Theresa Lola on Community, Identity, Movement, and Music
Theresa Lola is a poet living and working in London. She was named the Hammer and Tongue National Poetry Slam champion in 2017 after competing in the two-day finals at the Royal Albert Hall and has performed here poetry around the country. She recently spoke to Blue Milk about her art.
Theresa Lola: …I’m in two collectives, Six Weeks and Octavia. Octavia is a women-of-colour collective which is led by Rachel Long. We are resident at the Southbank Centre where we put on events. It’s a collective I didn’t think I needed until it happened. I made connections I didn’t think I would. We meet at the Southbank Centre and just talk. Talk about our different experiences and our lives and these conversations and experiences inspire our poetry. We are all different: from different backgrounds and with different perspectives but are all experiencing similar things. It is an opportunity for us to be together and write poetry about our experiences.
Blue Milk: So you are all connected by poetry and your common experiences. What’s the most important thing for you about having these collectives?
Community. They stop you from being isolated which is the most dangerous thing to be as an artist because you can so easily just burn out. It’s great to be part of a community of people who are going through similar things as you and try to make the most out of what they have. So community is very important, to share and inspire.
Would you say that these communities have helped you build your own identity on both a personal and communal level?
Definitely. These collectives have simultaneously allowed me to better understand both people similar to me and myself. Identity is such a huge part of my poetry. At the moment I am working on my manuscript, my first book, and identity is probably at the centre of it. Most of my life has been about moving. I was born in Nigeria and I went to boarding school where I was a shy, awkward kid; an isolated kid. I moved to the UK half way though my childhood. I went to a new school but it was a school with only about two black kids in the class. I experienced racism and moved school because of it and then moved again to another school, then went to sixth form, then went to university. Constant moving and not being in a space long enough to develop an identity is a feeling very present in my poetry.
Would you say that movement has shaped who you are?
Yes and no. Identity is something we constantly search for and want to find but soon you realise that it isn’t something that is fixed and is always changing. Moving here I realised there was a whole other identity of being Black British to my identity as a Nigerian. I didn’t realise they are polar opposites. Everyone was talking about Dizzy Rascal lyrics that I had no idea about. I felt like I was supposed to know who he was, who Skepta was and I couldn’t quote a line from either of their work. I’ve spent my whole life trying to own a space and I think poetry has allowed me to do that. In the past, my identity was a hindrance but now I love it. Now I love being Nigerian. I love trying to tap into the Black British identity. I love every aspect that has made me who I am. I’m like Hannah Montana trying to make the best of both worlds. [laughs] I am learning to appreciate every identity and stage of life that I’ve gone through. It was a source of conflict for a long time, but the more you become comfortable in yourself and confident you start to own everything and it no longer becomes something that divides you…[pause] Although it is something I feel like I am still searching for and poetry is the tool which helps me illuminate it more brightly.
You mention music, particularly Grime, as something that defines the Black British identity which you discovered on moving to the UK and music has a significant presence in your poetry, something through which you try and understand yourself and your identity. How significant is music for you and your poetry?
Actually songwriting was the first thing I did. I thought I’d be a singer! [laughs] That was never going to happen but I had a friend who was, and is, an amazing singer and she performed my songs at events. Once I left school I had no one to sing with so I started writing poetry because I wanted something I could sing. Songs and music are still heavily inspiring, which is why I love Erykah [Badu], she makes songs poems.
On that topic, what do you think about Bob Dylan winning the Nobel Prize for Literature?
I like the fact it sparked a debate and I like how many poets became so protective of their art and said they didn’t know if he should be winning it. It kind of brought out the rapper in us: fighting for our space. Apart from being rude and not showing up, I think he is deserving of it and I also love the tension. But writing is writing and it needs to be accepted in all forms and I was glad it opened up the conversation.
I agree. I think it is such a necessary conversation. So when you’re writing how much does musicality feature, how much would you think about flow, rhythm and the idea of performance?
Well before I put a poem out I always think about how it’s going to sound, I read it and think about the flow and obviously, music has a lot to do with it. The flow, repetition, and rhythm will play into what the poem is talking about and the poem’s purpose. I always think about whether the poem sounds like the emotion it is trying to present. Is this how it wants to sound? Does this sound convey the emotion that I want to convey? I was always influenced by performance poets and so the way a poem sounds is a huge thing for me. People think that musicality is only relevant for performance poets and people on stage but I think music and rhythm has such a strong effect on you mentally, so musicality should be a huge thing for page poets too. Sound and rhythm, for me, are always doing something deeper.
I suppose that is one of the fundamental drives of Jazz Poetry too. It aspired to both reflect the rhythms and flow of jazz music but also to do something more with its rhythm. It helped form a cultural identity specific to the experience of the African American community through its musicality and poetry. It gave an identity to the community of Harlem as a whole and also personal identities on individual levels.
The music of jazz poetry… I feel that the way the jazz poets wrote their poems was to convey a continuity. That continuous jazz rhythm represents the fact that there is no end to the fight against the struggles that they faced. I agree that jazz poetry was also giving an identity to African Americans living at the time. I think it’s what music and poetry do. Jazz poetry was doing something huge on political and personal levels. Langston Hughes was also a huge inspiration for me. I actually managed to see some of his poetry performed live, not by him, by the rapper Ice-T. [laughs] He came over to the UK for a jazz festival and read his work at the Barbican. Because I was part of the Barbican Young poets I wrote a response to Langston Hughes’ work and I got tickets to the show and met Ice-T backstage after his performance. But, for me, that took Langston Hughes’ poetry to a whole new level as everything that was being said was still relevant.
Well I suppose that gives a pertinence to what you were saying about how Langston Hughes made the rhythm of his poetry into something that felt continuous and almost never-ending.
Yeah, exactly. It was then that I realised that music, poetry and the words and rhythms people write down have an importance far bigger than the song itself or its singer.
This reminds me your poem ‘Mos Def’ which you performed at a Sofar Sounds, you had a line which went…
Is it: ‘The artist is most times as lost as the world that he is trying to save’? It’s weird, after I wrote that poem, I read it to myself and realised that I was talking about myself as well as Mos Def. A lot of the things I was writing about him were about me. I think that’s why it’s one of my favourite poems.
That’s interesting and demonstrates what you were saying about how both music and poetry work on personal and communal levels simultaneously. How do you see yourself in him?
When I was talking to you about exhaustion, I think that’s what happened to him. He became exhausted with the rap scene and music in general and just kind of burned out. That’s my biggest fear as an artist. Becoming exhausted with poetry and sharing it with the public and just going into my room and writing to myself. I have those moments when I block everything out and I go into my room and I’m just writing for myself. I think I relate to him in the way that he cares about the art and its purpose so much that clearly some things have affected him to the point where he doesn’t wanna do it any more.
So what is the most important thing about art then, is it what it can give you or is it what you can give other people?
Both. Obviously each poem affects each person differently but poetry is a source for activism, for feminist issues, political issues and mental health issues too. You know, that’s the power of Mos Def’s music. It isn’t something that people only like on a personal level, they also address big political and social questions. I guess that was his problem, he was just as lost as the world he was trying to save.
