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Angela Rideau and Julián Esteban Torres López explore taboos, their relationship to trauma, and how our taboo resistance is both a revolutionary act and a step toward healing.

Angela Rideau is a London-based British-Indian Spoken Word Poet. She is the host of Poems From My Heart, a spoken word podcast sharing stories and poetry that explores taboos and difficult topics such as colonialism, body image, living within the diaspora, and feminism through poetry.

Her debut autobiographical poetry collection, honeybee, is an exploration of trauma, identity, growing up within the South-Asian diaspora, healing, motherhood, and femininity.

With both Poems From My Heart Podcast and her poetry collection honeybee, Angela Rideau introduces us to the roots of her heritage, and the soil that has cultivated her grief and frustrations, her joys and her hopes. She brings footnotes to the forefront, decolonizing her heart and thoughts from those coercive frameworks that have for generations passed as common sense. With these raw and honest poems, Angela Rideau dissects the dominant hierarchies, cultures, and caste systems that have othered and devalued her, and she reimagines a world anew that includes, encourages, and elevates her, and you, us … the collective beehive. And in the process, she sheds the skin of misogyny and proudly arms herself with her battle scars to become one with herself, her body, and her hive .. to better embrace the harmony of her new collective colony — where we learn how to live with multiple tongues in our mouths, weaving songs that heal, that soothe, and that empower the soul.

100% of the royalties from the book will be donated to Tommy’s Charity (UK) who help to support families through and research the cause of baby loss.

Today’s musical guest: Mallika Vie, performing her track, “Since My Baby Said Goodbye,” which you can find in The Nasiona‘s compilation BIPOC musical album, Volume 1: Petrichor at thenasiona.com.

MUSICAL GUEST

MALLIKA VIE

Mallika Vie is an Indian American soul and R&B singer, songwriter, and producer from Boston, MA, who sees her music as a call to empathy, healing, and taking up space. In 2020, Vie released her ’60s soul-inspired debut single, “Be Still For Me” – a song about listening to a problem without trying to fix it – and her 2-song pop-soul EP, “Since My Baby Said Goodbye” – an account of heartbreak and resilience. Her influences include alternative R&B powerhouses like Solange, SiR, and Raveena. Her music indicates a nostalgic, dreamy heart, but her searing lyrics tackle delicate issues like mental health and sexuality, and a myriad of others with an unwavering gaze. This is in part motivated by a desire to shatter taboos in order to create a space where empathy and inclusion ring.

HOST

Julián Esteban Torres López

Julián Esteban Torres López (he/him/his/él) is a bilingual, Colombia-born storyteller and culture architect with Afro-Euro-Indigenous roots. For two decades, Julián has worked toward humanizing those Othered by oppressive systems and dominant cultures. He is the creator of the social justice storytelling movement The Nasiona, where he also hosts and produces The Nasiona Podcast. He’s a Pushcart Prize and Best Small Fictions nominee, a Trilogy Award in Short Fiction finalist, and the author of Marx’s Humanism and Its Limits and Reporting On Colombia. His poetry collection, Ninety-Two Surgically Enhanced Mannequins, is available now. His work appears in PANK Magazine, Into the Void Magazine, The Acentos Review, Novus Literary and Arts Journal, Havic 2021: Inside Brilliance, among others. Julián holds a bachelor’s in philosophy and in communication and a master’s in justice studies from the University of New Hampshire and was a Ph.D. candidate at the University of British Columbia Okanagan, where he focused on political science and Latin American studies.

The Nasiona Podcast amplifies the voices and experiences of the marginalized, undervalued, overlooked, silenced, and forgotten, as well as gives you a glimpse into Othered worlds. We focus on stories that explore the spectrum of human experiences—stories based on facts, truth-seeking, human concerns, real events, and real people, with a personal touch. From liminal lives to the marginalized, and everything in between, we believe that the subjective can offer its own reality and reveal truths some facts can’t discover. Hosted, edited, and produced by Julián Esteban Torres López.
Please follow The Nasiona on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook for regular updates: @TheNasiona
Thank you to Aïcha Martine Thiam for co-producing the BIPOC Music Series component of the episode, and to Mallika Vie for being our musical guest.
Original music for The Nasiona Podcast was produced by the Grammy Award-winning team of Joe Sparkman and Marcus Allen, aka The Heavyweights.
Joe Sparkman: Twitter + Instagram. Marcus Allen: Twitter + Instagram.
The Nasiona Magazine and Podcast depend on voluntary contributions from readers and listeners like you. We hope the value of our work to our community is worth your patronage. If you like what we do, please show this by liking, rating, and reviewing us; buying or recommending our books; and by financially supporting our work either through The Nasiona’s Patreon page or through Julián Esteban Torres López‘s Ko-fi donation platform. Every little bit helps.
Thank you for listening and reading, and thank you for your support.