Poète en vedette
Titilope Sonuga
Titilope Sonuga est poète et artiste dont les œuvres captent les moments de tendresse et de joie perpétuelle au croisement de la féminité et de la négritude. Elle est l’auteure de trois collections de poèmes primées : Down to Earth (2011), Abscess (2014), et This Is How We Disappear (2019). Elle a publié deux albums de créations parlées : Mother Tongue (2011) et Swim (2019).
Titilope a rédigé trois pièces de théâtre : The Six, une exploration de la féminité sur le plan intergénérationnel; Naked, un récit théâtral pour une actrice; et Ada the Country, une comédie musicale. Elle a rédigé des campagnes publicitaires pour des marques d’envergure mondiale et était actrice de la très populaire série Gidi Up, qui a été diffusée partout en Afrique. Elle est la neuvième poète lauréate de la ville d’Edmonton.
Les réalisations de Titilope comprennent notamment :
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la publication de trois collections de poèmes, de deux albums de créations parlées et de trois pièces de théâtre
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une interprétation pour l’investiture du président nigérian, étant la première poète à le faire
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la fondation de la Breath in Poetry Collective, une plateforme de premier ordre pour l’interprétation de posée à Edmonton.
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être la poète lauréate de la ville d’Edmonton
Poème en vedette
Arrival
Only the trees know
what wayward wind buoyed the first one thousand
through river, creek, and muskeg,
feet a calloused bark we peel until the fleshy center.
We count the rings to tell us:
how many lifetimes is the measure
between a stolen land and a stolen people?
What is lost eternally in the currency of the sale?
How many paces is each generation
between limber pine and baobab,
between prairie grass and cotton?
If we ask the sky
whose hands raised in prayer
carried their people across the bridge
from one dream differed into another,
who nursed the children
on the promise of home, a place
of rest and refuge,
it will answer:
the women
in Campsie and Breton,
in Clearview and Amber Valley,
Clyde and Rosetown,
in Wildwood,
knuckles bloody from begging
bush and meadow
into farmland, fruit,
into a harvest from the labour
of living and loving, of running
from that which will maim and unname,
from all the ways the black body is undone,
unwound from the spool of its history,
an unraveling for generations to gather.
It is the women,
arriving even now in Edmonton
and Saskatoon,
in Calgary and Regina
who touch their hands to the prairie dust
and ask first of the land:
what may I offer?
Who ask first of the people:
where may I flourish?
Who pour the water of their gifts
until an unforgiving winter gives way to spring.
Women who teach the language of resistance
and tally our remembering.
Who birth and bury,
their hands beneath the braiding
and baking, the building, and bracing.
We cannot gather what was lost
beneath the ocean’s swell.
We will never know whose baby teeth
line the ocean floor, iridescent as seashells.
So, we honor what was before and after the boats,
before and after the hands
that spun the globe and scattered the seeds.
We honor what remains,
the wild push and pull that gathers us here,
our blackness blooming against
the backdrop of a staggering white.
We honor the song even the meadowlark knows,
a centuries-old melody that gurgles to the surface
to touch the land and call it home.
What we speak in our soukous and ska,
our soca, soul, and calypso,
our compas and afrobeat.
What the women sing into the ears of children
whose dreams take up their rightful place
in the night sky.
Children who say their mothers’ names
and close their eyes
knowing.
