“This poem is your talisman. Wear it like a cloak of stars.
I will stitch you a galaxy for every black hole.”
– Sheniz Janmohamed, “Noble Soul”
It’s easy to be skeptical about the ability of creative expression to make any real impact on the political sphere, and it often seems impossible to imagine that art could combat the wealth, power, and violence that dominate world politics. Sheniz Janmohamed, a writer and spoken-word artist, is undaunted, and through her organization Ignite Poets, she is striving to promote literary expression as a means of instigating social change.
Ignite Poets is an initiative that provides young poets with the opportunity to promote peace and social awareness through their work. Janmohamed started the project as an undergraduate at the University of Toronto, when she was first emerging as a spoken-word artist. According to Janmohamed, Ignite’s original purpose was to provide young artists with an alternative to open-mic style shows, which dominate the spoken-word scene and are usually comprised of a series of individual performances.
“It just seemed like there weren’t enough opportunities for new spoken word artists to work together collaboratively on a project,” she says. “I liked the idea of integrating our pieces into one show…I started [Ignite] to see…if there was a way we could use our talents together to create a new genre within spoken word.”
In order to foster collaboration between young poets, Ignite’s first show featured seamless transitions from one poet to the next, weaving individual presentations into a single, cohesive performance.
“I looked at [the performers’] poems very carefully and I found ways of connecting each piece,” Janmohamed continues. “There were no introductions between each piece, it just went from one…to the next.”
Ignite took on another dimension last year, when Janmohamed began planning to launch a Kenyan branch of the initiative with a show featuring Kenyan artists (Janmohamed herself is of Kenyan ancestry). Because she primarily worked on the show from Toronto and was not directly involved in the details of its production, Janmohamed focused less on the show’s structure and more on its potential to serve as a vehicle for political and social change.
The local poets who performed at Ignite’s show in Kenya addressed some of the many issues that Kenya has faced since 2008, when a hotly contested presidential election sparked horrific bouts of violence throughout the country. They also donated the proceeds from the performance to a girls’ school in the slums of Nairobi. Janmohamed was struck by the performers’ eagerness to use their art as a platform for the peaceable resolution of political and social strife in Kenya.
“The desire for transparency and accountability and awareness that they have…is really an example of what we should be like here,” she says. “I think everyone can learn a lesson from Kenyan poets…because they really are the voice of that nation.”
Janmohamed believes that poetry’s pathos makes it an invaluable medium for addressing social and political issues, particularly in Kenya: “Newspaper, or radio [are] effective in a way, but [don’t] necessarily tug on the heartstrings of people,” she says. “Poetry can do that…it can challenge people’s ideas and challenge the status quo. I think that’s why Kenyans, specifically after…the election violence, found that the most effective way to channel their emotions and frustrations was through this medium.”
Janmohamed experienced the power of poetic expression herself when she was working on Bleeding Light, a compilation of poems that is set to be released at the end of the month. Bleeding Light is a collection of ghazals, an intricate poetic form that dates back to seventh-century Persia. Janmohamed wrote the compilation as part of her graduate studies at the University of Guelph. After researching the ghazal extensively, she drew on its ancient form and style to explore her own thoughts, experiences and struggles.
Bleeding Light addresses the anguish of love, the devastation of war, and the challenges that Janmohamed has faced as a person of Eastern descent living in the Western world. And yet, despite such intense subject matter, the sequence of ghazals in Bleeding Light traces a woman’s journey from darkness into the light of dawn. According to Janmohamed, this reflects the personal catharsis that she experienced through the composition of her poems. “I was dealing with specific issues that were surfacing through poetry and it was the only way for me to have [a] sense of release. I was also…in Kenya for a chunk of the time I was writing them, so some of that imagery is because of the fact that I was actually on a journey.”
Now that she has returned from that journey and finished writing Bleeding Light, Janmohamed has turned her sights back to Kenya, with plans to establish a permanent branch of Ignite Poets there. “I’d like to see if I can partner with some sort of organization…[to] create something sustainable that can be run by Kenyans, but stay true to what Ignite is about,” she says. “I want to promote literacy and the importance of literary expression as a more productive way of channeling your frustrations.”
