Bassey Ikpi: my act is like a prayer

Bassey Ikpi is a globally famous spoken-word artiste, writer, and TV presenter.

Born in Cross River State in the south-eastern part of Nigeria, her family moved to Oklahoma City in the United States when she was four years old. She became a popular appearance in Def Poetry. This is her  maiden trip to Kenya.

“Because I’m West African, most of my time’s spent in Nigeria. I think I went to Ghana once and did some shows in South Africa a couple of years ago, I don’t really travel the continent much. I met Nicholas, Binyavanga and Wanjeri, from Kwani? at a workshop in Nigeria last year, and befriended them. I said to them there were workshops and programs I wanted to do here, and they invited me.

This is my first time and I’m really happy to be here. We’ve been talking about this since last year, but in the last two months is when everything took shape, and Wanjeri started planning, scheduling and producing the events.”

Have you been anywhere other than the city of Nairobi while here?

“I’ve just been in Nairobi, it’s enough for me - I love it here. I have been working I have the shows, press stuff, the workshop. Tomorrow (Saturday) I will be going to Nyeri, but my free days will be Monday and Tuesday. I think then I’ll do more tourist things.”

Has your Kenyan experience inspired new material for your act?

“I think between the time when I’m here and when I leave I might write something based on it. For weeks on Twitter and Facebook all I was writing about was how excited I was to be coming here.

There’s a certain chaos that comes with Lagos and I needed a break from it. Pleasantly, Nairobi has been the perfect antidote to that chaos.

I am constantly inspired, but I’m not a stop-everything-write kind of person. There are things in my head that are being built, stories are being constructed and once I stop moving around I’ll definitely write something.

That’s just how I operate. I don’t put pressure on myself anymore to create things, it either happens or it doesn’t happen.”

How do you rate the show you did in Nairobi to the other shows you’ve done?

The show I did reminded me of the earlier days of my success, when I went professional as a fulltime artiste. I had the frame, meaning I had the words, the expertise, and the experience, but it still felt like a new experience for me.

I was particularly nervous because it is a new audience who were anticipating something. Whether or not I was able to deliver to their expectation, I didn’t know but they were very, very responsive and I got a lot of great feedback afterwards. I like to be interactive with the audience, but sometimes you’ll do a poem and people won’t react till the very end.

It drives me crazy, because the whole time I’m up there I’m wondering should I stop and leave, or what’s going on here? It felt good doing the show.

I’m nervous all the time, but if it’s a good show I stop being nervous as I deliver my act, then I get nervous  at the end of it wondering if people liked it. It’s a problem if I’m nervous throughout: as I’m doing the poems, as I’m talking, as the show is going on.

The experience I got was nervous before, calm during, and nervous after. It would have been a problem too if I had felt nothing at all.

The other difference between here and Nigeria, is that there is a thriving spoken-word culture. Nigerians for some reason enjoy spoken word but it’s not a community.

This reminded me of the time I lived in Brooklyn, when the art was new, there was a new community that gave artistes a platform to launch their craft. In Nairobi, I didn’t have to explain what spoken-word is and what I do.

Does religion or spirituality play any part in your compositions or performances?

I believe in certain things like universal laws, where it’s about how you treat people, how you act and react to things inform how the world reacts to you, and acts towards you.

I don’t profess to be any one religion, I think all religions are flawed because people are flawed. But we have the potential and capacity to be bigger than our flaws. I grew up on the golden childhood rule “treat others like you would wish to be treated”.

Art is such a spiritual thing and should be; there’s God in everything and in everybody. In that way, spirituality runs through everything that I do, even the art of performing I almost like a prayer, when you get up there you become immersed in something.

It’s a spiritual process that is not attached to Christianity, or Islam, or Buddhism, or Atheism. I don’t believe in God in the conventional sense, but I do believe there’s something that exists within us all that’s bigger than we’re just here because we’re atoms and molecules.

“Apology to My Unborn” was an emotional delivery. Tell us about your son, and how family fits in to this process.

I have a son Elawe (the highest place), he’s eight. He’s the one that poem was for, although I wrote it before he was even a thought. I am not a mother in the conventional sense, I travel a lot, but my whole family raises him - that was really important to me.

I didn’t want kids or to get married, but life throws you things and you have to make choices based on the moment. Still, I wanted him to have the full experience of family. I had a tumour in my uterus, and I didn’t have it removed because I knew I wasn’t going to have kids. During my pregnancy it grew from the size of a large marble to weighing ten pounds.

When I did that poem I had just come from the hospital for a check-up, then immediately after I went back to hospital again. I am four months in that video, but it looks like I’m nine months because the tumour was taking nutrients meant for the baby.

I didn’t get attached to the baby throughout the pregnancy because the doctors had already said maybe one of us will make it through.

Elawe was two months premature, as surgery had to be performed to get rid of the tumour, and the doctors said he would have slow mental development with speech impairment. However, he does arts and crafts and my sister is hands-on with that.

At a young age he’s completely in touch and in tune with who he is, and how he’s going to get to who he needs to be. I used to post pictures and write things about him, but when he was five he told me to ask him if a picture or a story was okay for posting or not. They also said he would have physical disabilities, but he is an amazing athlete with already a soccer career and my brother handles that. He’s a striker.

He’s also a very compassionate player, and works a lot on being a part of the team and getting others into the game by passing and assists. That’s important to me because he’s going to be an only child, and the fact that he’s learning to work with other people is awesome.

How has the journey been so far?

I stumbled into Def Poetry by accident; right place, right time and then prepared when I got lucky. You could be at the right place and the right time, but if you’re not prepared then it doesn’t matter.

Before you know it, six years have passed and I’m still on tour. Now it’s going on to more than ten years of spoken-word and I’m still waiting for someone to be like, “Ah, we don’t need you anymore.”

I’m very close with my family, being away from them has been so difficult. I see myself clear, with them. I’m an emotional writer and I’m very self-critical, when things aren’t going “well” I’m too much in my head about it. So I have to reconnect with them so they can remind me what I’m doing, what I’ve done – because it’s easy to forget you’ve lived this amazing life, the world judges “you’re only as good as your last”.

Also my friends and Twitter followers do that. I have amazing people who’ve been following my work for a long time.

What’s the next step for you?

I have a talk show that we’re supposed to start production on. When I get back to Nigeria we’re having a meeting to see when we’re going to commence. I’ve done other things that have aired like specials, but not my own series.

I am passionate about people. My writing is about explaining things to myself, when I write about myself, and it’ll come out that way. I want to know what makes people, the stories that are untold and what moves them. I don’t ask questions that I can Google; if I can Google it that means countless people have already asked that question, so people already know that.

I want to know their fears, triumphs, their failures; stuff that makes people human as opposed to things that make them demigods.

I don’t think I’ve met anybody that didn’t speak to me on some level, even if it’s the worst parts of me: the vainest, arrogant and superficial. Whenever I run into someone that I don’t like, I have to find out what about myself I don’t like that I see in them, because it’s all connected.

The people that don’t move me at all are the ones that I can’t find anything about them that’s real, good or bad.