Last week, the Hayward Gallery’s concrete walls housed some of the greatest poetic talent to come out of the UK in the form of spoken word poet and songstress Zena Edwards. Following in the footsteps of spoken word heroes like Linton Kwesi Johnson and Jean Binta Breeze, Zena Edwards did the genre proud as she spoke and sung to a crowd of admiring followers (including me) who lapped up each beat, verse and rhyme by the princess of poetry. 

Spoken word artist and musician Zena Edwards is a patron of cultural fusion, accompanying her words with traditional African instruments such as the Mbira, the Kalimba and Marimba (thumb pianos) which she played whilst humming and chanting, throwing her voice in and out of the African mix while she rhymed about London life, and its discontents.

Wearing traditional African dress and Levi’s, Zena champions all things fusion, rhyming in iambic pentameter while playing the marimba… Shakespeare’s rhyme scheme never had so much soul.

She talked about the importance of African development into the arts and the importance of embracing the ‘artist within,’ telling the crowd that, ‘we can change the world one piece of creativity at a time, we need to embrace the artist, it just gets killed in school’. Later, singing in Zulu and English, she recited, ‘we should constantly look to truth when we create…I dedicate my poetry to the artist in us all.’

Broaching the issues as she always does, Zena talked about recession, focusing on the current state of economic disarray and the negativity that comes hand in hand with people being made to feel redundant through redundancy. Her rendition of 'Laugh', one of her most popular poems, gave a poignant reminder that there are alternatives to succumbing to the economic depression, namely the age old premise that laughter is the best medicine.

She later sagely commented on London’s commuters in the poem ‘Tube’ where she dipped in and out of Patois, English, and Jamaican accents, commenting on how people gossip about ‘rising violence and knife crime’ while doing nothing to combat it. It’s a sad tale of our times that many of the members of the audience could empathise and shifted uncomfortably in their seats.

It was only the realism of the message that was uncomfortable though, as we swayed and sang along to the accompanying acoustic guitar player who played along to her poems, which she interchanged with her songs, moving back and forth between the two.

Always inspirational, she told us that: 'Everyone’s a singer deep down’ and ‘you got to be creative wherever you are, whenever the mood takes you.’ In the current climate where Grime artists spit bars and stories on the airwaves, it’s refreshing to go back to basics and hear a strong female voice fill the silence with expert metre and rhyme. Ending on a high, she left us with this thought: ‘The world is changing, and we should write our urban folklore, it is time for an inspirational push, and an enthusiasm for creativity through the dark times.’ Yes.