Creating Experiences with Britta Badour
The multi-disciplined wordsmith provides us with insight into comfortable courage, honouring influences, and getting your reps in.
Interview by Louie Simonin
Photo of Britta Badour by Gilad Cohen
Wires that Sputter (McClelland & Stewart, 2023)
Britta Badour is an award-winning artist, spoken word poet, emcee, and educator based in Toronto. Since the publication of her debut poetry collection, Wires That Sputter, in the spring of 2023, Badour has been longlisted for CBC’s 2023 poetry prize and named by CBC Books as one of three Black Canadian writers to watch in 2024.
As an educator, Badour is a professor of spoken word performance at Seneca College. She also orchestrates artist training seminars, poetry workshops, and social justice programs in partnership with organizations such as JAYU, Poetry In Voice, Prologue Performing Arts, and League of Canadian Poets.
SIMONIN: What is the greatest impact your work has produced that you’ve seen with your own eyes? How did that experience reframe the way you approach your work, if at all?
BADOUR: A lot of my writing is confessional. I realized that when I started to perform my work, people would want to come to my shows. My mom and dad would want to come to my show, and they would be hearing, maybe for the first time, thoughts that I had on my upbringing and about myself. I think it was really revealing for them. It also forced them to confront some things about themselves. I think the greatest impact is seeing how their relationship with themselves changed, having more grace and patience, and being able to regulate their negative emotions in better ways. So the greatest impact is a self-focused one. It involves my most immediate relationships—with the people who brought me into this world—seeing how they were able to take some harsh truths and become empowered by this confrontation of self.
SIMONIN: As a poet, public speaker, emcee, and educator, how do your disciplines inform one another?
BADOUR: I think that in its crux, I’m a public speaker who can create experiences. I can create a vibe, and that applies really well to hosting and emceeing. If you have public speaking experience, have skills to share, techniques to share, or some sort of information that will help somebody get ahead in some way—that translates very well into teaching. As an artist, I want to be the best speaker of my work, to be the best person to talk about what it is that I'm creating. I think it's cool that I can host a show, or I can teach a show, and then I can perform at the same time. If there's ever a lag of time where there's just a need for some improv in the moment, something to happen, I'm always ready with something in my back pocket that's either an exercise or a performance to be done. So the way they inform each other is just that I'm able to—in more ways than one—show up at the front of a room and be confident, comfortable, and courageous.
SIMONIN: Was that something you had to learn or was it natural?
BADOUR: It was something I learned from a really young age. My mom spent a lot of time reading and writing with me, as well as getting me up to stand in the middle of the room and practice delivering short little speeches. She would spend time with me saying, “Okay, I want you to look at the left side of the room, look at the right, okay, you're leaning a lot to the right, make sure you balance that out. Look in the center, look at somebody else, slow down, okay, pause, speak up, have your voice be louder.” She would give me these cues, so from a very young age—six, seven years old—I had a sense of my voice and what it would need to sound like in terms of its practice. Then growing up, getting older, writing and whatnot, getting a sense of my voice for myself, not just for what my mom says, getting a sense of what I want my voice to be.
SIMONIN: I thought this one was fascinating. In Wires That Sputter, you honour James Baldwin's short story, Sonny’s Blues. As an artist, do you feel like it's important to honour those that came before you, those that inspired you? Do you believe it's a necessary thing to do so?
BADOUR: The way I feel resonates most with me is trying to honour as many influences as possible. So, if I’m walking in a particular space, and there's water and trees, I like being grateful for the landscape in that moment. If a thought, idea, or piece of inspiration reaches me, I like to thank and honour those trees, the water, and that land. In the same way we would honour people for having said or created something, invented a new form, or made you feel like a memory wouldn't have been approached had you not read this other piece. I think it's really important to cite and name what has influenced or inspired you because it gives your audience a chance to trace that back, just like you went back and read Sonny's Blues.
SIMONIN: Sonny's Blues ends with Sonny's big performance, and Baldwin delivers this excellent meditation on the magical artistic display. The climax of the scene, in my opinion, is found within the quote, “Freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us to be free if we would listen, that he would never be free until we did.” As a performance artist specifically, can you give me your thoughts on that statement?
