Female slam poets of francophone Africa: spirited words for social change

Abstract

Slam poets in Africa are part of an emerging social movement. In this article, the focus is on women in this upcoming slam movement in francophone Africa. For these women, slam has meant a change in their lives as they have found words to describe difficult experiences that were previously shrouded in silence. Their words, performances and engaged actions are developing into a body of popular knowledge that questions the status quo and relates to the ‘emerging consciousness’ in many African urban societies of unequal, often gendered, power relations. The women who engage in slam have thus become a voice for the emancipation of women in general.

Résumé

En Afrique, les poètes de slam font partie d'un mouvement social émergent. Cet article s'intéresse aux femmes de ce mouvement slam en plein essor en Afrique francophone. Le slam a signifié un changement dans la vie de ces femmes qui ont trouvé, avec lui, des mots pour décrire des expériences difficiles jusqu'alors enveloppées dans le silence. Les mots, les représentations et les actions engagées de ces femmes se constituent en un corpus de connaissances populaires qui remet en cause le statu quo et se rapporte à la « conscience émergente » dans de nombreuses sociétés urbaines africaines aux relations de pouvoir inégales et souvent genrées. Les femmes qui s'adonnent au slam sont ainsi devenues une voix de l’émancipation des femmes en général.

Prelude

If I write, it is to say: Hey, there is a problem. Because people are often not even aware that there is this problem!¹

Slam poetry is a relatively new art form in Africa, as is research on slam poetry in francophone Africa. Slam poetry is often defined as competitive urban poetry and has its place in urban popular culture. From its beginnings, slam has been practised by both women and men, unlike the general hip-hop scene, where men dominate and in which misogynous texts are common (Charry 2012; Clark 2012). The poetry, like any other form of art, addresses numerous themes. The slameuses (female slam poets) we have been following since 2016 relate personal experiences of growing up in their home countries, with particular emphasis on social and political dynamics. These women are part of the emerging youth culture in West and Central Africa, where youth – who make up more than 50 per cent of the population – are gaining a voice. Urban art forms, such as hip-hop culture, have played an important role in these emerging youth movements (Clark and Koster 2014). Slam poetry is not always about societal engagement or protest, but in West and Central Africa such societal engagement appears to be very important for slam poets.

In this article, we explore female slam poets as pioneers in the search for a voice in public debates. We are interested in seeing how they engage with ‘emerging consciousness’ and with ‘further[ing] the cause of the people by opening their eyes to their objective situation in society’ (Barber 1987: 7). We are also curious to understand whether and how the women create such consciousness through their texts and performances. We attempt to answer these questions through the work of two young slameuses: Djemi Djiraibe from Chad and Mariusca Moukengue from Congo-Brazzaville. They are inspired by their elder sisters Amee, Lydol and Malika, who represent the first generation of slameuses in francophone Africa. Djemi and Mariusca are both relatively new to the slam scene, active since 2016 and 2018 respectively. We situate their work and art in the growing slam scene in francophone Africa and discuss it in relation to their personal trajectories and life choices. Their texts not only provide important insights into the role of young women in the growing slam network, but also reveal the debates in urban African societies that these texts engender about the inequalities women encounter and their wish for change.

A note on ‘field’ and method

We were introduced to the world of slam poetry in francophone Africa by Didier Lalaye, aka Croquemort, a Chadian slam artist and organizer of slam poetry events, with whom we collaborated in a research project (De Bruijn and Lalaye 2016; De Bruijn 2017). He is one of the initiators of the slam movement, which was launched from his festival N'Djam s'enflamme en slam in N'Djamena, Chad. Since 2016, we have collaborated in the mounting of these slam festivals through our organization Voice4Thought.² It was at these festivals that we met the women presented in this article. The most recent festival in N'Djamena, in November 2019, was devoted to women in slam and was entitled Slam et Eve: le slam au féminin. During this festival, the idea was born for a book on women in this rapidly developing artistic genre in Africa. From the start of this writing project we have had the full collaboration of the artists, who allowed us into their worlds and who became co-writers of this slam ethnography and biography. Our exchanges with these women have continued via WhatsApp and email since our last physical meetings in November 2019.

