Peace Akintade

In August of 2024 Peace Akintade, the current Poet Laureate of Saskatchewan, discussed her experiences as a creative leader and the interconnectedness of community and poetry.

Levesque : So poetry as a mindset can be very impactful. How has it changed your worldview?

Akintade: Well, for me, poetry has always been an avenue for change, for voice, for expression. And as a kid, it was really hard for me to find my voice sometimes. When I was five to nine, I went involuntarily mute, just because I didn't feel like I had anything to say. And so my mindset as a child is, ‘if you don't have anything to say, you don't say anything at all’. Which meant that I was a really, really good kid and everybody loved me.

But I found it very hard to come up with topics to talk to people with, or just answer questions. And now when I think about it, it's almost like you can’t stop me from talking. And that was probably because of all of the open mics that I did in poetry, or when I would listen to people also do poetry or do storytelling or theater, and seeing them actually be on stage and people listening; it felt wonderful. It felt like having a connection with something. And for the first time, I felt that if I have this media, if I have this way of speaking that people might not understand fully, but they're still hearing, it can help me.

And so, I started poetry very young, and it has been one of my main forms of communication for people. And slowly, it took me out of that feeling that no one is there to listen.

Levesque: Was there a moment in your life when you knew you wanted to be a poet?

Akintade: Oh, yes, there were two instances. One was when I first came to Canada. So the Open Door Society had this thing where they brought people together to do art programs. They said that if they bring immigrant youths and refugee youths into a room and they give them mentors, then the kids will be like, “Oh, I can do art”, and then we'll be completely okay with Saskatoon.

It worked to a certain degree, they tried to get us to try camp, and nobody liked that. So none of us became campers, but there was a poetry workshop that was run by Ahmad [Majid], who I'm now friends with and they made us write about our hometown. And instead of writing about hometown, I was just listening to everybody else talk about, you know, their home and what it was like to be back home. And they're just young kids, talking about how much they miss their home. And so I didn't write about my home, I wrote about other people's home, and I based it on a tree.

So if there's a tree that grows in the forest and it falls down and the roots are still grounded into the dirt, has it ever left the sky? And the mentor looked at me and gave me a little card to go to Write Out Loud, which was the open mic poetry group. And I remember specifically the moment when I wrote the poem, and read the poem and just looking at people's eyes and seeing like a light come in because I was writing about their experience. Using little pieces of their poem and making it into one. And it felt, it felt like being a little bit of a hero.

I don't know if I felt like I did my due diligence in the world, but I think that feeling has really [launched] me into the poetry world and into writing poetry.

The second one is a little bit more silly. It's when I had to do a workshop. This is now 10 years in the future. I was doing a workshop in Regina, and I always like to bring lots of loose leaf paper with me, and in the loose leaf papers, there's always like little pieces of poetry that I write, and I make other people write based on those words.

But there's a specific street in Regina that creates a tunnel, like a wind tunnel, and I walked into that tunnel, and all the paper flew into the air. And I didn't know at that time, but the people that I was doing the workshop with, they were also walking in the opposite direction, and they just saw the paper flying and me crying because it was such a long day, and that was my last thing. Like, I did not want to be in Regina. I do the poetry workshop, and there's paper on the road, and so this group of strangers come, and they're like, helping me clean it, and I'm like crying to them, being like, “I'm so sorry”. And they walk with me to the workshop area, and then they sit down. I think that was like a good cycle. You know, I started poetry with really loving my workshop facilitator, and then now I'm a workshop facilitator.

Levesque: An achievement like this is very important in your life. Are there other achievements you've taken time to reflect on and appreciate since?

Akintade: That's always a tricky question for me, and honestly, I really appreciate it, because I found that the way that I got the poet laureate position was because I integrate myself a lot into community initiatives. For six years straight, I was doing about five projects a month. They would include theater, it would include policy making, immigration law, puppetry, acting, playwriting, intimacy directing. And then I took in a barista job, and then I was like, why not be a bartender too?

But then that meant that, you know, like Monday, I'm trying to facilitate an open mic for kids in Prince Albert's, and then on Wednesday I'm in Saskatoon writing a play that is going to be put up in October. And then Friday, I'm intimacy directing, and that can be a lot. Also with facilitating and then doing anti racism work around the city, I never really get the chance to slow down or to just appreciate what I've done.

