Rakaya leaves the audience in awe with her heart-touching poems that inspire them to believe in themselves.
By Kamila Sukhanova
The courtyard of St. James’s Church attracted visitors and passersby from the whole Picadilly with its multiple beautiful voices performing that day. The gospel choir, or as they call themselves, ‘Soul at Saint James’, prepared the program by combining their songs with a poetry reading.
After each poem, there were seconds of silence as a way to comprehend what was heard that made the courtyard feel the light not only from the sun but from the author as well.
When the applause began to burst, you couldn’t help but look at the crowd and see how it felt like the world had stopped for a minute in their eyes. There was only them in the presence of Rakaya Fetuga, the person behind those touching poems.
“When you speak about things that are personal to you, you’re able to connect to the universal human experience that joins everyone”
Rakaya was raised in an artistic family. With her father being a musician, she was always around him when he would work as a DJ and produce multiple beats. It was one of those creative jam sessions when at that time, a three-year-old girl was singing and making up lyrics to her father’s songs.
Though poetry wasn’t always in her life, it did start with love towards words and playing around with them. As Rakaya would fall into an imaginary world of books, she felt the need to create one by writing fictional stories and then doing the storytelling to her friends. The more she did that, the more she got better at it.
Shaking hands, multiple ‘what ifs running in the mind, and the whole body freezing from feeling nervous are common symptoms of performing in front of people for the first time.
During her teens, Rakaya was a part of the youth theatre, where she participated in plays and shared the stage with a group of drama students.
When she started attending events like an open mic to hear other artists, it inspired her to share her work as well. However, performing alone is quite a different experience, especially after getting used to having the whole drama cohort by your side on the stage.
Playing a character or being someone else in the performance is not as personal as having something that you had written shared with people. “Showing my vulnerability through poetry, I think, was quite scary at the beginning”, said Fetuga.
Coming from a Muslim background, Rakaya looked after other Muslim artists, who inspired her to try and bring every part of herself into the art. She was able to include things like gender, religion, ethnicity, and anything about who she is and not have them contradict her art.
“I’ve got a friend called Sukina Noor, who’s a poet. She studied poetry as healing for, like, mental health and trauma, and she showed me that it definitely could be a way to heal”
For Rakaya, poetry is especially a great space to do that as it goes hand in hand with spiritual topics. It allows us to explore deeper things that we most likely wouldn’t bring into everyday conversation.
There is no more magical moment during live poetry than having everyone’s attention and focus drawn to one thing. Fetuga shares,
“I’ve even had experiences where I’ve been performing poetry, and then looking at someone’s expression in the audience made me feel emotional and made me want to cry as well”
It would have been probably hundreds of times already reading and seeing these words that she has written. However, that exact moment of vulnerability, where she gives energy to the listeners through her poems, and they receive it with something changing in their eyes, makes it moving.
Especially living in London, where everyone gets on the train with thousands of people, and no one looks each other in the eye, would raise a question of how it is even possible to shake up the crowd. But, “when you speak about things that are personal to you, you’re able to connect to the universal human experience that joins everyone,” said Rakaya.
Writing is always going to be a companion for Rakaya during her trip called life. Though it wouldn’t be only poems all the time. The poet is focused on writing her first novel. In a couple of years, we will witness the world discovering books by Rakaya Fetuga that would allow them to explore the magic behind her poems.