Q&A with artist-scholar Naila Keleta-Mae

18 November 2011 One Comment

Naila Keleta-Mae

By Samuel Getachew

With a newly minted PhD from York University and the position of assistant professor at the University of Waterloo to her resume – Naila Keleta-Mae is, as she describes herself, “an artist-scholar who creates, thinks and teaches from the space that the hypen in artist-scholar signals.”

Sway caught up with Dr. Naila Keleta-Mae a day after she defended her PhD dissertation entitled “(Re)positioning Myself: Female and Black in Canada”

You are expected to earn your PhD in a year. That is a huge achievement. Can you please share with us your academic journey so far?

I defended my PhD dissertation entitled “(Re)Positioning Myself: Female and Black in Canada” at York University yesterday, and my dissertation was accepted without revisions and nominated for two university-wide awards. So I actually just became Dr. Naila Keleta-Mae. It feels like a tremendous personal achievement, but when I think of the impact and importance of the support I received from family and friends when I started my PhD four years ago, finishing my PhD absolutely feels like a community achievement.

My academic journey has been somewhat unconventional. I did my undergraduate degree in Journalism and Spanish at Concordia University while performing spoken word, creating theater, and teaching creative writing in the community. A few years later, I did my MFA in Theater at York University because I wanted to enrich my artistic practice and expand my knowledge base as a scholar.

A few years after that I decided to do my PhD because I wanted to become a better writer and thinker. I also recently realized that I am an artist-scholar who creates, thinks and teaches from the space that the hyphen in artist-scholar signals.

Your recent poem – “memories five oh one“ – was commissioned by the Toronto Star and has had thousands of hits online. How did that come about?

I received an unexpected email one morning from a features editor at the Toronto Star asking me if I would accept a commission to write a poem on the 501 Streetcar that would be printed in the paper and that I would record as a video for the newspaper’s website.

The paper was featuring an in-depth story about the 501 Streetcar, one of the longest in the world, and thought it would be interesting to commission three poets to write three poems. I later found out that I was recommended to the editor by the poet Robert Priest.

For my research, I took the round trip three hour streetcar ride, read passenger reviews online, looked up the streetcar’s technical specifications, combed my memories, compiled my notes and wrote the poem. I have since received thoughtful emails from readers commenting on the poem. I doubt my poetry has ever had such a wide audience – I was told that the Toronto Star website receives 100 million hits per month.

You have worked in many diverse places such as in France, Japan, Portugal, South Africa, the USA and Canada. There has been much discussion in Canada about the lack of support of artists by our government. How true is that when you compare it to those countries?

I am not familiar, in a meaningful way, with the practices of government support in most of the countries I have worked in, other than Canada. My experience of public funding of the arts in Canada, on municipal, provincial and federal levels is that grants are very competitive and the task of the jurors who award funding is a complex and challenging one.

I actually think that we are faced with a much larger cultural challenge on the issue of arts funding. Arts in Canada are often framed as a luxury, an upper middle class pastime, a nice thing to do – if you have the time to do it. Oddly enough, creating art is seen as something that only passionate, bohemian, utopic and slightly crazy people do – folks who are willing to be struggling artists. If we could shift the cultural narrative so that we think of art as a necessary component of a society that imagines itself to be progressive then we could also re imagine the role of public arts funding in the country.

Your most recent CD has won the 2002 Urban Music Award. Your work has had many audiences in places such as at the Toronto International Poetry Slam, the International Dub Poetry Festival, the Nuyorican Poet’s Café and Scream in High Park. What is next for you?

Actually, my last album was Bloom, released in 2009 with songs available as free downloads at www.nailakeletamae.com. My second album Free Dome: South Africa, is a remix of my first one Free Dome and it won the Urban Music Association of Canada award.

The future feels bright, full of possibilities that will undoubtedly require hard work. Now that my PhD is complete, I plan to spend the next few years transforming my dissertation into a book, and expanding my artistic practice beyond spoken word, dub poetry, theater, and song writing and into new modes of expression.

In the immediate future, however, I am excited to be performing in Toronto on January 21^st at the When Sisters Speak Spoken Word Concert organized by Up From the Roots and held at the St-Lawrence Center for the Performing Arts (for tickets please go to www.stlc.com).

How could one be more exposed to your work?

Please follow me on twitter, www.twitter.com/nailakeletamae, find me on facebook at Naila Kelete-Mae or just visit my website: www.nailakeletamae.com.