Emma Dabiri's My World interview: “A lot of my politics was informed by listening to, from a young age, revolutionary Irish music”

Through books like Don’t Touch My Hair, What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition and Twisted: The Tangled History of Black Hair Culture, Emma Dabiri has explained the politics of race, gender and the body in the every day – works recognised by the Royal Society of Literature when they made her a fellow in 2023. This continues with her most recent book, Disobedient Bodies, a look at how we treat our bodies in a capitalist world. She argues that increased pressures and ideals related to how our bodies should look and behave are making it ever more difficult to live in harmony with them. Such pressures surround us, whether they’re coming from the wellness and beauty industries, or images of vague acquaintances on social media. ‘Choices within an oppressive or exploitative paradigm aren’t always as liberating as we might want to think,’ writes Dabiri. Her solution? ‘The politics of refusal. The refusal of all the choices on offer – not inclusion in the system, but the system’s transformation. The politics of disobedience.’

Part of this politics of refusal involves embracing and trusting one’s body, rather than submitting to external pressures. ‘When we’re anxious, alienated and disconnected from our bodies, we can’t appreciate the beauty of what they can do,’ she writes. And, for Dabiri, an essential component in reconnecting with one’s body is music. ‘Dance,’ she instructs her readers, ‘dance is such a powerful tool to reimagine your relationship with your body, sing… sing to share joy, to express gratitude, to shift grief, to process rage.’

Dabiri, who has presented BBC Four’s Britain’s Lost Masterpieces and Radio 4’s Journeys in Afrofuturism, alongside her literary and academic work, sees music as crucial in fomenting her world view. “A lot of my politics was informed by listening to, from a young age, revolutionary Irish music,” she tells me from her Margate home, “but also to dub and roots reggae, which has a very righteous sense of justice embedded into it. The messages in those types of music grounded me in the kind of politics that went on to inform everything that I do. When I was learning about Black consciousness, it wasn’t like I was learning this stuff on the internet… a lot was from hip-hop. In my teens, its messages were about injustice and how it could be overcome, also social commentary and just really clever, exquisite wordplay.”

It’s clear that her belief in the power of music exceeds academic analysis. Talk of the book is swept aside as Dabiri waxes lyrical on genres she loves. “I feel I’ve never met anybody as into music as me who doesn’t work in music in some capacity,” she laughs. A lot of this seems to have been inherited from her parents. “The Irish music was definitely through my mom. She taught me so many songs from a really young age by singing them to me. We would sing together.” This love for Irish music is currently focused on the Dublin-based Lankum. “I just love [them], I saw them at the Hackney Empire… [Some of] the songs I knew, like ‘Go Dig My Grave’, I knew that as ‘The Butcher Boy’ from my mum teaching me. What they do is so rooted in tradition and history. Their knowledge of and love for this music is so pronounced, but they also do all this kind of doom noise stuff with it. They’re so fucking good. And then their politics are really on point. Love them.”

As for her dad’s influence, he “was a massive Jimi Hendrix fan. But I remember not being into Hendrix. I’m obsessed with [him] now… Both of [my parents] listened to a lot of 60s folk and pop music. I love 60s music so much. I think that’s very much from my mum and dad.”

Her parents were both big reggae fans too, leading to a memorable encounter. “I met Bob Marley when I was about six months old. At home in Dublin, I have this poster [of] the album cover of [Survival]… Written on it is, ‘To Emma, One Love… Bob Marley.’… We lived in Atlanta, and he was playing somewhere,’ and [my parents] took me to where he was. My mom said he was very taken with me. He picked me up and was walking around with me and she had to be like, ‘Uh, can I have my kid back?’”

In Atlanta, Dabiri explains, “I lived with my Nigerian [paternal] grandparents, I lived in a pretty much Nigerian household for the first two years of my life. So [I was] listening to a lot of highlife, a lot of Fela Kuti.” She cites ‘Zombie’ as one of her favourite Fela tracks.

Dabiri further explored her Nigerian, specifically Yoruba, roots at university. “My degree was in African studies, and then I went and taught African studies at SOAS for a long time, specialising in Yoruba cultural production.” This involved an investigation of Yoruba music and its legacies. “Lots of aspects of [Yoruba culture] are found in Black cultural musical traditions in America, in the Caribbean, Brazil and Cuba. So even, when I’m thinking about the blues, the idea of the devil at the crossroads that’s in the blues, that comes from Yoruba culture. Eshu is this really powerful deity associated with the crossroads. He’s not the devil, in [the] Yoruba belief system it’s not a binary of good and evil, it’s more holistic, [but] when European colonisers and missionaries went to Yorubaland one of the things they did was erroneously interpret Eshu as the devil. So, this figure in the blues, of the devil at the crossroads, has antecedents in Yoruba culture.”

With all this sewing together of music, culture and politics through her upbringing and career, however, Dabiri initially struggled to carve space for her own voice in a society with strict expectations. “In school, if you were a girl, in Ireland, back then… if you didn’t just have a really fucking high, piping voice, it was like you can’t sing. [It’s] such a narrow and culturally specific interpretation of what singing is. And as somebody that has a really low voice, I was just kind of ruled out of singing.” Those days, though, are happily behind her, with Dabiri declaring “Singing should be more of an everyday thing. I hate this idea that singing is only for professional singers, or for ‘good’ singers. I love singing. I sing with my kids all the time.”

Reflecting on her low voice, she muses “I’ve often been drawn to women, to female singers who [also] have quite low voices.” She cites Alice Coltrane as one example, describing her Journey in Satchidananda album in Disobedient Bodies, as ‘out of this world!’ The discovery of Coltrane and jazz more generally, however, were fairly recent. “I feel like I didn’t really get jazz before,” reflects Dabiri, “Yeah, I didn’t get it. Maybe I wasn’t listening to the right jazz… But then I [became] increasingly obsessed with, I guess, abstraction, and it’s playing with form and linearity. It really inspires me to think more creatively, as does dub.”

Through our talk, Dabiri’s enthusiasm bubbles over. She moves rapidly from talking about dub to ‘The Ballad of James Connolly’ to Yoruba and back, sometimes forgetting what she was planning to say as another artist grabs her attention. For her, “music is probably the most transformational, transcendental expression of human creativity.”

This article originally appeared in the November 2024 issue of Songlines. Never miss an issue – subscribe today