BADOUR: The whole story looks like a movie when I read the way Baldwin has written it. When I read it, I can experience it in all of my senses—even the senses that I'm not aware of names for—my intuition, my gut feeling. I wanted to selfishly capture it in a way I could also feel that sense of that lilt as an artist. When I think about what it's like for a performer to tap into the taplessness, the timelessness, the beyond death and life, I think it’s a communal experience. It can't only be the performer experiencing it alone. That doesn't seem like a holistic approach to getting to that zone, what I would call the “painlessness.” As a performer, I know I've experienced the opposite, where it's like, I'm tired of performing, I'm tired of the exhaustion of trying to push myself or others to get to this place. It gets really exhausting. So to be reminded of this sort of mysterious, almost magical experience of being able to be fully present in a moment—mind, body, spirit, all those connections—it's a nice refreshment for me. Because it is why I perform.
SIMONIN: While curating a poetry collection, is the process the same as a musician sequencing their album? How conscious is that process? Did it go further than simply having the titular poem in the beginning?
BADOUR: I'm certainly one of those artists that will look at the track listing and see how that tells a story, so I wanted to do the same thing, I wanted to mimic that. I'm someone who also believes that the greatest gifts you could give somebody for a birthday, an anniversary, or any celebratory moment is either a mixtape or a handwritten note. My poems are my handwritten notes. What's the mixtape look like? It looks like the titles. So, how do those titles speak and have a conversation with one another on the table of contents? How does that layout feel in terms of its weight? Something I learned in fiction writing is that a lot of authors will print out maybe the first page or perhaps all the pages of their work and lay them out chapter to chapter on the ground, and their whole apartment will be consumed with all these pages, and they'll look at the shape. So looking at the shapes of poems and how the varying lengths or aesthetics of the pieces speak to one another was also important for this collection.
SIMONIN: What do you think is generally misunderstood about poetry? And can you give me an advocacy for the art form, for its versatility—to all the doubters? I feel like it's a form that isn't appreciated as much as it should be.
BADOUR: I think what’s most misunderstood about poetry is that it needs to be understood. Y’all come to the page, or we all come to the slam, we all come to wherever poetry is happening, and we think we’re supposed to solve this puzzle. It’s not always a puzzle, it’s not always something to get. I think it’s more about taking it in as an experience. What happens to you when you read that poem out loud in your own voice? What sort of sense can you make from that? What do you feel? What do you think about, what comes up for you? I wish that people could approach poetry like walking into a shop, where you want to buy clothes, you want to add to your wardrobe. You pick things out based on your tastes. So pick things out of a poem or out of a poet's work based on your tastes, and then learn about your taste. What is your taste? How do you develop your taste as well? Start at the baseline, picking poems that feel like they're connected to the things that you would naturally enjoy or be satisfied by. Have a conversation about it with others, because then you’ll notice that someone may disagree at some point, and there will be some sort of challenge towards that thought. Then that experience will hopefully open up your perspective a bit. Having that conversation, I think, is really important, the same way a writer needs writing communities, readers need readers and engagers need those sorts of communities to engage in the conversation as well.
SIMONIN: As somebody who's gone through many slam poetry and spoken word circuits, how has it felt to be a part of these writing communities? How substantial of a contribution have these communities had to the blossoming of your career? You kind of spoke to it right then, but if you don’t mind expanding on it.
BADOUR: I wouldn’t be who I am without mentors. I take mentorship to mean someone that spends time with you one on one, but also somebody who inspires you in the moment. I try to listen for what opportunities are open, and what opportunities are present. So without being able to go through the slam community and see how audiences commit to loving a poet—cheering for them and making sure they get high scores. To being in writing circles where I feel more adjacent in power with peers and getting a chance to fail, experiment, explore, and learn things that I wouldn't have otherwise known. There's a lot that I am exposed to by being situated in different communities and different, as you say, creative circuits.
SIMONIN: You spoke about mentors, how would one find a mentor if they're looking for one?
