Denise Chaila: Understanding the Affective Nature of 21^st Century Broadcast Irish Spoken Word Performance

by HELEN LANE

Reading Denise Chaila’s performance piece ‘Duel Citizenship’ [the ‘e’ is deliberate] through an affective theoretical lens exposes a series of oppressive psycho-social cultural paradigms at play in Irish society which evoke shame and fear among people of migrant origins and dual citizenship. The theory of affect explores how humans are affected, either positively or negatively, by each other, past experience, and the world they inhabit.  It is not easily defined as it spans various disciplines such as philosophy, psychology and cultural studies, and it is also subjective, phenomenological, and dependent on interaction with others. Chaila’s recorded spoken word performances are significant as a medium to understand these pervasive affective forces. As a Zambian born Irish person, Chaila’s identity is complicated by her dual citizenship and hybrid identity. Chaila’s work has been selected for broadcast on mainstream Irish media such as RTE, meaning that her work blurs the boundaries between high and popular culture, and is accessible in ways that the spoken word performances of others are not. The importance of this type of publicity serves to confront the audience, either by stimulating affective dissonance (Hemmings 2012) or by appealing on a more fundamental pre-personal level through various paralinguistic affective means, such as tone for example. In the absence of atmospheric hormones, pheromones and other such chemicals, the affective potential of the performer is not as charged, but it is not hindered either. By broadcasting Chaila’s experience in her apostrophic monologue to a large viewership, the affective thrust of her material is a powerful tool to deliver cultural capital and stir a social awakening among an audience, particularly when the audience is assumed to have had an entirely different lived experience to the performer. 

In the official video produced for narolane Records in 2020 (Chaila 2020) , on screen, a barefoot Black woman, dressed in white, enters a brightly lit room, which exists as a blank canvas of stone walls painted white and furnished with a white table and white rug. The woman places her hand into a bucket of emerald green paint and smears green paint onto her body. The symbolic green colour of the paint is an instantly recognizable signifier of Irish identity in this interpretation. Chaila’s delivery of her work takes place as a voiceover to the choreographed performance. The piece opens with the line ‘Where are you from, originally?’, where she poses the question firstly with a tone of interest, to suggest innocuous curiosity, but then dispenses with the pleasant interest, and repeats the question in a serious, matter-of-fact tone, with the intended effect of the repetition to reinforce the gravity of the question posed for the viewer. In Chaila’s delivery, the addition of a pause before the adverb ‘originally’ has a powerful effect. The deliberate caesura serves to add emphasis to the adverb ‘originally’, suggesting that the artist is an Other, unfamiliar, and not of this place. When delivered by Chaila, the pause is noticeable yet not forced. Her pitch drops and deepens on the final adverb of the question to add further emphasis. The tone that she adopts can be interpreted as derisive, mimicking the suspicious attitude of the imagined person posing the question. The effect of this anaphora is to reinforce its grip on the audience’s attention, while also being aggressive and intimidatory, capable of instilling a sense of shame, and eliciting fear within both the interrogee and the captive audience. 

The introduction of the adjective ‘originally’, serves to remind us that Chaila is a migrant. The process of displacement, bringing with it the experience of liminality, is a psychologically destabilising affective process. Chaila explains that she also experienced the anxiety of trying to fit in with her Irish peer group (Barter 2020) and is forced to view herself through the mirror of society, and subjectively others herself. In the poem, Chaila states that:

There are some people who will spend their whole lives 
Looking for a definition of home. (2020) 

Later however, Chaila gives the audience the impression that she has effortlessly merged her Zambian identity with her Irish identity. In the following lines, Chaila employs antithesis to emphasize the shared lived experiences of Zambian and Irish people historically. These lines are also rich with the alliterative and consonant [L] sound, as well as long vowel sounds, which harmoniously bridge the gap between Irish and Zambian places and language. She tells us: 

So now, now I could tell you about king and about countries
About wars and democracies
About independence and revolutionaries
About famine and bounty
About green and white and golden eagles
Against streaks of orange and black
I could tell you about Amhrán na bhFiann
And Lumbanyeni Zambia
I could show you the spirit of Lucan, Limerick, and Lusaka
I could translate all of my Lenje stories
So that we could sing them as Gaeilge
I could be bacon and cabbage in Mufulira
Or in Swords, cooking nshima (Chaila 2020) 

Chaila outlines various aspects of normative Irish identity that she has internalised triumphantly. The outcome is an interesting one, and a subtle leaning towards an Hiberno-centric ideology is apparent. For example, by learning ‘how to be Irish’ (Chaila 2020), Chaila’s acquisition of the Irish language (Gaeilge) is important in her integration into the wider Irish community. By learning the language of her new country, the reward is the ‘“promise’ of being loved in return’ (Ahmed 2014, 134). Chaila is expected to bend towards the ego-ideal ‘obeying the law to please’ (Lacan 2006, 672). Ironically, this occurs through affective compulsion in a grand effort of self-preservation. Chaila may have invested more of herself in her relationships with her Irish peers, making several efforts to acculturate and sacrifice aspects of her identity, in order to be accepted. However, her Black skin remains a signifier of her otherness in the eyes of her peers. She makes powerful comments in the lines:

Don’t need your Concern if you’ll look at me
And see a Trócaire kid. (Chaila 2020)

In this observation, she is presumed to be a poster child for a widely recognised marketing campaign for Irish international aid agencies, Concern and Trócaire. Even though Chaila does not pose a threat to the imagined nation, as a Black immigrant, she is still not like the majority of the white Irish-born nation, who are also, it may be assumed, the typical audience of the national broadcaster. Arguably, a deferential self-whitewashing born out of a deep sense of shame is at the core of this piece. By positioning herself in the public eye, the mirror of the other, Chaila opens herself up to criticism and runs the risk of provoking hatred. Affectively this brings to mind the Lacanian concept of the Umwelt in the Innenwelt and the later conceptual development of extimité/extimacy as there is a blurring of the boundaries between the psyche and the external world. We can also understand this as the penetrative nature of emotional contagion (Durkheim 1966 in Ahmed 2014, 8-9). Ultimately, the fearful attitudes of the least vulnerable in society, which are held towards genuinely vulnerable migrants, take control of Chaila, and this is apparent in her performance piece. 

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Works Cited

Ahmed, S. (2014) The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Second Edition, Routledge: New York. 

Barter, P. (2020) ‘Denise Chaila, a rapper-poet in motion,’ in The Sunday Times, 19 September, available at: https://www.thetimes.com/world/ireland-world/article/denise-chaila-a-rapper-poet-in-motion-svjzl0035?t=ie. [Accessed 25 July 2024]

Chaila, D. (2020) Denise Chaila – Duel Citizenship. narolane Records Available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gU0KGcNbOKk. [Accessed 11 June 2023]. 

Hemmings, C. (2012) ‘Affective solidarity: Feminist reflexivity and political transformation’ in Feminist Theory, 13(2), 147–161. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464700112442643 [Accessed 1 November 2024]

Lacan, J. (2006) Écrits, The First Complete Edition in English, Translated by Bruce Fink, New York: WW. Norton & Co. 

The thumbnail is also taken from Denise Chaila’s Duel Citizenship.

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