‘The aftermath of enslavement just doesn’t wash away with bleach. It doesn’t wash away with new buildings. It doesn’t wash away with so-called diversity and representation.” The voice of poet and musician Camae Ayewa, known as Moor Mother, commands your whole attention even over a video call. Within minutes of connecting with her, it’s clear that when she speaks, she does so not to impress or to serenade, but to tell the truth. “In the last [interview] I did in the Guardian I said we have yet to deal with the repercussions of enslavement. Everyone got mad at me for saying it. How have we?”
That interview was back in 2017. Since then, the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests brought the discourse around systemic racism and colonialism to the forefront of public attention and so today, Ayewa’s ruminations – about our slowness to reckon with the effects of the slave trade – wouldn’t be deemed as “fringe” as they once were. However, her suspicions remain as strong today as they were seven years ago. “I don’t think [much] has changed. It’s still the same thing. Just dressed in different, more modern clothing,” she says. “Technology is advancing and more information is coming out, but we have [yet] to do the due diligence to put pressure on our governments and make a stand.”
Perhaps this is why Ayewa’s new album The Great Bailout is so specific about who and what it is critiquing: Britain. Made in collaboration with the London Contemporary Orchestra, it is a harrowing odyssey exploring British colonialism and the 1835 act that compensated 46,000 slave owners with £20m (£17bn today) for their lost “property” due to the legal abolition of slavery.
On the track All of the Money, Ayewa delves into a timeline of colonial atrocities while an echo – “where’d they get all the money?” – permeates the background. Her voice gets more grotesque the more she asks the question and the soundscape darkens: an enthralling experience that pushes the emotional boundaries of what a song can achieve. “I toured it with the London Contemporary. We sold out every show. But when it’s put on streaming for the world to hear – who knows,” Ayewa says, unsure of what listeners will make of it. “We’re addicted to certain pleasures. We’re addicted to certain sounds or hypnotised by them. So when you don’t provide that, it’s nerve-racking. Everything’s a popularity contest, and [about] following trends. This [project] is really about the permission that artists can have to make any kind of album they want – you can do things that you deem as important.”
The opener Guilty, featuring Lonnie Holleyand Raia Was, sets the eerie cinematic tone of the entire album with layered vocals, whispers, strings, horns and even more questions: “Did you pay off the trauma? The horror? The whip of the sugar cane?” Ayewa is interrogating the ugliest parts of history here – and she also contributed to the Guardian’s Cotton Capital project, exploring the links between the newspaper’s founders and slave ownership. On her website, she directs her listeners to “think: not one of the enslaved received a penny in the form of compensation. Think: two British prime ministers – William Ewart Gladstone, prime minister on four occasions between 1868 and 1894, and David Cameron 2010–2016, both of whose ancestors received ‘compensation’.”
Why did this American musician target British history? “I’m not removed from the UK. As an African, our story runs all through the UK. I’m just following the threads. Where we’ve been. What has happened to us. How have we overcome it,” says Ayewa. “My government last name is Dennis. That’s English. You gotta look at your name. Where am I coming from? What does this mean? Who the hell is Dennis?”
Ayewa was born in Aberdeen, Maryland in 1981. She grew up in a public housing project and from a young age, she was politically tuned in. “As a kid, you hear about certain atrocities: what happened with Indigenous populations here in America, about enslavement. It radicalised me,” she says. “I remember speaking about Christopher Columbus in the third grade. Saying how upset I am about it.”
That hunger for information is also evident in Ayema’s interest in the Black experience and African diasporic communities outside of the US. “I grew up in an African Methodist Church. That word ‘African’ was so important. It gave me so much power to see this explicit connection. Where I grew up, we loved all kinds of African cultures; I always had a hunger to meet different people. Anytime someone came [to our area] from Jamaica, it was exciting, like a celebrity had come to the neighbourhood.”
Ayewa eventually moved to Philadelphia to study photography at the city’s Art Institute, and wrote poetry, about love and the things that frustrated her, as a form of journalling. “But then my favourite poets died,” she says. “Amiri Baraka, Maya Angelou, Lucille Clifton. It was important for me to carry on the tradition that I thought was dying out. I appreciate poetry as a healing tool, but not everyone can do the work of being a poet. It’s like being a doctor. You can’t just start cutting people open. Yeah – you know how to work a knife. Yeah – you know how to use words. But poetry is a different alchemy.”
She formed a rap duo with her best friend Rebecca Roe called the Mighty Paradocs and later joined saxophonist Keir Neuringer and the bassist Luke Stewart to form Irreversible Entanglements: a free jazz collective that combines music with activism. Their sound is mesmeric, imaginative and radical – and in line with the same artists Ayewa tells me she loves, from Billie Holiday and Nina Simone to John Coltrane and Saul Williams.
Her debut solo album as Moor Mother, Fetish Bones, came out in 2016: a coalescence of spoken word, hip-hop and field recordings about survival and resistance. Since then she has jumped from tiny DIY spaces to high-art stages such as London’s Barbican, earning the description “the poet laureate of the apocalypse” – a title she doesn’t find much value in. “I understand that people will categorise me because the sounds and experiences are new to them. But the apocalypse – I don’t think I’ve ever even said the word ‘apocalypse’ in a poem or a song in my life.” She refers to another outlet for her creativity, the collective Black Quantum Futurism. “We don’t believe in endings. We believe this is a continuation.”
Whatever the world may make of Ayema’s singular sound and storytelling, The Great Bailout is another testament to her radical thought and liberatory politics. “I tell the truth about what’s unknown and what has happened,” she says resolutely. “Someone needs to tell the truth.”