The festivals and the organization around slam can be seen as one of the worlds in which these slam poets live and work; hence, it is an important field site for the ethnography of slam. We were able to grasp this world especially during the Coupe d'Afrique de Slam Poetry (CASP) in November 2018 in N'Djamena and during the Slam et Eve festival in November 2019. Our engagement with slam also takes place in the virtual world, as social media have been important outlets for slam poets to share their work beyond annual festivals and to stay connected with other slam poets and international audiences. Furthermore, the field of such ethnography consists of the urban setting where these women live and work. We were introduced to these life worlds when we met the slam poets we present in this article in their respective environments: urban Chad, urban Côte d'Ivoire and urban Cameroon. The environment that we do not know from experience is urban Congo-Brazzaville. These urban spaces have their own cultural, historical and political contexts; however, parallels can be drawn between the growing role of slam poetry and urban culture festivals, and we see a specific relationship with the francophone African network in which the art of slam is developing. This orientation is not unique to slam poetry, as francophone and anglophone ‘zones of culture’ (Newell 2006: 21) remain rather distinct in postcolonial Africa.

French is the working language for these women, and they are oriented to the francophone world. The financial and logistic support and initiatives of the Instituts Français in the different countries, as well as coverage and awards organized by the French international radio station RFI, partly shape and maintain this orientation. This does not exclude the fact that the artists also perform in other languages, but French remains dominant. Slam is a textual art, though not only textual. The performance of poems is central to the art, and different forms of performance are debated and tried out in the slam scene. Performances vary from presentations of poems a cappella to poems embedded in dance and music. Increasingly, slam poets also produce video clips that they publish on social media. For this reason, a publication about slam cannot be in written words only; this article is therefore accompanied by some visual material, which was produced by Denis Gueipeur and Annour Halal, both young Chadian photographers and filmmakers, Mette van Dijk, a Dutch art student, and Sjoerd Sijsma, a Dutch cineaste and colleague in Voice4Thought. The material was produced during the CASP and Slam et Eve festivals. Mette van Dijk and Sjoerd Sijsma made the selections of the film material that we present with this article.

Our approach in this research on the world of slam combines an ethnographic and descriptive method with a method that can be described as ‘biographies in context’ (see De Bruijn 2017), where we try to understand the itineraries of the young women in relation to their personal experiences and the environments in which they live and grew up. A biography is a way to link lives to social processes that can stand both for the specific individual and for the world in which he or she lives (Apitzsch and Siouti 2007). The sketches of Djemi and Mariusca's biographies, their experiences and the way in which slam has become their art form therefore reveal more than just these personal lives; they also represent lines of social development of youth in urban Africa. We will situate the slameuses in their specific personal histories and in the francophone Africa slam network that has also become their world.

Slam poetry: an emerging literary genre in West and Central Africa

Slam poetry is art in motion. Slam poets deliver their texts in live performances, and the rapid growth of international slam poetry festivals in Africa in the last decade has added to the mobility of the art. More figuratively, their words move people, providing inspiration and persuasion. Slam poetry first emerged in the 1980s in Chicago in the USA. Since its inception, it has provided opportunities for marginalized communities, especially young people, to organize slam poetry events and express their ideas and feelings of exclusion (Muhammad and Gonzalez 2016; Sorensen 2016). The genre is characterized by its freedom, both in its textual and performance qualities.

A number of elements characterize slam poetry and distinguish it from other, related art forms such as hip-hop and rap. Slam is characterized by its poetry, performance, elements of competition, audience interaction and sense of community. Interaction with and the effect on the audience at a slam performance are fundamental to the art. Slam competitions have a few basic rules, which include that a performance should last three minutes (with a maximum of ten additional seconds) and that the work performed be the artist's own (Smith and Kraynak 2009). However, as slam poets perform outside this competition format during concerts, festivals and on television shows, they are free to exceed this three-minute limit. Writing and performance do not follow clear scripts, but most slam poets write their texts before they perform them, whether the writing be on paper or in their heads. It is also not uncommon for texts to be adjusted over time, or as they are performed for different audiences, or when new ideas and ways to express these ideas have emerged for the artist (for this process, see one of Amee's texts, Mutilée, in Oudenhuijsen 2021). However, with the development of the genre and with the availability of new technologies, slam poets increasingly record their texts in studios and some even produce video clips. This tends to give a more definitive form to their texts.

