Our host Vick Hope is joined by anaiis.
Born in Toulouse, France, anaiis grew up on the move. She was raised between Dakar, Dublin, and California, eventually settling in London where she lives now. Influenced by the work of Black thinkers and artists like Ella Fitzgerald, James Baldwin, bell hooks, Alice Walker and more, anaiss makes lush, genre-fluid music that explores themes like belonging, connection and motherhood. In 2018, she released her debut single, called ‘Nina’, and since then anaiis’s career has soared, seeing her release multiple albums, and share a stage with the likes of Erykah Badu and Daniel Caesar. Last year she released the album Devotion and the Black Divine to critical acclaim, and this summer she announced a worldwide tour and put out two singles: ‘Sunshine’ and ‘P4P’, each representing joy and rage respectively, and marking a continuation of her creative journey.
Listen to the full episode here and read on to discover anaiss’s five most influential books by women.
‘I didn’t immediately come to this book. I was thinking about Angela Davis and some other books that were a part of my formative experience. But when this book re-emerged in my brain, I was like, wait, this is the book. There is no other book. This is the book. I think I read it maybe my early university years. I was living in New York at the time and I feel that this book was the first time that I read a story that so deeply reflected my own journey, like as just, you know, a black person who’s originally Senegalese, but born in France and grew up in America and grappling with identity and what it meant to be an outsider, but also an insider of blackness as well in America, and so I feel like she put words to things that I had experienced, but I hadn’t quite had the language for it before.’
‘You know, I just have so much respect and gratitude to Adrienne Marie Brown and their work. For me, I grew up being really connected to revolutionary thinkers and activists. Often it also came with a heaviness and a darkness and this kind of sense of carrying the world on our shoulders. And I think it also reflected in my music. So discovering this book, giving me, again, a different type of permission, permission to feel joy, permission to seek pleasure, you know, felt just so necessary, especially at the time in which I found it, which I think was around the pandemic. You know, sometimes it just feels like… it is so dark and for them, as people who are so involved and active, doing so much for change in this world, to then release a book like this meant a lot to me.’
‘I think it’s really unsettling [on the prescience of the book] because as you’re reading something that feels so real and so alive and where that journey goes I’m like I really hope we don’t keep aligning with this story, but at the same time maybe there are tools within this book that can help us visionaries and creatives, and anyone who reads the book is moved by it to think, well, how can I contribute towards a change, because she is giving us tools within this book, it’s not just the story.’
‘I think what’s really becoming evident is actually the shift that I’ve gone through as an artist in the last few years and how much I’ve had to create space and, again, centralising love as the main sort of focus in my work, and I think you know earlier when you mentioned this whole it’s not romance, I feel like when I first thought about love I saw it like almost purely as romance and I think especially in Soul and R&B music, I felt like a lot of the lyrics were always about love in that way and I had a resistance to that because of this activist spirit within me who was like, no, no, we don’t have time to talk about romance, we need to talk about these issues that are happening in the world and so it took me a while to circle back and and bell was definitely one of the most instrumental thinkers who helped me to recognise love as a different thing, and to really assert the importance of love through everything that we do and to see it with a wider lens. Obviously, she speaks about mothering. She speaks about friendships, she speaks about truth telling so it has completely reformed the way that I think about love.’
‘When I read this book, I kid you not, I just I bought like six or seven copies, I said it’s Christmas I sent them out to everybody who I felt really needed to read this book. I did read it in the last couple of years, it’s only been a recent discovery you know amidst what’s been happening in Palestine and I feel that it’s an important perspective because we are seeing so much just through the lens of social media and through the news channels, but the power of writing – I think this story is mostly fiction – but what it depicts and what it allows us to feel is so much deeper and more complex than what we can feel just from seeing images on the internet, and it really allows people to feel the generational journey and trauma and damage that communities are going through.’
