CNN meets inspirational poet Wana Udobang

By Olubukola Afolabi
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Wana UdobangPhoto credit: Obi Ifejika

On this week’s episode of African Voices, CNN International meets Nigerian poet Wana Udobang who shows the programme how the streets of Lagos inspire the work she does.

Udobang explains to the programme how poetry helped her express herself during hardships she faced. She says: “What inspired me to become a poet, I think it started… as a child, I was going through a lot of difficulty with my parents getting divorced and then general teenage angst. And for some weird reason, I've found that just writing them down kind of helped… poetry for me was catharsis and therapy… And I found that every single time I wrote something down, it just released me in some way, shape or form.”

Udobang didn’t realise she was writing poetry until it was pointed out by her best friend. She explains: “My best friend saw a couple of things I had written and said, ‘Dude, this is like poetic’... It just planted the seeds of something inside me. And she bought me a journal, so I had to stop writing on scraps of paper. I think those were like the early beginnings of it. And I became more conscious of the idea of poetry.”

While at university in the UK, Udobang was inspired to transform her poetry into a performance. She tells African Voices: “It was my second year at University… I was watching stuff on the internet. And then I was on YouTube and then this lady comes up called Bassey Ikpi. She's Nigerian, and she does this poem called homeward. So, I think that moment like watching her like really connect, and it was like, oh, wow, like, so you can write stuff and you can perform.”

Udobang’s success has seen her perform at different arts festivals around the world and seen her become a recognised name in the spoken word community. However, there’s also a part of the poet who believed her skills were written in fate. She says: “My full name is Wana Abbasi which means the light of God. There's this thing that Africans, you know, say a lot about your name and how it's tied in with your destiny and you know who it is that you're going to become. I really do feel like a strong sense of connection with my name. I feel like the work I've always done has always been about light either as even as a character, my personality, about bringing light to a space.”

For Udobang, the best place for a poet to be is in Lagos: “I think I feel like if you're an artist or you’re a writer especially Lagos is definitely one of the ultimate spaces to be in. And the reason is because Lagos is an assault on the senses. I always say I love the city so much. It is it is an assault in that sense it is [a] theater, life theatre… I mean, there's just storytelling stories and storytelling is just breathing around you.”

On her future, Udobang tells CNN how she is currently working on her third album and hopes to continue being successful: “I am currently writing material for my third album. I have a working title for this third one, but I think it's going to be called something like transitions. I'm trying to explore a lot of the themes. I'm looking at exploring generational relationships between mothers and daughters. I also have an interview series, which I run where I interviewed artists… I call them like my friends and members of my artistic community and it's a space for them to share their work share their process… because I think that our stories shouldn't be erased.”

African Voicesis sponsored by Globacom

African Voices airs Friday 19thApril at 1130 WAST on CNN International.

The show also airs at the following times:
Saturday 20th April 0130 WAST, 1330 WAST and 1730 WAST

Sunday 21st April at 0500 WAST, 1030 WAST and 2100 WAST

Monday 22nd April at 0630 WAST
Wednesday 24th April at 1230 WAST