Slam poetry originally takes the form of a competition, but a slam event is also a place where the texts that the poets present are part of a public debate: ‘slam poetry can be a purposeful genre for youth to interrogate the social times and violence in the world’ (Muhammad and Gonzalez 2016: 443). Slam poets respond to and draw attention to social injustices, as well as being agents for self-empowerment and self-determination (Somers-Willett 2009). At the same time, these authors see slam poetry as identity poetry: key to slam performances is the personal experience that mediates the issues addressed (ibid.; Muhammad and Gonzalez 2016; Bishop 2019).

Slam poetry is relatively new to francophone Africa. It emerged in the first decade of this century and is developing rapidly. However, slam also builds on long histories of oral art forms. Africa is often portrayed as the continent where oral literature is the dominant genre (Finnegan 2012), but many parts of the continent also know centuries-old traditions of Islamic literacy, both in Arabic and in African languages written using Arabic script (Nobili and Brigaglia 2017). Furthermore, oral and written texts have a history of relationality, with texts that are written explicitly for oral performances (see Raia 2020 on such poetry on the Swahili coast). The importance of griots (praise singers, musicians and transmitters of collective memory) in West Africa has provided fertile ground for the development of slam poetry in the region. When we asked Mariusca where she situated slam poetry, she referred to griots in addition to other lyrical and textual genres:

Slam is a crossroads art. In Africa, it comes from the language of the griots. It also has its roots in classical poetry. This art of speech is intended to urbanize, to dust off the classical poetry that is buried in books.³

In the festivals we participated in, women took a prominent role. Slam poetry is not the only oral art form where this is the case: African narratives, praise songs and oral traditions are often performed by women. For example, Hausa women have long been storytellers in northern Nigeria (Aliyu 1997); Tamacheq women in the Sahara are guardians of poetry in their society (Rasmussen 2003); and in the contemporary music scenes, women are no longer an exception. Djemi and Mariusca described the nature of slam poetry as follows:

Mariusca: In Africa, slam is much more than an art. It's a state of mind, a movement of thought that conveys and defends universal values: freedom, peace, equality, democracy.⁴

Djemi: Here in Chad, slam is in a literary field of demand! This can be explained by the committed nature of the first recorded slam and other social events! Slam in Chad is part of committed literature; it's a committed art. The slam movement came about in the years 2005–2006–2007 if we refer to the first recorded slam. We don't know when it was born exactly!⁵

In West and Central Africa, slam poetry is a form of popular art that has predominantly been taken up by the youth. It gives a voice to people who remain unheard in many more formally organized spaces of expression. It works bottom-up, with people organizing slam evenings in the streets, in bars, and in community centres. Today, such informal, low-key slam poetry events exist side by side with international festivals and international media coverage by RFI and the BBC. This international character of the art is also present in the sources of inspiration of the young artists. Djemi and Mariusca both referred to Croquemort as an example, as have the other slameuses whom we interviewed. They also draw inspiration from French slam poets, among whom the most frequently mentioned is Grand Corps Malade.

Why slam poetry is on the rise in these parts of Africa is difficult to pinpoint. As Djemi says, it is not fully clear when the slam genre as we observe it now took off in francophone Africa. She refers to the first slams recorded in Chad around 2005–07, which were recordings of Croquemort, who released his first single in 2006. We entered the slam poetry scene in March 2014. This is when Mirjam met Didier Lalaye, aka Croquemort, in N'Djamena. At that time he was preparing the second edition of his festival N'Djam s'enflamme en slam. It was around the same time that Aziz Siten'k, a Malian slam poet, started his slam and humour festival in Mali. A few years later, slam poets in Niger, Burkina Faso and Côte d'Ivoire had all started organizing slam events.

