Justine McConnell

Caleb Femi’s work compels his audience to move away from a modern dependence on the written word. Because he has not yet published his poetry on the page, our ‘reading’ of Femi’s work is always transmitted through his bodily presence, including on screen. He asks us to engage with his poetry with two of our senses, both sight and hearing, and to immerse ourselves in a way that differs from how we read poetry on the page. This prioritisation of performance is part of a wider movement that has seen not only a surge in the popularity of spoken word in recent decades (see also Warsan Shire), but also an approach to art that spans various creative media within a single work. For example, Femi often projects images behind him as he performs.

When Femi does go on to publish his poetry in book form, we will be offered yet another iteration of the poems contained there. He is currently working on his debut collection, provisionally entitled Poor. However, by focusing his attention on spoken word poetry in the first instance, and prioritising the performance dimension of his work, he offers audiences the opportunity to engage with his work in a different way. His performances are collaborative and collective, with the audience, the location, and even the unpredictable incidents of the moment of performance itself all playing a part in the poetry. As audience members, we are not only invited to engage with the world that Femi is creating before us, we also become a part of that creation, impacting its shape on any particular day.

Despite this, Femi develops much of his work on the page. His poetry falls into a category that John Miles Foley has termed ‘Voiced Texts’: poetry that ‘begins life as a written composition only to modulate to oral performance before a live audience’. If a poem always remains ‘unfinished’, as Femi has proclaimed, this dimension is amplified in a work that has been written with the intention that it be performed. The performance and the live audience ‘complete’ such poems, but only temporarily, because each new performance allows the poet and audience to complete it afresh. The result is collaborative: the audience is drawn in as a reader is to the world of a written work, but they also impact the shape of that world as it is formed in front of them and they interact with it during the live performance.

This poetic process allows us as readers access to a particularly rich archive. For instance, there are several ways to ‘read’ Femi’s poem, ‘Children of the ’Narm’. You could watch him performing live, and be part of the creative process at that very moment. Or you could watch a recording online, either a live performance or a filmed video, in which your role as audience can no longer affect the creation of the poem. Or – if he chooses to include the poem in a printed edition of his work one day – you might read it in the pages of a book.  Each way of accessing the poem will offer the reader a different perspective on a poem that explores the nature of Britain today. Our mode of reading will be different in each case, and the world created by Femi will shift in subtle ways with each rendition. However, what remains constant is the poem confronting issues of identity, migration, violence, and politics, refusing to let us look away.

We are the Children of the ’Narm
The barefaced, ten-year-old dreamers,
Who saw north Peckham a paradise
To the hell of Jos, Freetown, Yammoussoukro.
Who came and realised that the stories of gold-paved streets
Were just stories, but didn’t even mind
Because we were here now
With our lives, and with each other,
So what else could matter more.

(Opening of ‘Children of the ’Narm’)

~

Works cited

John Miles Foley. How to Read an Oral Poem. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002, pp. 43–45.

Featured image credit: Caleb Femi

Cite this: McConnell, Justine. “Caleb Femi in performance.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2018, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 14 April 2026.

The post ‘Caleb Femi in performance’ by Justine McConnell appeared first on writers make worlds.

Biography

Writing

Caleb Femi (photo: Caleb Femi)

When Caleb Femi became the Young People’s Laureate for London in 2016, he explained his vision for the role as seeking to,

re-engage young people, who have long been disenfranchised, through poetry. I don’t see it as far-fetched to normalise poetry among all demographics of young people in London. Poetry is the one of the purest forms of conversation there is. At its best, it allows us to communicate from an honest and safe place. And young people deserve to be included in such spaces.

Femi’s commitment to ridding poetry of its inaccessibility, revealing it instead as an art form in which young people’s voices can be heard, is central to the task of the Young People’s Laureate. Originally the role was known as London’s Young Poet Laureate (a post first held by Warsan Shire), so the name-change signals the emphasis on engaging young people across the city. In keeping with this, Femi has brought the democratising power of the internet to bear on his work throughout his career. He has uploaded his spoken word performances and short films, and made them freely available via his website and YouTube.

In this way Femi puts into practice his belief that poetry always remains unfinished, ready to be reworked and reshaped at any time. It is an idea he first explored in his undergraduate dissertation when he focused on the work of American poet Emily Dickinson, who frequently rewrote her poems or left them deliberately unfinished. In his own poetry it can be seen, for example, in the different versions of ‘Coconut Oil’ to be found online. One of these poignantly changes the close of the poem.

Often autobiographical, Femi’s poetry frequently focuses on the experiences of being a young black man in Britain. He has become a sought-after speaker, addressing audiences at the Tate Modern, the South Bank Centre, and TEDx events. In 2018, his poem ‘A Tale of Modern Britain’ was commissioned by Heathrow airport, to celebrate – in Femi’s words – ‘what it means to be British and the emotions that unite us all when we travel’. Images of the poet performing his poetry and giving words to people’s experience of flight are visible on big screens around the airport in exciting and provocative ways.

—Justine McConnell, 2018

Cite this: McConnell, Justine. “Caleb Femi.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2018, https://writersmakeworlds.com/caleb-femi/. Accessed 14 April 2026.

The post Caleb Femi appeared first on writers make worlds.