Introducing: Aamani Kanda
Image: Poetry is Always in the Background
While the Collecting Coventry exhibition seeks to showcase and celebrate some of the many objects we hold in our collection, I wanted to focus on the stories that objects elicit. In considering alternative types of collecting, I landed on poetry and found Aamani, Coventry’s Young Poet Laureate.
My interest was piqued through the thought-provoking work Aamani shares on her Instagram page (@aamanissecretjournal) and when we finally met, I knew she was the perfect poet for this project! She describes her role as Young Poet Laureate as vehicle for connecting with people and culture in Coventry in an eye-opening way.
““Honestly, it’s just quite a connection with the diversity in Coventry, like being young Poet Laureate has opened my eyes up to so many groups of people that I didn’t know existed in Coventry and so much rich culture that it’s kind of like it’s not buried under so deeply that it’s inaccessible. But it’s so rarely talked about, so it’s so nice to see the connection between cultures through poetry, which I didn’t know was such a thing until I started getting more involved with the poetry world””
Aamani’s passion for poetry on the theme of social issues is informed by her current studies in Law. Separating her writing practice from formal studies is something she is grateful for. It allows her to explore poetry organically and find her own unique poetic voice.
““Law is my main input for all of like my academia, so when I study poetry and I write my poetry, it’s a lot more free flowing now, because I know when I started being Poet laureate I really struggled with writer’s block because I’d have like, this anxiety that I was going to write something that wouldn’t class as a poem or like, it wouldn’t rhyme well enough for people to understand that it was a poem. But now it’s a lot more like, free, especially when I was writing taxidermy. That poem is a lot different from my other poems, where it’s kind of, it’s kind of like a journal entry.””
Mary Fedden , Oxen in Tuscany, Florence 1956
We spoke about the freedom to write without constrictions of these self-imposed rules. As part of the project, I held a writing workshop for Aamani. On a beautiful afternoon in September we flitted between the exhibition and a quiet break out space, exploring references, themes and form. Some of the prompts did focus on form but there was no requirement for the final poem to honour this. We discovered that poetry is expansive:
“It's always in the background. So many people are so poetic and they don't even know they're being poetic when they say certain things. But like, it's so deeply integrated in different ways into different cultures, like my mum was telling me that her dad used to write poetry, and I didn't know that, but because he used to know so many different languages, the way it would come across in different languages was different. When we were doing our workshop and we were learning about how poetry is used in different cultures like in cultures where women are more oppressed, how they use it as a form of like to stand against the oppression*. I think that people use poetry in so many different ways, and I think it's quite beautiful. That's probably my favourite thing about poetry.”
“I feel like poetry. If I had to describe it like in one word, it's so reactive, like, even when we were looking at the poems that were in response to each other. I don't remember the main topic, but it was the one where it was like blacked out.**I feel like even if it's not in response to someone else's poem, for example, like, the way that poetry is formed, even when it's not formal poetry and it's just people speaking and they're speaking poetically, it's so reactive. Like, it's based on their feelings. It's based on the situations. It doesn't just come out of nowhere, but that's what it feels like. Like, it feels like it just comes out of nowhere because you have to build up to a point where you become poetic about what you say.”
This is something which Aamani continued to explore in her second workshop with the performance poet Maureen Onwunali (@monwunali_poetry). Maureen is a Dublin-born Nigerian published poet and a two-time national slam champion. She is currently a Resident Artist at the Roundhouse and has been commissioned, sampled, and featured by various musicians, radio shows, and organisations including BFI, Pearson, Penguin, BBC Radio London, and the Poetry Society.
To develop the poems into something even more magical Aamani had to take a new approach to her work.
““I had to learn a lot about the way I was writing my poems in order to really take in what Maureen was saying. You have to be a lot more intentional in the way that you go about it because anyone could interpret a written poem however they want. But the point of you giving a spoken word poem is that you’re conveying your emotions based on the subject, right? So Maureen, she was really good. And she taught me a lot about how I was actually writing it down in order to convey how I felt. She showed me some videos of the spoken word poems and you can really tell that spoken word poetry is a lot different from what’s like pushed in schools, and yeah, it was really cool. It was really cool to work with Maureen.””
The result of these two workshops are the beautiful words Aamani has pulled together in this small collection. Both Aamani and the Herbert(@the_herbert_cov) will be sharing the poems on their Instagram pages throughout the month. You can also download a copy of the e-pamphlet to via the link below.
*Poetic form called a Landay originating from Afghanistan
**Raymond Antrobus ‘Deaf School’ by Ted Hughs, and After Reading “Deaf School’ by the Mississippi River