This is also the period that saw the advancement of mobile telephones and social media in West and Central Africa, and these technologies have been very important for the emergence of a community of slam poets in the region. The artists exchange their work on social media and in a variety of WhatsApp groups, and they disseminate their texts in the form of short clips on Facebook and WhatsApp. This has certainly enlarged the visibility of the art and the possibility for the organization and creation of the slam scene as a network of young people who inspire each other. Such developments have also expanded access to international funding, which in turn has facilitated the rapid development of festivals in the region.

Slam pioneers⁶

One of the first female slam poets in francophone Africa was Amee, from Côte d'Ivoire, who, since 2010, has become known in West Africa and to a limited extent in Europe, being invited to festivals in Belgium and the Netherlands. A legal expert by training and a communications expert by profession, she has come to gradually devote more time to slam poetry over the years. Similar to other accomplished slam poets, such as Lydol from Cameroon and Malika from Burkina Faso, she told us that, for her, the writing was her outlet, and slam performances helped her to voice her ideas in front of an audience.

Lydol, Malika and Amee seem to share a similar trajectory. They come from relatively well-off families. Today, they all have good jobs, and this financial independence enables them to invest time in their art. All three are unmarried, between twenty-six and thirty-five years old at the time of writing. They are on good terms with their parents, who support their engagement with their art. A good education was a priority for their parents; as long as they performed well at school and later at university, they were not discouraged from engaging with slam poetry. Slam poetry's positioning in between urban cultures and intellectual, literary genres has enabled women to enter the scene often without too much objection from parents and family members. In these poets’ stories and memories, their parents discovered the world of slam poetry as the women developed their art. As slameuses, they found a balance between being public women voicing opinions and the mores of their families and cultures.

The texts the slameuses produce often relate to the position of women in their societies, and they contain messages for other girls and women who may not have the same ability to voice their discontent.⁷ All three women are active in social projects that consider the education of girls through slam, through which they hope to give this same opportunity to other girls and women to voice their opinions. Their texts and social projects reveal a clear engagement with the emancipation of women.

We asked the poets to send us examples of their texts. All of the texts reveal a mastery of stylistic devices such as puns, repetitions and slogans that amplify their messages. Malika sent us her text ‘Allez leur dire’,⁸ in which she describes the bravery women need to choose to become an artist. She explains the hard work required, as well as a certain defiance of societal expectations against a woman becoming an artist (or whatever other dream she may have):

Allez leur dire, que la route est longue,

mais Inshallah un jour on pourra toucher les cieux ⁹

Amee sent us her text ‘Adam et Eve’,¹⁰ in which she takes a stance against the use of the biblical reference to Adam and Eve that is often used to show women's inferiority:

Nous nous sommes laissées intimider par leur apparente vigueur

Nous les avons laissé parler sans jamais leur en tenir rigueur ¹¹

This text reminds us of what she exclaims during one of our interviews: ‘Art makes us a little rebellious. We have guts … by facing the look of others, so we are not afraid.’¹² The rebellion of these three women has transformed them into stars on stage. And although they are questioning the boundaries of how a decent woman is supposed to behave, they have been able to do this in such a way that the larger public accepts and embraces them. Their texts definitely speak from a personal background and experience, but they also send a broader message to the outside world. And with these texts they speak to an emerging discourse of urban women who are increasingly standing up for their rights.

Mariusca and Djemi are part of the network of these young urban women. Both mention Amee, Malika and Lydol as inspirations for their art, despite having grown up with different, and in many ways more challenging, backgrounds.

Slam et Eve: learning and networking

When we began to interact with the slam scene in 2014, female slam poets were still a minority. This has changed over the years. The fact that the 2019 edition of the yearly N'Djam s'enflamme en slam festival was devoted to female slam poets reveals the ascent of women in the slam scene. Fewer funds were gathered than in previous years, so the festival was a small one, but the smaller scale created a close-knit environment in which we were integrated as organizers and as writers of these women's slam stories. It gave us greater insight into the working of the slam movement and the role of women within it.

