'This is a love letter to my girls': Titilope Sonuga on her new album, Sis
The award-winning, spoken-word artist shares how friendship and community inspired her latest work
Nigerian Canadian poet, playwright and spoken-word artist Titilope Sonuga released her new album, Sis, earlier this year, melding ambient music with Sonuga's moving prose.
Growing up, Sonuga was influenced not exclusively by poets, but by singers, too. She told The Block's host Angeline Tetteh-Wayoe that it's why Sonuga works with musicians, adding that music is "sort of my entry point into the art form."
In a new interview on The Block, Sonuga reflected on the making of the album, her run as Edmonton's ninth poet laureate and the inspirations that fuel her distinct style of poetry.
You can hear the full interview above and read an excerpt below.
We mentioned you won the [2012] Maya Angelou poetry contest. But is it true that you weren't necessarily inspired to do this by virtue of other poets? It was other inspirations?
You know, whenever people ask this question about, "Did you always dream of being a poet as a child?" you know, they're actors or musicians who just knew when they were three [or] four. I don't know that I necessarily did. And this might be just [my] upbringing. I don't know. [It] didn't occur to me. My dad was an engineer, I became an engineer. We moved to Canada. I was 13. And it was like, "This is a sacrifice that's been made and—"
Oh, they let you know about the sacrifice that's been made.
It's like, this is what you do next. But I mean, I read a lot. I loved Maya Angelou, of course. And Ntozake Shange had For Colored Girls, which became a movie. I remember picking that up in a library and loving it. But I also love Lauryn Hill and so I was listening to music as well as reading poetry and prose. And so I feel like I'm influenced by all of those things, which is probably why in my making of poetry, I work so closely with musicians because that's sort of my entry point into the art form.
I often think about the historical, cultural, oral traditions of storytelling that existed before the written word, so you know, these stories [that] are passed down. You are a storyteller, so did you find that you were also, in addition to writing poetry, were you writing those stories?
I think, yeah. I started that way. My mom was a working woman and she had four girls, but she would leave me a notebook every time she went on a trip and just say, you know, "Write down what your sisters did and how they harassed you," those kinds of things.
A little journal?
Yeah, a little journal. And so I started off just kind of embellishing, of course the tall tales started early, and just writing things down. I didn't have a genre [and] it didn't have a form that I could identify, but I would say it was probably more prose than poetry. But I think even in my poetry now, it doesn't necessarily fit into the literary boxes.
What are the literary boxes?
You know, certain poems have certain forms and shapes and rhyme and structure. And for me, a lot of it just feels like a conversation, decidedly so. I want it to feel like I'm just talking to you, because I feel like the poetry that I came up on was, you know, kind of inaccessible in that way. It all felt very rigid.
So I wanted to get into something from your most recent album, Sis. Why Sis?
So this is a love letter to my girls. I think there are albums about romantic love and I wanted to centre our love, the love that sustains girls who've known me before I was married, before I even thought I was going to be a poet, before my children, all of the things. And you know, those friendships see you through the seasons and they really know you. And so I wanted to honour that, but also honour how difficult it can be to sustain friendships. And they end sometimes.
Sometimes, they do.
Many times it's your fault, sometimes it's theirs. All that kind of stuff. I didn't want it to be a "rah-rah sisterhood" album, but really a true, nuanced look at what it means to love women [and] have friendships with them, that have endured, you know, your whole life, essentially.