Speaking Out

You'd be hard pushed to find many 20-year-olds like Ameena Atiq. Feisty, driven, fiercely intelligent and enormously talented, this is one spoken word poet to look out for.

Born to Yemeni parents and raised in Liverpool, Atiq has eschewed the expectations of her family and steadily carved out a name for herself in a small corner of the Liverpool arts scene. “I had a difficult time when I first said I wanted to become a poet,” she says, “but I knew that the single best thing I can do is write. It’s been a slow process but my parents have finally accepted it, and of course I understand their hesitations.”

Atiq’s success is no mean feat; her reputation in the city is such that she will soon be performing alongside award-winning poet Hamdan Dammag at Liverpool Arts Festival. For Atiq, her poetry is a platform to get her voice heard on the issues that matter to her: “I’ve always been passionate about things that are going on in the world, but I found it hard to get people to listen. I became interested in debating, but I felt like a lot of the time my message was falling on deaf ears. But when you perform poetry, your audience is right there and most of the time they’re engaged with what you’re saying.”

“If you turn your back on your culture, you drift away from yourself” – Ameena Atiq

Atiq's subjects range from women's rights to the loss of culture that comes with dual nationality, and she hopes to make a difference to the way her audience views the world. “I know you can’t influence everyone with your work, but if you can inspire one person then that person might go on to inspire another,” she says.

One of the aims of Liverpool Arab Arts Festival is to explore the ways in which Arab communities worldwide respond to contemporary changes from within, and this is a subject that interests Atiq greatly. “When we have young Arabs who are living in a different part of the world, they drift away from our cultures,” she says. “But if we knew more about our own history, we’d understand more about the issues we are facing today. When we leave our Arab culture behind, we're really just drifting away from ourselves. I think it’s important to have a British identity and a Yemeni identity: it’s two in one.”

For Atiq, her heritage, as well as her faith, are the fuel for her art. Though she has been brought up in the UK, she still strongly associates herself with her Yemeni roots. She writes and performs in English, but aims to complete her first poem in Arabic this year – a challenging task that she hopes will make her feel closer to her Yemeni family.

Though poetry is popular in Yemen, it's unusual for women to perform it, something Atiq hopes will change with time. “When I first started to perform poetry, a lot of people I know who are also Yemeni would tell me that they write poetry too. It’s amazing that there are all these pockets of people writing in secret. They only felt confident to tell me because they knew I’d hurdled the obstacle where I had to be accepted.”