Poetry: body, voice, gaze

Interview with Laura Amponsah, artist, poet, and queer Afro-descendant performer based in Bergamo.

Can you tell us about your poetic research and how you came to performance?
I'm very interested in exploring the potential of language to tell the story of the body. Poetry has helped me keep my body, my thoughts, and my fears under control; it has accompanied me through the early stages of discovering my queerness and continues to do so to this day. Even though I really appreciate classical poetry, I've often perceived it as exclusive—something white and bourgeois, tied to a kind of prestige I didn’t identify with. Maybe I didn’t even believe I understood what poetry was, unless I threw myself into it. I started about six years ago sharing my poems through slam poetry. In slam, you can’t use props—it’s just you on stage, in front of people, with a microphone, your body, and your voice. Coming from this background, where spoken poetry plays such a key role, I find it hard to separate these two artistic dimensions.

Would you like to tell us about a specific project?
My most recent project is called Genesi Terrena—it's still incomplete, and the name might be temporary. I performed it for the first time at Spartiacque, a festival for young artists in Bergamo. My poems often try to dig into memory and reproduce physical sensations on the body, and Genesi Terrena is a piece where I try to revisit all the moments in which I discovered the concept of care: from the time I saw my mother again after coming out—she had been away for months—to my first childhood affection, to the moment when I looked at myself in the mirror and recognized myself for the first time. During the performance, I undress and spread clay over my body in a gesture of care. The act of undressing also came from a personal frustration—knowing I had something to say and that words simply weren't enough. I needed to go beyond words, to use the body, to search for images and gestures as a means of survival, because it truly was a public need, something stronger than just my own discomfort.

What does it mean for you to make poetry and performance in a queer and racialized body? How do you deal with the possibility that the audience may have stereotypical expectations?
On stage, I was lucky to have started performing as an adult, so I had already begun to deconstruct the social anxiety of having to conform to a stereotype, of trying to guess what people might be expecting from me. It’s true that marginalized experiences are sometimes consumed as entertainment by those who don’t live them. Some people expect a tear-jerking show, a disturbing use of trauma, or to be able to use your story for their own self-congratulation. Even on a personal level, when I bring Black experience to the stage, I have to make a conscious effort to erase stereotypical expectations rooted in the internalized racism we've accumulated throughout our lives. There are many ways poetry interferes with reality, and sometimes it does so by scraping off a layer of reality and making it visible. And on a physical level, performance is a chance for me to direct the gaze: in everyday life, many gazes are directed at me and I have no control over them. On stage, I get to decide what they see. It’s a kind of power—I’m not sure whether it’s positive or not—but I enjoy it. I see performance as a real opportunity to decide where to set boundaries, to assert oneself, to self-affirm outside of the external world’s desire for possession.