Esperance Goes International

Esperance Luvindao is a performance poet unshackled from the stage.

A breath of sobering air on YouTube in collaboration with Suzy Eises. A conscious stream on Audiomack where ‘Etha’, her debut spoken word album, waxes poetic about love, blackness, gender-based violence and her mother and a Namibian poet set to take Zambia and Zimbabwe by storm.

“This will be my first time performing outside Namibia,” says Luvindao, who has been invited to perform at the Sustainable Development Goals Youth Summit in Harare and the Women Summit in Lusaka.

“I’m excited because I believe that moments like this take you out of your comfort zone and stretch you till you have no choice but to grow.”

With each event appealing to Luvindao both as a young person and woman, the poet is eager to start her international journey and sees this as the beginning of greater things.

“Both of these events speak to everything I am and stand for. I have seen that life tends to be unfair to those who don’t know who they are, what they want and how they want to get there,” she says.

“I’m young, but in my few years of living, I have noticed that we don’t lack potential. People all over Namibia and Africa have large amounts of untapped potential. Our issue is realising what we carry and tapping into it.

“My main calling and purpose can be summarised as assisting fellow women and young people, in general, with vision validation and dream reactivation. Destroy a man’s ability to dream and you have killed him. Summits like these assist in reviving lost dreams, and if I can do that through my spoken word and humanitarian work, that is exactly what I intend on doing for a long time to come.”

A creative self-starter who has performed on some of the country’s most prestigious stages, Luvindao inspires in her ability to reimagine poetic outlets and reflects on the disbanding of Spoken Word Namibia’s monthly platform where many experienced her talent for the first time.

“I think what the dissolution of Spoken Word [the monthly event] has done is sift through those who had a hunger to express through word and those who perhaps had no intentions of pursuing it further,” she says.

“Over the last few years, poetry in Namibia has grown to be accepted as a valid art form with people attending shows to launch my spoken word album in January 2018, the launch of my spoken word video featuring Suzy Eises, the launch of my spoken videos and the recent ‘Architecture of Poetry’ featuring South African poet Nomonde Sky.”

Drawing attention to the fact that her spoken word videos play on national television as well as the shift she has seen in the corporate world inasmuch as businesses and events are now willing to pay performance poets, Luvindao loves that spoken word lives on and continues to thrive beyond the esteemed legacy of the monthly platform.

“People are willing to pay for poetry as long as you position your brand and talent adequately,” she advises. “This is no longer just my passion; it’s a paying job.”

Describing her plans for 2019 as simply “international!”, the elegant and ambitious poet is thrilled that everything she has been pushing for is finally taking form.

“I’m grateful to those standing with me to push this art form forward. Together, we are pioneering something phenomenal,” she says before a Google search reveals a post-‘The Architecture of Poetry’ YouTube Q&A with Nomonde Sky where Luvindao elaborates on why she loves poetry.

“Poetry is so intimate and it really just connects all the different sides of me. The intellectual side of me. The artistic side of me. I think it’s universal. Everybody speaks poetry.”