Newport-based creative Andrew Ogun, who readers may also know for his hip-hop career and his Agent For Change role at Arts Wales – releases his debut poetry collection Slingshot next month. Hari Berrow talks to him about the book and the inspiration behind his work.
Andrew Ogun’s Slingshot is a powerful exploration of identity and selfhood in all its forms. The title of the poetry collection, Ogun’s first after several years rapping on the south Wales scene, reflects his experiences with both mental health difficulties and navigating the wider difficulties of life.
“There was a period of time when I was going through some hardships and I was thinking of moving back to my family home, but I was really tossing and turning on the decision; I’ve been out of that house for eight years now, so it felt like a regression,” Ogun explains. “It felt like I was conceding to life in some type of way. I remember expressing this to one of my friends – I was really going through it in myself, and he was like, ‘No no, you can’t look at it as a step back. You have to look at it as a slingshot. You’re going back to move forward.’
“It really stuck with me – that concept of a slingshot, that going back to go forward in the tension – and it kept ringing in my head. As soon as he said it, I was like, this is what we’re going to call the collection. So I had the name before I had any of the poems!”
A stark and honest reflection on his experiences, the collection opens with Suicide Note, a poem looking back on the night Ogun contemplated ending his life. “I really needed to reckon with myself with these poems, and really be comfortable with portraying and expressing myself in a light that is not usual for me, or that people may not associate with me. It was a conscious decision to really start the collection with Suicide Note; I really wrestled with the idea of even having that poem in the collection, but then it was like, ‘no – we have to start here, this is the basis.’ A lot of it came from real life, my experiences, drawing on my own personal history.”
A series of poems at the heart of the collection explores Ogun’s different names. “We all know that there’s a lot of power in your name. I’m half-Nigerian, half-Togolese, and in a lot of these African cultures names are very significant things. So, for me, my name and the way it’s used has always been fascinating. It’s no wonder I’ve always had these conflicting identities and feelings and ambivalences; it was one of the first ideas I had for the collection.
“My mother would always call me by my Italian name, Andrea – that poem is really the closest to me and my family, and the people who are in my inner circle. My dad would call me Arafat, which is my Muslim name. And then there’s Andrew, which is my Anglicised British name that we changed when we moved here. Then there’s Ogun, which is my surname but also my artist’s name. I thought it was a way to introduce all these tensions and explore all the things and the pressures that come with each name.”
Ogun doesn’t mind if audiences love or hate the work, as long as they feel something. “If the reader can get anything, positive or negative, and just sparks some kind of emotion in a world that tends to numb that or dull that or fragment that experience, then I think I’ve done my job as an artist.” He smiles. “My job is to evoke something from you, and that’s about it. Other than that? I guess it’s just wait and see.”
Slingshot by Andrew Ogun is published on Thurs 3 Oct via Lucent Dreaming. Price: £10. Info: here
A launch event takes place that evening at Rhostio in Cardiff. Admission: FREE. Info: here
words HARI BERROW