I think I finish something and then I move on to the next thing. I didn't really take the time to understand that until me and Dash and Lauren, we all organized Write Out Loud. If you remember, that's the one that I went to years ago, my first time. But now I'm the third generation of organizers, and so we take it with such pride. And we created the first Saskatchewan Youth Poetry Festival ever, and that was the first week of July. And we did it, and it went well. And then I moved immediately into starting a new project and getting ready to do work in Toronto.

And I didn't really get a time to sit down and reflect on that achievement until I was in my Airbnb with a busted down air conditioner with humidity and sweat, and I was showering, and I was like, “Oh yeah! We did a youth Poetry Festival.”. And it felt good to see the youths from all over Saskatchewan. So people that's like, they haven't ever felt like they have a community to go to, because these are not kids that are rambunctious. They wanted to journal when we were having dinner together. They were like, “Can we write?”.

At the end of the third day was their final showcase, where people came in and sat and listened to them. Me, Lauren, Dash, we just started bawling our eyes out. Because in the beginning, a lot of them were so apprehensive about performing, and then all 14 wanted to perform at the end. And every single one of their poems was heartbreaking. And they found the voice to talk about that on stage, just through, like, through poetry, you know, and this is like, using metaphors and similes. It's not just saying, this happened to me. It's using symbols, and I don't know, it just feels like they found a way to talk about it that doesn't necessarily have to be too vulnerable.

You know it was really lovely seeing all of them. And I think that cemented when I got the poet laureate, because I got to the poet laureate position literally after the youth Poetry Festival. That's when I got the phone. And so I guess that's why I just, like, erased it from my brain. And I was like, Okay, on to the next. That achievement means a lot just to do that festival here.

Levesque: As the poet laureate of Saskatchewan, where do you plan to lead poetry throughout the province and the community, especially with youth?

Akintade: Yes, and so I participate in this form of poetry called interdisciplinary poetry. When I talked about all of the different initiatives that I do around the community, they're all kind of based on the foundation of poetry. So like theater, for example, even though I'm a playwright, I'm a chorus poem playwright, which means that all of my plays are done in forms of poetry, different forms of poetry and spoken words.

Even with intimacy direction, strangely, there's a way to integrate poetry into this, to make people feel very comfortable. In my anti-racism work, like a lot of it is talking about storytelling from, you know, an African centric point of view. And so with interdisciplinary poetry, one thing that I really love is the bridging of different communities. And I find that in Saskatchewan that is so important is to be able to bridge different art communities.

Because, you know, the revenue of Saskatchewan is really based on the arts; like theater you know, the art galleries, the performance artists, the musicians, all of these people are bringing in revenues to Saskatchewan, but do they actually integrate with each other? Not really. You know, like a musician is over on the other side and then a theater artist is in the other side and then, like you have performance artists on the other side, and you have speakers down on the other side, and it's kind of very hard to get them to intermingle, especially with each other. And I find that with the initiatives that I've been doing, poetry has been a connector, in a way, with music, with songwriting, you have poetry with theater, you have poetry with performance art, you have poetry with dance.

So I've been trying to get more [multidisciplinary] work up in Saskatchewan. And as Poet Laureate, I find that it's so important also that the accessibility of poetry is really, really clear about how accessible poetry can be. And that can mean change in terms from the bottom down; removing the idea of publication in order to be a poet. Or it can mean that when you go to see a theater show, and you hear poetry, but you hear it in a way that means something to you, because you're more comfortable with that form of media. It shows that the accessibility of poetry is actually there.

Making people aware that if you can see and recognize poetry in this in any kind of stance in the world, then you, in your way, can also feel comfortable writing poetry. And I think what I want to do as Poet Laureate is to make people feel like they can be a poet, rather than it being a separation. I don't want it to be like a poet laureate is someone that has written the best poems in the world. It's really about, like, now being the servants to poetry and showing that, like I can do it so can you, and making that distinction a lot more clear. And that, I feel, starts with just meeting people where they are, instead of trying to, like, push a bunch of Shakespeare at them, showing what modern poetry can do, what spoken word can do, and what contemporary poetry can do. And hopefully, that gets people to recognize poetry as a form of healing and a form of using your voice.

