forcing each other to speak about it, to address these issues head-on without silencing it or us ‘getting over it’, you might say.”
What the pandemic has uniquely done, she continues, “is halted our distractions, our movements as well as our minds, and is currently making us all unnerved, agitated and upset. The racism conversation is, therefore, something we have never had time to address as an entire nation. The conversations we have are across small timelines – they haven’t stretched, even though many things have happened to keep them going. I don’t think I have been involved in a lengthy discussion with Ireland about race, or vice versa.”
Art is, of course, one way to make more people aware of different frames of reference, be they social, political, sexual, racial or cultural. One of Felispeaks’ recent projects in this regard was her involvement in this year’s Virgin Media Dublin International Film Festival, for which she was asked
to select films for the Festival Retrospective focus on Black Women Filmmakers.
Along with director Maïmouna Doucouré and director/producer Oyindamola Animashaun, she was invited by festival director Gráinne Humphreys to “watch a list of films, about eight, and prepare our thoughts on them. We also gave the festival a list of additional films we thought would work. It’s interesting because I had never previously thought specifically about PoC female directors, and then I came to realise there are hardly any! It wasn’t a reality I had ever really thought about, so it was certainly a confronting moment for me.”
In what way? “It was sad more than anything else. I didn’t realise it was something I needed to care about. But the fact is I should, especially when it’s so easy to pull out one person’s name – Ava DuVernay, for instance – and then say that things are okay.”
One name doesn’t make for an example, reasons Felispeaks, but admits how surprised she sometimes is by levels of disrespectful sexism and how they can spike so many things. “I realise how easy it can be to fall into that way of thinking.”
One to watch out for and listen to in 2021?
Mark my words. Her words, too.