What It’s Like To… Make A Poetry Album

Wana Udobang knows her new poetry album, Dissonance, is a slow burn. Due to the project’s emotional intensity as well as its heavy themes (of body image, socio-cultural reflections and familial traumas), she knows people are working through the otherwise gripping project slowly.

“What I'm realising is that people are really taking their time to digest it,” she tells OkayAfrica. “The way that it took time for me to articulate while making it is the same amount of time it's going to take for them to articulate it for themselves and digest it.”

Udobang is one of Nigeria’s most prolific and celebrated artists with four poetry albums in her discography, including In Memory of Forgetting (2017), Transcendence (2020), Dirty Laundry (2021) and now Dissonance. Each of Udobang’s projects builds on similar but differently considered themes of love, self-perception and identity. The body, for Udobang, is also the biggest point of reference and the most recurring canvas. In Dissonance, it is the site of self-loathing and immense love, the location of unimaginable harm and an avenue for unexpected restoration. The body is also a place for everlasting companionship, for friendship that transcends time and geography and the instrument through which affection, via food and sometimes via voice notes, is made possible. The body, in this strikingly delivered project, is Udobang’s most important subject primarily because it is the central vehicle through which we encounter loss, facilitate harm, experience miracles and conceptualise hope. Through tracks that talk about body image, a genocide that forces many to go hungry in contrast to a global culture that glamorizes starvation, and tracks that trace the impact of familial trauma on one’s present state, Udobang illustrates the dizzying and often incomprehensible experience of being human today. 

This state of incomprehension, which she found hard to describe for a long time, is highlighted in this project as a matter of unending contradiction, of things clanging against themselves, morals shifting depending on the circumstances, the line between good and evil losing its certainty, our sense of the world falling neatly into a sense of dissonance. Udobang, who is one of the pioneers of contemporary Nigerian poetry, has managed to offer us a useful metaphor for our times, a guide to understanding our feelings. This project arrives at an auspicious moment in Nigerian poetry, a time when spoken word artists are receiving more recognition, being integrated into the mainstream and given commercial attention similar to that of a music or movie star. 

Below, Udobang tells OkayAfrica about the process of making a poetry album as a Nigerian poet, the journey towards finding the right tone for this project, the state of Nigerian poetry and what it means to have a fourth poetry album out in the world.

Wana Udobang: Making my first album was really an experiment. It was me trying out something, as I had been writing poetry for a while and wanted to play with audio. I didn't even know what it meant to sound like myself in terms of performing because a lot of spoken influences at the time involved watching a lot of American poets. So your cadence is still tailored towards that.  But after my first album, everything else came with a greater sense of intention. I think I entered a new level of intention with Dissonance. This was the first time I wrote a concept note for an album. 

I was in a mental phase where I was frustrated by things I was seeing and experiencing, and then really thinking about how all of us were participating in many of these things that we were complaining about. Whether we're participating in hyper-productivity or hyper-consumerism, or the body, it is all a means of survival. In a way, I guess it was like an essay forming in my head. Each poem became a paragraph in that long essay, so to speak. We're all experiencing a kind of fracture and trying to survive in these dizzying times.  But with fracture also comes repair because I think I'm very cyclical in that regard. So I wanted to know: what would it mean to repair this fracture? And so those are the themes towards the last seven poems, where I am talking about love and friendship and self-love and self-gratitude. When I made my first album, I listened to Ursula Rucker’s album. Claudia Rankine and Warsan Shire are also influences. 

When writing poetry, I always feel very exposed because a lot of my work has personal memory. I think ultimately the real through line that comes up for me in my work is that we're all just going through the same thing in different ways; we're all fighting for a place in this world to belong, to feel safe, to feel seen,  to be okay with being our full selves. It's your permission to be a human being, and I refuse to let people deny themselves that.

With Dissonance,  it started with a few poems I had been writing here and there. “Thick Skin” had been written maybe two years ago. “Take me Back” had been written a couple of years ago; there were four or five pieces that had been sort of written and maybe performed once or twice, and then there were poems just in the works, but I hadn't completed them.

The moment I wrote the actual poem “Dissonance,” I knew that I had found the word for the thing I had been feeling for the last year. That morning I went on Instagram, and on my For You page it was all before-and-after, before-and-after. And the next thing, I went on Instagram stories, and then on somebody's stories I saw a child in Gaza banging on a metal plate and saying “We need food.”

I literally like hand typed the things he was saying, and that was how I started writing Dissonance that morning. So if you really listen, most of the poems have this sort of double-edged tension that's happening between them. When I write “Novenna” as well, it feels like an ode to the woman, but it's also not an ode to just good women or the women that survived. I also had sound references. I love listening to pop a lot, so I wanted jazz pop. I wanted some ambient sound in there, which became the guiding document for the producer.

Working on the album started with a meeting with the producer and figuring out what I want; we then set up deadlines. So I then had to finish writing and send the poems to him. Then the producer has his deadline for when he starts making the music and composing. And then he sends me what he's made. Afterwards, we book our first recording session. About three sessions in total. He takes a month-plus to mix and handle post-production. Between that, writing the poems and conceptualising the album, it took two years to finish. The feedback has been a lot of people crying and sending me voice notes.

Some people just go, “Thank you for writing my life, thank you for saying everything that I'm experiencing. I am exhausted, and thank you for just being able to capture that exhaustion that we're all feeling at the moment.”  When I think about it, most of my albums have been deeply personal, but I think this is the first time I'm writing what I would consider a collective experience, as I move from myself to the “us” a lot in this album.

I love the growth of poetry in Nigeria right now. I love the explosion. Some people are like, a lot of these poems are really bad. I don't know that I care. I think whether people consider poems not so great or great, there's interest. Do you know what it means for people to be interested in literature?  To have a main stage for it, I think that's a big deal. For me, art is about possibility, and I'm not interested in the gatekeeping of that. I'm excited by the evolution of it and the invention and reinvention and reimagination and the advancement of it. All that I think is important is: how do we empower people to do their best work?