Levesque: Oral tradition, poetry, it plays a very strong role in our Saskatchewan history. Since we're on treaty six territory, the homeland of the Metis, how do you plan to celebrate and uplift the indigenous people of Saskatchewan during your term?

Akintade: Awareness is a big thing in reconciliation, but awareness and art is also so important. Especially because I am also coming in as a settler, but also as an immigrant and as someone with a background in oral storytelling.

That's how my family lived back in Nigeria. The first memory that I have is storytelling. Is when we were sitting in a circle, and it was the Lion Gate Festival, and you would have a storyteller that literally leaves the community for months just to come up with new stories to bring in for the festival. And they would have the storyteller right in the middle, and then it would be the children in the inner circle, the parents and older siblings, and then you have the elders. That's how we would sit listening to the stories.

And so when I came to Canada, the first mention or the first feeling of being back home, was listening to Indigenous storytellers. I remember going to a winter camp when I was part of the youth speakers bureau for the office of the treaty Commissioner. And one thing that they did to train us for when we go to conferences to talk about issues, was taking us to a winter camp; one of the Cree winter camps. And we had the elders that would literally be cooking bannock for us, and then teaching us stories.

And I remember, I came into the Cree winter camp, and they looked at me and they're like, “You're gonna be freezing”. And they would push me to the fire. They would put so much blankets on me. And I had to explain that I can handle the cold and they were like, “No, no, no, you're from Africa, so you need more blankets”. And they would give me coffee. And I remember sitting in a circle, and one of the elders was telling us a story, and I'm a crier, so I felt like crying even then, because it was the closest thing I've had of my country, any sense of Nigeria, in Saskatoon. And that is awareness in a simple form, you know?

It's awareness of feeling a connection that you know, brings you back to yourself, brings you back towards them, and in that way, of them also not knowing that I can handle cold and giving me blankets and giving me warmth that is also awareness. And when I told them that our tribe comes from storytelling, they were aware of new traditions in Yoruba that they did not know about, and I was aware of traditions in Cree that I did not know about, you know. And all of that came from just stories. It came from poetry and came from them sitting down and listening.

So I think with reconciliation, it's not enough to do land acknowledgements in the beginning. Let's have an event where we actually just tell stories with each other. It seems simple, but it's so powerful. And so that is awareness of story, and that is how simply, very simply, in this bone chilling way, how stories can help with awareness and with reconciliation. And that's one thing that I want to happen. I want that to happen a lot. And that's one of the initiatives that I'm taking, is storytelling sessions with different different communities.

Levesque: How has specifically being a Saskatchewan poet, growing and learning here in this environment, with the cold and the flatlands, impacted your work?

Akintade: Yeah, it's tricky, because if you asked me this question maybe five years ago, I would say that it has impacted me positively. I think the quiet and the stillness of Saskatoon is something that is very undervalued.

A lot of people are always aiming for the grass is greener on the other side, but from someone who came from a different country that was going through a lot of upheaval; it was going through a lot of really sad things that that still impacts who I am as a person, just from experiencing it, coming to Saskatoon felt like heaven. It felt like a protective bubble around me. And so a lot of my poetry when I first started out was that joyfulness, that feeling of this is what's an immigrant that has to experience five McDonald's on the street. This is what they feel. They feel joy, they feel happy, they feel connected.

The problem is now with the ecosystem of Saskatoon again, it's very quiet, very still, which means that they want to keep it that way. Which means that when someone comes with complaints about racism and microaggression and feeling not connected to the space because of something that has happened to them here in the space, even though it's supposed to be like the bubble of safety, people do not listen. They do not want to listen.

I went to the grocery store and I was taking my potatoes and putting them in a bag, and the plastic bag broke, and the potatoes fell all over the floor. It seems like a setup for a good joke, but everybody just kept on looking. And I was like, picking up the potatoes, being like, ‘Oh, this sucks’. And one of the workers came and started yelling at me, being like, ‘Why did you drop all the potatoes on the floor?’. And I was like, ‘The bag broke. I am so sorry’. And they went, took a bag and just like, threw it on the floor next to me.

