Aimee Cliff caught up with the ‘iPhone poet’ Dean Atta. She finds out how Atta feels about basking in mainstream public approval, what the place is of spoken word in our culture today, and what the next step is for this formidable talent.
I Am Nobody’s Nigger by Dean Atta by deanatta
Your poem ‘I am Nobody’s Nigger” has attracted so much attention; how does it feel to go viral?
It’s been amazing how many people have supported and shared the poem, how many people have come back to me and told me who they’ve shared it with, whether it’s been their mum, dad, grandparent, aunt. It’s just been really amazing that, because of how the internet works and Twitter and everything, people can actually tell me how it’s touched them, or how they’ve used it to reach other people.
I’ve had particular support from the Spirit of London Foundation; they’ve been fantastic in terms of spreading it, and in terms of linking me up with SBTV to work on a video for the poem, which is really exciting. I’ve been asked to do a festival in Sweden, I’ve been contacted by a filmmaker in Germany who wants to film me, and I’ve got a music producer in Denmark who wants to work with me. It’s amazing that it’s gone international, not just the UK, because obviously I thought this was an issue for the UK. Obviously the N-word is quite an American influence, so I thought, yeah, America and England will have something to say about this – I was not prepared for Europe to be talking about it, so that’s been really interesting!
The poem appeals directly to rappers to stop using the word ‘nigger’; you’ve had an overwhelming response from the public, but what kind of response have you had to the poem from rappers in particular?
I was really happy that Bashy tweeted about it a couple of times, because he’s one of those rappers that I’ve always respected. He did a track a while ago, ‘Black Boys’, which had an equally empowering message as mine. It was really well received, and it’s what made a lot of people take notice of Bashy. It’s very easy to just fall into the mould of talking about the streets and talking about not such a desirable lifestyle when you’re a rapper, because it seems like that sells, but actually Bashy came up with something really intelligent with ‘Black Boys’, and a lot of his stuff is really positive and inspiring. So I was glad he had something to say about my poem.
I don’t know that current, famous rappers are going to change from hearing my poem, but I know that some more up-and-coming rappers might – because they’ve contacted me. I’ve had a few lesser-known rappers get in touch and say “yeah, you’ve made me think about that word, I don’t think I need to use it, and I won’t.” That’s been really nice to hear them say that.
A great deal of the power of ‘I Am Nobody’s Nigger’ comes from the speed with which you wrote it – you really captured the moment while emotions were still raw. Are you likely to use social media more often now, so you can replicate this effect?
Definitely – I was just on Twitter because everyone was on Twitter. I didn’t realise how it could spread something that quickly, I really didn’t. I’ve seen things trend and I’ve things spread, but you think there’s something behind that, some kind of machine behind that. Like someone must contact everyone to let them know, “this is the time to send something out!” There’s certain powerful tweeters out there, like Stephen Fry for example; I remember I was doing something a while back and we wanted Stephen Fry to tweet about it, and we had to email his people. There was a whole process behind it, because when someone’s followed by millions, what they tweet is going to have a huge impact.
But when you’re someone with only a thousand followers, like I had when I put the poem up, you think “okay, maybe a thousand people will read it, or maybe if I’m lucky, two thousand,” I didn’t think twenty thousand people would have heard it. So it’s really amazing that twenty thousand people have listened to it on Soundcloud, and it’s coming up to two thousand on YouTube.
Are you hopeful that the exposure you’ve had this week will open people’s eyes to the extent of the spoken word scene in the UK?
Definitely. I also really hope that it will make people aware of the good work that the Stephen Lawrence Trust do, because that’s important. But yeah, the spoken word scene has been really supportive of me in this time.
It’s been nice to know that they just want to see someone break through, although I don’t think that’s always necessary; for a scene to do well, it doesn’t have to be in the mainstream. It would be nice if people were aware of how genuine and honest and immediate spoken word can be. If you were making music it could take a little bit longer to get those messages out there, there’s a lot more of a process to go through, but with spoken word, it was recorded straight on my phone, put straight on to the internet and shared.
Look out for part 2 of the interview, comming soon!
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