ON THE COVER
Award-winning Emirati spoken word poet Afra Atiq, who will be at the Emirates Lit Fest next month, tells Shreeja Ravindranathan why she thinks words are so powerful that they become more than just words...
Award-winning Emirati spoken word poet Afra Atiq tells us how baring her soul has encouraged people to find their own voices.
‘Words are quite sticky…’ trails off Afra Atiq mid-conversation, conjuring up an image of treacly letters that coat our perspectives, lodge in the crevices of memory and like all good adhesives, is the glue that holds together the universal experience of human emotions.
The loaded silence that ensues lasts only a few seconds, but it’s suggestive of the power of words to trap and freeze experiences in time, like bugs in amber. They can morph from honeyed encouragement to acidic taunts on the turn of a dime, like the time a little boy’s declaration of never being able to love 12-year-old Afra because she wasn’t pretty enough corroded her self-belief for the next 20 years. She skirts around this deeply personal incident that she’s discussed on stage at TEDxFujairah 2017 when we talk, saying, ‘Words are never just words. There are things that people say to you that stick with you and that was a realisation for me about the power of words.’
For the award-winning Emirati spoken-word poet, the middle child of an Emirati father and Japanese-American mother, words have stuck with her ever since she’s been old enough to remember, and she’s always harboured a desire to be heard. Her favourite book is a dictionary, a ‘Webster’s Dictionary from the eighties that I discovered as a nine-yearold. Then there was that moment in eighth grade where I stood up in class with no prior warning and just read out a poem. I think it was just a sign of what was to come down the line,’ she tells me, her rich laughter booming across Nadi Al Quoz where we’re sat talking. In the past, this same multipurpose venue at Alserkal Avenue has hosted Afra’s performance as part of slam poetry sessions and spoken word events, and her voice has reverberated across these walls.