And then when I took the bag and put the potatoes in, the bag broke again, because it was the same kind of plastic bag that caused the problem in the first place. And the lady said a phrase that really just shocked me. She was just like, ‘Is it your first day in Canada?’ By now, it's already been six years, you know. And she said, is this your first day in Canada? And was kind of really frustrated that they have to deal with someone that is coming for the first time in Canada.

And I think that's what broke the little bubble. And I found that my poetry became a lot more angrier, you know, instead of loving the quiet, I started to really, really hate the quiet. It felt very definite. I was now aware that the reason why it's quiet is because people like me are staying at home instead of going out into the street.

And so my poetry started changing into observations like that, where I even took old poems and reinvented them, rewrote them. It has [now] gone back to a place of healing. I actually went out and knocked on the doors of people that are just staying in their house, and I asked them, “Why, why are we not out and about? Why are we not involved in the arts community, why are we just staying at home? Why are we immigrants just staying at home, not being part of the ecosystem of Saskatchewan?”.

But then I did a project called Do I Intimidate? and it was put on in the art gallery in Regina. It was when I photographed people with their head scarves and their cultural clothes; you know, the cultural clothes that I was wearing when I was in the grocery store. And I wrote a poem on kind of the beauty of creating the gele, which is the headscarf that we use, and the gele being a metaphor for always having to almost, like, reduce the size of it, because the gele is supposed to be big, like it goes all the way to the sky. That's how big the gele is. But now it's turned into a simple head scarf that people would do, and that was a metaphor for how it feels to just be in Saskatoon was continuously turning into a head scarf instead of a gele, and that's changed the way that I started to see Saskatoon.

I started to write about it, and I think my poetry now, yes, is a place of healing, but a place of being aware that things are wrong, but still seeing the good, being connected to the good, and knowing that sometimes people need to feel like it's safe to go outside. And hopefully, if they read my poetry, they can feel like it's okay to be outside.

Levesque: Do you have any idols you draw inspiration from, and what part of their work or persona do you identify with?

Akintade: Khodi Dill is a hip hop artist, spoken word artist, and children’s book author. He created the first hip hop children's book in Canada. It's called Welcome to the Cypher. He’s been such an inspiration because he’s the first Black, successful author that I knew personally. And he’s known me since I was 13.

We performed for a feature in the Write Out Loud the same night I got the confidence to go up and perform for the first time for myself. So he was the feature and after seeing his feature I felt like I could go up and perform. And now we’ve created this friendship. And this person is actively changed peoples lives. And it's amazing to be able to say that we are friends and say that he's such a wonderful mentor. And the way that he’s turned Hip Hop into a way of acceptance for youths and children. It means that those children will grow up with a mindset that I did not even have when I was younger. A mindset of justice, advocacy, from a very young age. Because of his book, because of the way he is, because of the workshops that he does where he makes rap about actually learning about trauma and actually using it for good.

Goldboo Amani is a performance artist that creates performance art from games. And created a whole board game called “Unsettling the Settlers”. And it's based on another board game called Settlers of Catan, and they found that the game is actually just teaching you about colonization. This is real life, you can see it in the board game. Those are the two I can think of right now that are really effective with the way I look at poetry and interact with poetry.

Levesque: Final thoughts you’d like to share?

Akintade: For me, when it comes to poetry, human connection is such a huge tip from me. Especially when it comes to connecting emotionally with people. With my first poem being about listening to people talking about their home and their writing about it, it has become my breath.

So yes, a lot of my poetry is about being home and being alone and thinking about things internally. But also listening to people and writing about their experiences in poetry form. And in a way people can relate to themself.

A term I coined throughout this year as I move my poetry into performance art pieces, a term called “collective oneself”; it means that you first must know yourself in order to see yourself in others, and in that we become connected.

And it came from a performance art piece where I didn't eat, sleep or drink water for 46 hours [without] acts from the community. So people would come as I’m writing and say “Peace take a 10 minute break” or “Here’s some kale from Una Pizza”. So I asked the community to come give me things in order to show that they care but also to see the work that I'm doing. So with that connection there is an interaction happening, coming into my space, while I'm using that space for myself but together we are experiencing collective oneself. It has turned so that my poetry has almost evolved past me, where people can now read my poetry and have their own ideas.

By: K. Levesque