Some of the women had not met before, at least not face to face. They knew each other well, however, through the multiple Facebook exchanges they had been having over the years. Amee, the most experienced slameuse present at the festival, said that, although she had never met most of these women in person, she felt strongly that she knew them well. This greatly enhanced the integration during the week of the festival. In between festival activities, the women spent a lot of time together in their hotel rooms, and it was during such moments that they shared experiences and advice with regard to challenges they shared relating to their engagement in slam.

We organized a focus group discussion with the aim to come up with some key themes that we could highlight in the above-mentioned book about female slam poets. This discussion quickly turned into a very personal, emotional and intimate sharing of experiences with sexual violence. It was extraordinary to see how the women willingly shared their stories, especially considering the fact that this was their first time together. The festival turned out to be a bonding event that would continue after the festival in the various WhatsApp groups of which the women are part: with other female slam poets; with their male compatriots; and in both French and English, despite linguistic challenges. They are also active on their Facebook and Instagram pages, where they share new texts, performances and projects. Other women who could not make it to the festival were present via these media, so the festival was mediatized far beyond N'Djamena.

Women are increasingly visible and present in slam poetry in francophone Africa, and the emergence of particular women's slam events has facilitated the creation of a network of female slam poets. However, female slam poets also participate in other, overlapping networks with other (male) poets. The men's work is much less concerned with gender (in)equalities, but often it is just as interested in social critique as the women's slam poetry. A slam poet such as Croquemort from Chad is known for his outspoken political critique, commenting extensively on the injustices and neglect that Chadians experience as a result of a succession of repressive regimes.

Slamtherapy¹³

Slam et Eve marked an important development in the slam movement in francophone Africa. First, it showed that women today are an indispensable part of the scene. Second, with the appearance of a larger number of women, the approach to slam and gender issues has diversified. In a way, it seems as if the women who entered the scene a couple of years after the pioneers – Lydol, Amee and Malika – have taken up the message of these three women in reflecting on their positions in society. For many of the more recently arrived women on the slam scene, slam seems to be a way of ‘transforming my pain into words’.¹⁴ These are the words of Fatine Moubsit, a Moroccan slam poet and the Moroccan ambassador of slam for the CASP. For her, slam poetry has been a way to free herself psychologically from the pain she endures from her continuous struggle with cancer. Lydol similarly emphasizes the therapeutic working of slam poetry: she named her first album Slamthérapie. For these women, slam is the medium through which they translate their everyday experiences of living as a woman in their respective societies.

Mariusca¹⁵

Mariusca Moukengue is a twenty-six-year-old slam poet from Congo-Brazzaville. When we spoke to her in November 2019 in N'Djamena, she described herself as a timid, introverted girl who quickly matured due to her parents’ divorce when she was eleven years old. Her discovery of slam led to a release of the heavy burden she felt from looking after her younger siblings and managing family tensions resulting from the divorce. The second civil war fought in Congo-Brazzaville, between June 1997 and December 1999 (a first civil war was fought in 1993–94), had also had an impact on Mariusca, who had been separated from her parents at a very young age when a paternal aunt had come to fetch her to flee the war.

Before encountering the art of slam poetry in 2015, she had tried theatre, but she had felt too constrained by the rules that theatre prescribed for her expression. Slam poetry, on the other hand, has helped her to ‘transcend not only my family situation, my social situation … but in addition, slam has really given me a place in this life. Slam has made me feel human.’¹⁶

Today, Mariusca has developed into an engaged slameuse in her society, as becomes clear through her social projects, for which she is able to find funding. Her most recent project is Slamunité, where she works with young children on their ability to shape and voice their ideas through slam.¹⁷

