Taboos: Trauma, Resistance, & Healing

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.

I had the pleasure of speaking with Angela Rideau on June 17th of 2021.

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

 

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. 

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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 Nas