Simba Alik
Grandmama
Watch grandmama’s hands
How they cook during raptures
adjacent to God
—Simba Alik
“I tell people, ‘I’m a poet, which means I tell my life for a living.’ So ask me all the questions. We can get deep.” Simba Alik laughs. We take a deep breath and dive in.
Simba Alik is a poet, spoken word artist, organizer, Black trans Nashville native, and a new dad. Outer Voice readers might also know him from a piece we ran last year on Southern Word’s Write With Pride program, a writing initiative for Middle Tennessee LGBT youth, helmed by poet Amie Whittemore, in which Alik serves as a mentor.
This time around, we’re talking to Simba about his own work, what drives him, and where he’s headed. He’s an electrifying live performer with a flow that cuts deep and never pulls punches. Not content to settle for one role, he’s also currently pursuing his second graduate degree, a master’s in public relations, to complement his bachelor’s degree in journalism and sociology and his other master’s in organizational leadership.
I got tired just writing that.
“The art of spoken word found me,” Alik says. “But I was always a writer. I come from a family of writers and creatives. A lot of them were really known locally, but then life happened and they just stopped. There was a lack of resources — we didn’t really come from much. I have a lot of singer-songwriters in my family, so I always watched them. My mother was a songwriter. My aunt … was a gospel [song]writer, and my mom was R&B. And that’s what I was raised around. My 8th grade year at LEAD Academy middle school, Southern Word came to my school. They came to my classroom and brought a little older youth poet. And I was like, ‘I want to do what you do.’ It was Shawn Whitsell. And he gave me my first writing prompt, and I was like ‘this is kind of dope,’ and he was like ‘yeah, you know that rap stuff you do? Same thing.’”
In the years since, Simba has honed his craft and performance style, but also kept a close eye on the why behind what he does. This keeps him out of the highly competitive slam poetry world, for the most part.
“I don’t think I became a poet to become a well-known poet,” he says. “I became a poet to save my own life.”
That’s what spurs him to say, “we can get deep,” and so … we do.
“I have a very interesting background,” he explains. “My mom was sexually assaulted when she was 16 years old. So that’s my conception story. That’s who I am. She had to raise her first baby as a teenager. I have five siblings. She was great to us. Having all of those struggles, single parent household living in poverty, all these things, and then I’m also trans. So I was working through all of this weird identity crisis in general. Like, am I a monster too? My father is a rapist. What does that mean? I know who he is, right? He was still around. I knew this man and I didn’t necessarily hate him. I couldn’t stand him, but me being me, I can’t find myself to hate anybody. So, because I don’t hate this man, am I also a monster?
“I’m nine at this point when I started thinking about that. And then just watching my mother go through the stuff she had to go through. There was that chaos in the background, and then here I am living in a body that I don’t believe is mine. So it’s like, what do you do? I was raised in North Nashville, mostly … before it got gentrified. I could have done what everybody else outside was doing. So many opportunities — I could’ve been in jail, could have been dead, could have killed somebody else. I met Southern Word and I was like, ‘or I can be a poet, or I can be a rapper. I can be creative and I can do everything that my family told me I can do — that’s one thing I appreciate about my family. We went through some stuff, but they were extremely supportive. We were always happy with all the chaos around us, and they always saw something in me.”
He laughs and says, “I started off selfish, right? Everybody else is like ‘I started writing so I can change the world one person at a time,’ and yet, no, I want to save me first. I’m glad to help you, too, but it’s for me. When I get mentees or somebody and they ask, ‘how do you do it every time?’ I’m like, when you get up there, the only way you’re gonna mess up is if you’re doing it for them and not for you. You’ve got to do it for you first. This is yours. When it becomes theirs, you’re not going to do it the way you need to. It’s not going to have that impact it needs to have, because it’s not your poem anymore.”
Before our conversation, Simba shared a link to a video of him performing three poems, including one titled “It Must Be the Devil: Part 1, After Amiri Baraka’s ‘Dope.’”
Watch it below (note, if the video doesn’t want to play, click this link: https://youtu.be/ooO1roUgBqU?t=407
“It's one of my favorites,” Alik says. “I never perform that poem the same way. Some of the words are different. The way that I fluctuate in sound and in tone. It changes. When I first wrote it, I did it the same way every time. It was great. People loved it. But for the past year and a half, I don't remember me performing that poem the same way. And I performed it at least 10 times in the past year and a half, and I did not perform it the same way.”
This is an insight into Simba Alik’s approach not only to the performance of a piece, but back to the construction of it.
“I don't really have much of a structure for my writing,” he explains. “If someone was teaching a class using my writing, everybody would be confused. You'd have to take one poem and look at that one poem. You can’t give a group of students three poems written by Simba. You can’t. It’s like, ‘what are you trying to teach me? I don't know. I don't know at all.’ I don't write as much as other poets. Because a lot of other poets that I know… They’re like, ‘I'm gonna write X amount of poems by this time to work toward this thing. I want to write a chapbook, so I'm going to write 25 poems to put in this chapbook, or I want to submit for this, this prize, this fellowship, whatever, I’ve got to write this amount of poems. I'm about to do slams, I got to write this poem. And it has to be this way to win that slam.’ I'm not that way.
“My poems come to me in different ways, and they come to me without a structure. Most of my poems are free writes. And I tried to get out of the habit because when I started doing more competing and submitting, you have to get used to proofreading, editing, doing all that. It was so hard for me, because that's not what I have done. I free write and then I just memorize that. And I perform that. Which is why I also stopped slamming. Because I don't want to make my poem something else to win. I don't. Because it came to me this way. So I want to leave it that way.”
As he pursues two new adventures, fatherhood and finishing a second graduate degree, Simba looks to a future where he can combine art with the disciplines of his degrees, continuing to speak and work with organizations to deepen the scope and effectiveness of DEI initiatives, working with LGBT youth, and eventually combining his and his wife’s love of film to create documentaries and consult filmmakers on making work that’s more inclusive and also less clumsy in its approach to race and sexuality. “Big dream is, I’m the person they call in to make sure this stuff doesn’t happen … not just going in and saying ‘this doesn’t sound right, do it this way,’ but also, ‘let’s step back and figure out why you’re even thinking that way in the first place.’”
We finish by tempting fate and trying to predict what purpose art can serve in the coming year as we all come to terms with three years of pandemic, difficult conversations, heartbreak, and hope.
“We’ve noticed that history repeats itself, right?” Simba says. “There’s never been a time in history where art wasn’t important to making a thing whole again. There’s never been a time where art wasn’t important to making the world make sense. There’s never been a time in history where art wasn’t a part of some type of change. I definitely see art continuing to play that role as it has always been in history, also keeping us sane.
“What role do I think art is going to play in this next year? The main role is going to be joy. That’s just what art does. It gives us a different lens. It gives us a new way of looking at stuff. I think that’s what the role of art is going to be. A little more hope.”
