Inua Ellams: Voice of progress

“Jeanette Winterson said there’s no such thing as autobiography; there’s only art and lies,” muses Inua Ellams in his soft, pensive West African lilt. “So 80 per cent is factual and 20 per cent is fictional – but it’s all based on my life. It’s a coming-of-age story.” If 24 seems a young age to be penning one’s memoirs, the performance poet at least seems to have given The 14th Tale—his solo debut at this year’s Fringe—more thought than have the young sportsmen and singers currently cluttering the nation’s bookshelves.

Now a leading figure in London’s thriving spoken word scene, Ellams has seen all manner of changes since his birth to a middle-class Nigerian family in 1984. A boisterous African childhood lasted until the age of 11, when the increasingly dangerous political climate in Nigeria and a London job opening for his father combined to bring the family to Britain.

“Arriving here was definitely a culture shock,” Ellams recalls. “I remember the first time someone was outwardly racist towards me. I had never come across such a thing before, so I didn’t know this term. People said, ‘You shouldn’t take that,’ and I said: ‘Take what? What’s happened?’”

Ellams’s affectionate characterisation of this rough treatment—“just boys fooling around”—reflects an enduring love of mischief that fits with the trope of the “trickster” figure so prominent in African oral traditions. “I’m from a long line of troublemakers,” he declares in the opening line of The 14th Tale – and it was this youthful cheek and impetuosity that first drew the young Ellams into the world of literature, shortly after moving to a suburb of Dublin at 15.

“There was this beautiful guy I grew up with called Stephen Devine,” laughs Ellams. “Stephen was as argumentative as I was; we were both nerds, we both wore glasses, both vaguely loved hip-hop. We would argue about the most inane things, not letting up for two hours non-stop. He was in my English, business and maths classes; we were top of the class in English. That’s when we really bonded—over language, over literature—and we spent the lesson pulling out the bawdier meanings behind Shakespeare’s lines, which always made the class laugh. Stephen always said I’d be a writer some day; and I never entertained the idea for a second. I still wanted to play basketball.

“And then in 2001 Stephen committed suicide over the summer holiday. One day he was there, and the other day he wasn’t. To this day I’ll never know why.”

Ellams’s breath catches. “It was disastrous for me. So I began writing – I guess not so much because I had any great pain to get off my chest, as because I’d lost the person I was most argumentative with.”

Ellams continued to experiment with language over the ensuing months, without ever viewing the results as poetry. Things moved up a gear during a busy week shortly after his return to London in 2003. On a recommendation from a friend, Ellams checked out a CD by legendary stage poet Saul Williams, and was spellbound from the first line of the classic ‘Ohm’. “Late one night I pressed play...and out of the darkness came this voice,” he recalls.

There followed a slightly less transcendent poetic experience, courtesy of Channel 5: “There was this poet called Jessica Holter, reading this poem into a microphone. She was part of this group called the Punany Poets. And behind her was this woman butt naked in a bathtub, with water cascading down her back – and I thought, ‘Damn, that’s poetry!’”

His interest piqued, a quick Google search had Ellams attending his first poetry event that weekend, at a bar near London’s National Portrait Gallery. “I just liked it, and I kept going there. I was so nervous the first time I read a poem, my hands were shaking,” he remembers. But the young wordsmith’s burgeoning talent was unmistakeable, and within two months he had been given a headline slot.

Ellams’s reputation and CV have since developed at a prodigious rate. With a well-received collection of poems, 2005’s Thirteen Fairy Negro Tales, already under his belt, special commissions from The Times and the BBC’s Politics Show reflect the poet’s now established status as a leader in his field. Yet he’s far from a household name: while London’s performance poetry scene is blossoming, it remains stubbornly under the mainstream radar.

“In America it’s huge, it’s massive,” says Ellams. “There are prime-time shows specifically dedicated to it. Barack Obama had a spoken word and music night at the White House.” So why hasn’t the UK shown similar enthusiasm for ‘live literature’?

“In Britain, knowledge and education was guarded, and hidden, and this was how the ruling class kept it from the people,” replies Ellams. “With more people going to university, people—especially the working classes—have got a better grasp of English. Those in power, this is something they are at odds with, because as there are more people who are more eloquent...their power is loosened, and people can control their lives more.”

It’s a somewhat rambling hypothesis; Gordon Brown’s fiercest critic would struggle to nail his government for actively undermining British stage poetry. Ellams is far more convincing on the more pressing issue of underachievement by black boys in Britain’s inner cities – an issue that he has attempted to address, through voluntary teaching in deprived areas of London. “It’s to do with teaching about identity, about voice. A kid I was teaching yesterday – I saw him transformed over the four days I worked with him.

“I think a lot of the problems black boys go through are to do with how black men are portrayed in the media. A generation of boys growing up with all that around them, believing black figures to be against society, backward. At some subconscious level all of this registers, and black boys think: ‘There’s no point going to university, I’m gonna fail anyway; I’m a bad guy.’”

Ellams himself continues to dodge pigeonholes and stereotypes as deftly as one would expect of a man who lists his two greatest influences as John Keats and Mos Def, and who enjoys a successful second career in graphic art. Yet there’s no sign of existential crisis. “I love being a Nigerian in the UK,” he insists; “I love what it means. I love the battles that come with that, and my voice specifically makes sense here more than in any other part of the world.”

The 14th Tale does full justice to the richness of Ellams’s cultural heritage, with soaring Shakespearean cadences accompanying an exuberant physical presence that evokes the land of his birth. And the hours spent pondering his past appear to have given Ellams plenty to chew on where his future’s concerned.

“There’s a saying I like: ‘As soon as something hits the mainstream, it’s watered down.’ If ever I was to write for a mass audience, I’d need to use very general forms, very simple references in my work. And I’m not yet ready to do that.

“When I first began writing,” he continues, “I’d write poems so dense that only I understood what they meant. And a lot of the time I didn’t care – it was just all about my self-expression. But since then I’ve grown wiser. It’s about knowing and mastering oneself, so when you do have to show off, the blows are precise, and you’re there and in control of it.”

Introvert and show-off; literary geek and hip-hop scenester – Ellams looks set for a long career mining his rich stock of internal contradictions. “You can imagine a prehistoric man trying to describe a prehistoric sunset to his girlfriend in a cave,” he murmurs. “That was a poem, that first attempt at recreating our life, our environment, in words. There’s poetry and structure in everything, regardless of whether you see it.”