Britta Badour's powerful poetry is inspired by her family, community and her experience of Blackness
The Toronto-based spoken word artist discusses her debut poetry collection Wires That Sputter
For Britta Badour, storytelling is grounded by her family, community and experience of Blackness. In her debut collection, Wires That Sputter, she has taken on translating the beauty of spoken word to poems for the page.
Badour, better known as Britta B., is an artist, public speaker and poet living in Toronto. She is the recipient of the 2021 Breakthrough Artist Award from the Toronto Arts Foundation. She teaches spoken word performance at Seneca College.
Wires That Sputter is an intimate collection of poetry which plays with form and punctuation. Badour explores pop culture, sports, family dynamics and Black liberation.
Badour spoke to Ryan B. Patrick on The Next Chapter summer edition about how she writes, performs and teaches poetry.
When did poetry begin for you?
Poetry began the day my mom taught me how to spell my name. I remember her hand around my hand. She gave me a pen and then together we learned the shapes that produced the sounds and the letters of my name. I think I chose my young self to keep that memory because that feeling was so, for lack of a better word, very powerful. Being close to the page and having this movement of my hand moving across the page is always something that feels grounding. It feels like it's something that I can use as escape, but it's escaping back to what is my fundamental self.
Poetry began the day my mom taught me how to spell my name.- Britta Badour
I always grapple with asking marginalized individuals what it was like being of this race in a certain location. But I feel that we have to have that conversation in terms of how it shapes your poetry. How does that shape your storytelling? How intentional are you thinking about gender and race when you were writing Wires That Sputter?
It's something that sticks with me. I'm thinking about the difference between the way my mom's mom tells stories versus the way my dad's mom tells stories. My mom's white and my dad's Black. I could engage soulfully with both of my grandmothers in storytelling. I would be feeling, not whimsical, but very light any time they would tell me something. I felt like I was a keeper of these stories. When I look at creating poetry, I'm trying to reach for something I hear in my head. Sometimes it's my voice, sometimes I may be doing something close to persona or something close to something I haven't heard before and I want to emulate that both with my vocal delivery but also in my physical movement.
Talk about the world of spoken word versus poetry on the page. Does it lose some of its energy when it's on the page? When you're writing, do you think along those lines?
When you read page poetry, you are learning how to read the writer's work. Not all of us have the access to knowing what that poet sounds like all the time, but along the way you're bringing your experiences, your interests in sound, your insights into the meaning and feeling of the work. I think what's really important to know is that all poetry is meant to be read out loud and this started to change my mind on what the gap is between performance poets and page poets.
If it's all meant to be lived, be embodied — through voice, through movement, through facial expression and gestures — we can find more sense in the sounds that language is bringing us to see. Then what I can do in my exploration and in my craft is play with the way the words and bits of language appear on the page and start to trip people up on how things get pronounced.
We can find more sense in the sounds that language is bringing us to see.- Britta Badour
This book is like a grab bag. You're talking about pop culture, you're talking about making space, but you're also talking about the idea of being Black, the idea of Black freedom and Black liberation. What does that mean to you?
I look at how we've been able to point out and confront Black fetishization. The fetish of Blackness and how we're able to look at the barriers, the systematic and systemic barriers to Blackness. So when I think about what it means to be free, what it means to have liberation and be Black, it is evolving with this knowledge of history in mind and hopefully getting to a space where our Blackness is able to care for itself more.
I don't know if we could ever stop taking care because we are so behind on how we've been taking care of the land and our environment. We are so far behind on how humanity has treated each other. So I think it's a matter of us as Black people, but also us extending within and beyond Blackness to be better caretakers.
WATCH | Britta B. perform Dear Young Woman:
There's a lot of focus on family in these pages. How important is family to you and your poetic practice?
What do they say? They call it like your blessing and your curse. It's the best and also I have to be considerate of my family as well. When I was younger I thought that to bare my soul meant to tell the exact and literal truth. To speak back. But I find that right now where I'm at is to ask how do I give a story to a reader, to an audience, in a way that will benefit them if they're going through the same thing?
My family is probably my biggest source of inspiration. I tried in this particular collection to not write about them and give them a break. But it happens and so what I then intended to do with a lot of these pieces is to handle it with greater care and not just try to put some fancy poetry on a page.
You teach spoken word performance at Seneca College in Toronto. How do you approach it? How do you give back in that sense?
I get to create a space where people get to focus on their creativity and then through that they write poetry and then they perform it. With spoken word, a lot of it is getting better at our public speaking skills. When I was little that was the thing my mom had me do. She spent time with me reading and writing and then spent time with me speaking up in the middle of the living room. I don't know where she got those ideas from, but it was something that she made sure from a young age that whenever I had an opportunity to be at the front of a room I wouldn't feel that stage fright, I wouldn't feel that performance anxiety and I would be comfortable.
That's the energy I try to bring to my students. You don't have to be perfect and you don't have to be a professional spoken word poet out of this. But using our tools in class, thinking about vocal delivery, thinking about body movements and body language, we will get more comfortable with hearing ourselves, being ourselves and then putting all that in front of an audience.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
