Mos Def & writers who inspired me

I found myself in an empty house. My teenage years in the early 2000s are mapped in these fleeting moments, the late afternoon hours, when school has finished, and my parents are at work, or on their way home from other corners of London, and my brother is off in another room somewhere. In a teenaged twilight zone I stumbled around MSN and RWD forum and torrent sites, and Wikipedia and early YouTube in search of nothing certain, fastening myself to whatever drifted down the line.

The specifics are vague. But in my memory, he is there. There is a vigour in his voice, and a gentle lisp in his cadence. Who I would become bloomed out of a LimeWire link – or an iMesh file, or a YouTube lyric video. I don’t know his face. But in his verses, I hear stories of New York, of Brooklyn, of far brothers living across the waters. On song, he announces himself as ‘Mos’, as ‘Mighty Mos’ or ‘Mos Def’ – names on which I came to carve my earliest personal interests. I carried him with me, on MP3 players, on the bus into school and in those slow passing afternoons.

It was rap that lowered me into the well of literature, Mos Def who guided my hands towards writing the spoken word.

On the song ‘Respiration’ with Talib Kweli, he said:
Hard knuckles on the second hands of working-class watches
Skyscrapers is colossus, the cost of living is preposterous
Stay alive? You pay or die, no options 

And I listened.

I had been a reader since I could remember, but inspiration is something different. A new world opened. After finding ‘Thieves in the Night’ where he and Talib Kweli remoulded the final paragraphs of The Bluest Eye (1970) – ‘We courted death in order to call ourselves brave, and hid like thieves from life’ – I was led to its writer Toni Morrison. From Ms Morrison I found Alice Walker, and eventually Joan Didion and Jacqueline Woodson, Truman Capote and Gay Talese and Irwin Shaw, those whose words sang with the same sense of rhythm and melody as Mos Def’s songs and sermons. This unfolding was a finding of self, a realisation that the written word, in rap, in literature, in nonfiction, in poetry, was a vessel to bring up what sits beneath, a way to tease out the personal history in the collective, to study the deepest parts of our shared human experience.

I trace the origins of my writing back to those hours alone in the house. I see and hear similarities in what I read and what floods into my headphones. The two run parallel. To write I lean on the rapper Kano as well as the writer James Baldwin, Potter Payper as well as Caleb Femi. Some of the greatest stylists in this country and beyond are rappers. My experience of the world is richer for it. My writing is made possible by their efforts.

Aniefiok Ekpoudom

Aniefiok ‘Neef’ Ekpoudom is a writer from South London who documents and explores culture in contemporary Britain.