Mariusca's text ‘Espoir’ (Hope), which we present below, was written in the light of these personal experiences. The end of the text hints at this: although ‘slam’ is a very common way to end one's slam performance, Mariusca ends her text with ‘Merci slam’ (Thank you, slam), indicating that slam for her is the hope that she describes in the text. When we interviewed Mariusca in November 2019 during Slam et Eve, she presented herself as a ‘slamheureuse’ rather than as a ‘slameuse’, ‘because slam made me happy – it gave me a life to my life’.¹⁸

So when she starts her text with a list of endings and emptiness, after which she describes what hope does in this context, it is not a coincidence that she mentions the ‘sparrow [that] loses its feathers’.¹⁹ In our interview, she described herself as this ‘bird lost in nature, not knowing in which tree to choose to spend the night’.²⁰ Having experienced both war and her parents’ divorce at a young age, her childhood had been far from carefree. For a long time she felt uprooted, and she explains that she plunged into depression. As a teenager she became very unsociable and created her own inner world. In this world, she wrote texts and poems, strictly personal: ‘I wrote as therapy, because it was the only way to free myself. I was really afraid of people, of others … I sought refuge in my writing.’²¹

This was before she discovered slam poetry in 2015. She attended a live event and was deeply moved by the performance of an artist named Prodige Eveil. She approached him after his appearance, and he explained to her that he had performed slam poetry. She asked him: ‘Can you teach me to be free like you?’²² He suggested she send him her texts. He noticed the poignancy in her texts, and he encouraged her to try to perform one of her texts on stage. She hesitated for a while, afraid of people's response. She first performed on stage in 2016 at the Institut Français in Brazzaville. After the discovery of slam poetry for her as a form of personal liberation, Mariusca also became aware of the international scene that goes with it, and her talent was discovered by other slam poets. She started performing at festivals in West and Central Africa, and her project Slamunité was received with enthusiasm and international and national funding. Mariusca has stopped pursuing her academic studies (for the moment) and now lives for her art and activism.

To Mariusca, slam has always represented hope: the hope to move people with her words and her emotions – and to personally be moved, freed from her own sorrows. In addition to allowing her to express her feelings and ideas, slam poetry has allowed Mariusca ‘to accept myself as a woman, as an individual. And furthermore, to heal my pain, my problems, my fears, my phobias, and my dreams as well.’²³ Slam poetry has been a healing practice. The text ‘Espoir’ that she shared captures this feeling.

Djemi

Djemi Djiraibe was twenty-one years old when we met her in N'Djamena during Slam et Eve in 2019.²⁴ Her name appeared in the Facebook posts of slam groups and at different festivals in the region. She is presented as a rising slam star. We also met her in 2018 during the CASP, where some of our friends were already talking about her. On stage she appears strong, furious at times. Off stage she is shy, very gentle and silent. Djemi's posture and gestures show that she has lived through pain and suffering. In the interviews we had with her, these sorrows came clearly to the fore. They echo the life of a young woman in a society where she feels imprisoned, and her relationships with the adult carers in her life can be called problematic.

Her parents, who both live in N'Djamena, divorced when Djemi was very young. Her mother was unable to take care of her and her father was apparently not interested. Djemi was fostered out to her aunt, a sister of her mother who lives in Burkina Faso with her husband. She remembers this period with mixed feelings. Her foster father gave her a lot of books to read, and through them she discovered a love of language and started writing herself. She does not say much about her foster mother, but she talks about her with affection. However, a violent event disturbed this idyll of a loving home with caring foster parents.

In her text ‘Rats-content-et-racontez’, Djemi refers to a girl confronted with sexual harassment. The text, which relates a very personal story, transcends her own identity: ‘When I write, I put myself in someone else's shoes. I never write about myself.’²⁵ Violence, sexual or otherwise, is unfortunately rather frequent against women in Chad. The increasing attention to violence against women is furthered by women such as Djemi, who decide to write about women's experiences of violence. In our interview with her in November 2019, she referred to the fact that people (adults, carers) see and perhaps talk about violence inflicted on women and children behind one's back, but they never talk about it to the girls themselves or reach out to help. ‘In Ouaga … they found out. They said nothing. Every day you hear about such cases.’²⁶

