Songbook
26 september 2024

Time: 26 September, 19:00 - 20:00
Place: Meditation Room, Konsthall C
“We know where we came from. We came on boats, on planes, with passports and on the back of trucks. We worked three jobs and sent the money back home. We brought our motherland to life in our kitchens, our bedrooms, our churches, our songs, our dance, our sex, our pidgin, our patois…”
Joshua Idehen’s collected works has been a long time coming. Songbook comprises verses from Mercury-nominated and MOBO-winning albums by Sons of Kemet and The Comet Is Coming, alongside watershed poems of spoken word legend, newly captured in book form. From Poejazzi and Benin City to a string of supreme collaborations, Idehen’s impact resonates far and wide across the landscapes of poetry and jazz/electronica. Cross-examining colonialism, masculinity, mental health and ways of healing, his writing is an essential provocation, a diasporic dance, a comedy roast, an intervention, a cannonball from which no one is safe, least of all himself.