BADOUR: I had a really difficult time finding the sort of mentor that would help me get to the next level. I felt like I was doing a lot of the mentorship, working with a lot of young people and helping them to get to my level, but I wasn't levelling up. It took me a long time to find the sort of people that I thought would help. You need somebody who's twenty years advanced because they have a wealth of experience and have gone through various trials and errors. They have a perspective that someone who's ten or five years ahead in the game will not have. So it was hard for me to find somebody of that nature, and the best way that I could do it was to go back to school. Fortunately enough for me going back to school, and attending this master's program was the place where that showed up for me, it may not show up for everyone. But the idea is to ask for what you need as often as possible, and hopefully, that door will open eventually.
SIMONIN: On Begin This Freedom: does this kind of poem, a chant of empowerment, come after a revelation? Or is it a slow distillation, a slow discovery? Does it just stream out of you? Or is that, again, a due process?
BADOUR: Does it come as this thing that dawns on me? So this piece actually came to me in a couple of different segments. I fused them, and I think the impetus that started it was something like: “If I give myself permission to change, that is a sort of freedom.” Maybe that was the line that I was percolating on. But usually what happens for me is I will be writing, writing, writing—it's craft, you're constantly working at it. If it's not every day, it's a regular practice. Then sometimes I'll have things on the shelf in my head, like a line, a certain melody, a twist of sound, right? And I'm trying to eventually find my way back to that. So I think for this particular poem, it did happen to just come out all at once. Luckily, like I said, I had these sections of a thing that I was then able to fuse together; those sections all came out at the same time. In terms of a slow discovery, I love this. You sound like such a writer when you ask this question. The slow discovery is the poem discovering and figuring itself out. I know how I hear things, I know what my taste is in terms of sound. So then the discovery is how do I want the poem to look? What can I drop away? What can I keep? What can I do to make the poem present itself on the page?
SIMONIN: So it's finding the way to present the message in the most efficient vehicle?
BADOUR: I'm trying not to use the word efficient anymore because I feel like I get away with a lot of things when I say, oh, this is the most efficient thing. So even though poetry is meant to have a sense of brevity and efficiency, I would say that the thing I'm going after is the most interesting way the work can be presented.
SIMONIN: I have to hit you with the cliche last. What is the greatest piece of advice you can give to the readers of Arrival magazine?
BADOUR: This is not so cliche, but we have these magicians, David Blaine and David Copperfield, and the two of them are having a conversation. David Copperfield says to David Blaine, it takes 500 shows to get a trick right, and more than 1,000 to make it feel good. When I heard this, I felt that that was the best way to explain how I feel whenever I perform a poem. It's getting the poem written, working on the techniques 100,000 times, getting it to a place where I feel it's something I want to share in a performative way, or perhaps in an even reading way, whatever it is. In terms of performance specifically, it takes me at least a year of performing that poem before I can say, okay, I got in the pocket. I might feel really good the first time that I perform in front of a live audience—it doesn't take away from that—but getting the timing right, nuances right, takes a wealth of experience. So my advice is to get as much experience as possible, get your reps in, do your drills, and do what it takes to get that one swift movement. I shared this quote with my students, actually, just this past week. I have a bodybuilder in my class, and he says that in powerlifting it takes at least 1,500 reps to get a movement in one fell swoop. 1,500 reps before the muscle says, “I will do this naturally now.” So if it takes that many repetitions, you have to repeatedly work at getting the experience of performing your work, speaking your work out loud. Also, write that many poems before you feel good about being called a poet, or feel good about being called a writer, or an artist, or creator, whatever it is, it takes a lot of repetition. It's your experience. It's your gains.
SIMONIN: It's your gains, get the reps in. Wow, I'm inspired after that. I appreciate it so much.
BADOUR: Word. So don’t be afraid to fail because it’s a part of it. Everyone does it, right? You have to fail, you have to fail fast, you have to fail forward. It's not failure though, if you're working towards the development. That's not failure.
“When I think about what it's like for a performer to tap into the taplessness, the timelessness, the beyond death and life, I think it’s a communal experience. It can't only be the performer experiencing it alone.”