It was only in 2005, when she was nine years old, that she discovered that her real mother was the ‘aunt’ who visited them every summer. A period of unease and searching started. She became a recalcitrant young adolescent when her foster parents prevented her from going on a trip to N'Djamena to meet her biological father. This led to a rift between her and her foster father. In 2010, she finally went back to N'Djamena. Her return was primarily to get to know her father, but ‘my father has done everything to deceive me at every moment … I have never called him dad.’²⁷

While studying in Yaoundé a couple of years later, she encountered the slam poetry scene, although she hesitated over joining fully. She knew that an engagement with the world of the arts would not be accepted by her biological parents, and she personally did not feel attracted to urban poetry. This changed with her participation in the CASP in 2018 with some fringe performances during late-night concerts in the bars of N'Djamena: ‘After this it all went very fast … stage, stage, stage.’²⁸ Today, writing texts has become her profession, and she combines work for a number of communications enterprises with her poetry and slam performances. She currently (December 2020) works for a communications enterprise that collaborates with a number of NGOs in the country. Her most recent job was to write poetry texts in the context of the Global 16 Days Campaign against gender-based violence.²⁹ She was asked to work with the initiative after the Chadian NGO Voix de la Femme had seen her perform during the fête de la musique, an international music festival in June 2020 in N'Djamena. Performing slam poetry gives her an outlet for her drive to write, to liberate her thoughts. The artistic milieu, which was seen by her parents as the realm of bohemians and vagabonds, has now become her spiritual home.

In her text ‘Rats-content-et racontez’, Djemi describes a woman who has experienced deep lows and some highs, a woman who, despite all the norms of society, tries to stand up for herself. This woman is not respected, not even considered worthy, but she fights back. And, despite the difficulties, especially the sexual assaults and experiences of violence, she finds her way. The text criticizes those who judge too easily (les rats) and who (content: are happy to) talk behind people's backs.

Afterword and reflection

The slameuses have many exchanges with each other, and they draw inspiration, motivation and encouragement from one another. Festivals such as N'Djam s'enflamme en slam and the CASP have provided very important moments of connection and exchange between slam poets from different countries. However, their connection goes beyond such physical meetings: for many, long before they first met their fellow slam artists, when they shared the stage at such festivals, they had been following each other on social media. Many had already exchanged messages extensively with one another, and they continue to do so as they envision projects and productions together. Their close relationships are built on these years of exchange on social media, and they very quickly feel at ease with and able to trust each other. This allows for very deep and emotional conversations, as on the night when we organized the focus group discussion with the slameuses during Slam et Eve. In addition, the follow-up after the festival and the many exchanges that we have seen since on Facebook and WhatsApp show that these women have developed a shared language, one that may not be deliberately activist but that does address issues that are not yet publicly debated in their societies.

Many slameuses now use their art to develop projects and programmes with youth to teach them about the transformative capacity of slam poetry. Projects such as Mariusca's Slamunité teach youth to give words to their experiences and to share these with an audience. Slamunité promotes the art of slam poetry as a form of therapy.³⁰ Not all women who start to perform slam become known slam poets. Among the women we interviewed for this project, some have already left the scene and no longer perform on stage. But they all agreed that the use of words and being part of a collective with other slam poets helped them establish an identity and defend their choices in life. This liberating spirit is found in their texts, and it potentially has the power to change not only the poets themselves but society at large.

In conclusion, we return to the question that we put forward in the introduction to this article: whether and how slameuses contribute to an ‘emerging consciousness’ in their societies. At this stage of our research, we can only partly answer this question, and we can do so only on the basis of our interaction with the slameuses, as we did not interview the public. It is clear that, for the women we interviewed, being part of the slam scene and networks has helped them express and develop their thoughts, which, over the years, have grown into their own emerging consciousness of gendered inequalities in their social environments. Their texts, combined with their performances and social projects, aim to open up that consciousness to other women and girls in their societies. And this consciousness is probably primarily of their own inner strength and the possibility they have to take their lives into their own hands.