Tawahum Bige is a poet and spoken word artist with Lutselk’e Dene, Plains Cree, Hungarian, and British roots. Born and raised in Surrey, they have a BA in Creative Writing from KPU and have performed at spoken word festivals across the country. This January, he curated Poets+, a local collection of poems and artistic performances from poets of colour, in association with the Arts Council of New Westminster.
His debut collection of poetry, Cut to Fortress, will be published in late March 2022. They can be found on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.
How did you get into poetry and spoken word?
I came to creative writing after a family member had passed away and I was really deep in my grief. I had been taking IT in university up to that point, but I was just kind of digging myself further into a hole, separate from everything else, so I started taking all these different arts courses. Creative writing really appealed to me because it seemed to merge trauma healing with an artistic practice.
After a very difficult semester in one of my creative writing classes, I solely dedicated myself to my creative practice and my art form as a [way] to work on intergenerational healing.
One of my first poetry events that I had ever witnessed was at Kwantlen University called “Slamming the Binary” in 2014, and I just found it amazing how these artists created a world [where] the listener, just the person sitting in the room with them, could join them in their world. I always wanted to know how to make that happen.
Poetry became a beautiful way for me to tell my story and honor that story, especially as I build my skills up.
What do you think about audience engagement in spoken word poetry?
The context of the audience cannot be understated, and I did a lot of research on this when I was in my undergrad. From an Indigenous point of view, the storyteller and the listener of that story are in a constant context with each other, and that influences the entire meaning of any kind of performance.
So, I’ve always found myself very interested in what those different contexts between an audience and a performer can be. I honestly write a lot of land protection work in my art and to speak that directly to the audience is a very different feeling [from] stepping up onto a cafe stage somewhere, [which] is also very different from, say, a university auditorium or a street show.
They all have very different energies, very different audiences, and it’s a different story that I get to tell with all of them.
Can you tell me a little bit more about the collection of poets that you brought together to make Poets+?
Stephen O’Shea approached me just over a year ago to see what kind of ideas fellow artists in the community would have. I find that the magic of poetry come[s] alive when we realize how mixed of an art form it is – how it interacts with other art forms. So I named it Poets+ to note that it would be more than simply spoken word, and that these would be poets who have practices that go beyond poetry.
So you have Justin Percival, who’s also an amazing emerging hip hop artist and Indigenous person who’s been on many frontlines and is just a cool human being. His merging of music and hip hop with poetry is very influential to his style of storytelling.
And then you’ve got Tin Lorica, who is also a comedian, and will do these sets of comedy and poetry where they’re making everybody laugh, and then they … twist the knife real hard and they dig it in deep with their poetry, and it’s very influenced by their mode of comedy.
[There’s] Jillian Christmas, who’s been a front-runner organizer in the Vancouver scene. [She’s] an amazing poet who … brings in the musical, harmonious, one-person band energy, and mixes that with songwriting and poetry in a beautiful way.And then, of course, I’m a part of the show as well, and I’m somebody who’s done spoken word and poetry, but I’m also giving a set about what I have witnessed in land protection, as well as the music I’ve been working on now that very much merges hip hop with poetry.
Is there a topic or a theme that you would like to see talked about more in poetry? Or is there something that you tend to focus on that you don’t see occurring in other forms of art?
What I’m interested in is music approached from the side of poetry first. Poet musicians like Kae Tempest or Saul Williams go to music from the side of poetry. That’s how I approach music myself.
Songwriting is ultimately always poetry in some way, shape, or form, but to go to it from that side of poetry first is something I don’t see a whole ton of and I would love to see a whole lot more of.
I heard that you have a new poetry collection being published this year. Can you tell me a little bit more about that?
[Cut to Fortress is] so many poems collected from 2016 to about 2018, talking about everything personal and political in my life. Everything that shaped me to be who I am, as well as [the] worldview [it has] given me and how I apply that to a lot of what’s going on, especially around Indian country today and with Indigenous issues, decolonization, [and] resisting colonial occupation.
It’s a very politically charged collection of poetry. I’m very, very excited for it to be coming out this next month.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Image: Megan Naito
Danaye studies English and procrastination at UFV and is very passionate about the Oxford comma. She spends her days walking to campus from the free parking zones, writing novels she'll never finish, and pretending to know how to pronounce abominable. Once she graduates, she plans to adopt a cat.
