We were lucky to catch up with Ayodele Nzinga- Damu recently and have shared our conversation below.

Ayodele, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Did you always know you wanted to pursue a creative or artistic career? When did you first know?

My first memory of being asked what I wanted to do when I grew up started my pursuit of the arts, but it was seeded earlier.
I have told the story of the Christmas Pageant so many times that it remains vivid in my mind decades later.
I lived with my maternal grandmother as a preschooler. Grandma was a member of the Church of God in Christ and her church presented an annual Christmas play. When offered a chance to participate in Sunday school and expressed interest in playing the role of Mary Magdalene.
I was a bit disappointed to be given the role of the Christmas angel instead, but I embraced the chance, and when I was instructed to learn all the lines –I did exactly that.
The afternoon of the performance became and has remained the time when my path was revealed. It was not uber clear from the beginning but as with most things in hind-sight my current understanding of the moment’s significance is crystal clear.
We smalls, gathered in our home made costumes in the church in front of the altar. Parents, grandparents, siblings, and other church members made up our attentive audience. As the choir came to a close behind us quiet fell in the room and the audience/congregation looked at us expectantly from the pews. The room was silent. We waited for Mary to speak. She did not.
I looked over to see a petrified Mary who seemed not to know what to say. I watched for what I think may not have been a sufficient amount of time for her to recover and then I acted. I said her lines and that seemed to make her more terrified and it threw off Joseph who should have answered Mary, but he said nothing– so I said his lines. The angle spoke next and so I said my own lines and continued the play as a monologue.
As the play concluded my grandmother exploded into singular applause. Others in the pews looked amazed and confused as did Mary and Joesph but they all slowly burst into applause as well.
I felt a curious kind of power— the ability to garner attention and was awe struck that knowing and saying words could elicit such a response.
No story was ever the same for me after that. Not even the story of me — who felt too aware of self as a site of invention, trauma, myth, and needed from very early to be in charge of that self and to create worlds for it to inhabit.
A few years later at the ripe old age of 8 I would be asked, “what do you want to be when you grow up?” I responded I want to be an actress.
Those were the words I had. What I came to understand was I wanted to control/create the story of me, of the world, of the things I thought about and yearned for in a world. I came to know that I am a story teller and there is no way for me to escape that. All roads lead to it and it saved me and gave me a life in which all my best jobs were written by me. A world in which my childhood dreams came true and provided me with a way of being in the world that sustains me.
When I said I wanted to be an actress I was told it wasn’t the right dream for me a small Black girl who should dream closer to the ground, be practical, be safe.
What I do for a living is my way of being in the world— I would be the storyteller wherever I was. It is my great fortune to be a storyteller with a theater and a troupe. It is my singular delight to be the Poet Laureate of Oakland. To have stages and pages to expand upon is a storytellers dream. I create therefore I am— and it’s always been like that. If not for imagination I wouldn’t have made it. The ablilty to dream out loud has served me well and I could tell you some stories but it’s impossible not to immensely grateful for knowing my purpose and being in that purpose.

Ayodele, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I have been described in numerous ways: actress, playwright, director, producer, cultural anchor, a Renaissance woman, multi-disciplined, and a polymath. The range of descriptors is indicative of my 360 approach to life. I think of myself as a big-picture person, and my favorite sobriquet is “the truth.” Although my epithet as the WordSlanger is equally apt. It’s said I’ve a way with words. Words and a relationship with truth are foundational for a storyteller.

Situated thusly, I founded and ran a theater company, Lower Bottom Playaz, Oakland’s oldest North American African Theater Company. The company is in its 26 season and is the only troupe on earth to have completed the August Wilson American Century Cycle chronologically. The troupe’s work has been the subject of international scholarly inquiries and reviews.
My work is site-specific in a nuanced way and deeply connected to Oakland, CA. It focuses on the West Oakland area known as The Lower Bottoms, aka the Harlem of the West. My theater practice has been in West Oakland since its inception in 1999, the site of the work intentionally connected to the first community I ever lived in on purpose/by choice. This community is an echo of South Africa, Cite Soilie, and other similarly marginalized spaces.
We are currently in residency at BAM House on Broadway in Oakland.
BAM House was founded in 2023 by the Black Arts Movement Business District, Community Development Corporation, which I founded in 2016 to animate Oakland’s first official cultural district.
The founding of the cultural district offered a unique opportunity to become involved in fighting the displacement of artists and people of color by supporting the development of the district as a space for creativity-driven solutions to endemic and systemically entwined challenges to thriving for marginalized spaces and at-promise populations.
As the Executive Director of BAMBD CDC and the lead curator of BAM House, I collaborate with other community-based organizations and artists to create opportunities for economic development, cultural cohesion, and participation in the public square and offer a safe third space for the community.
Under all the hats resides a singular logic — how do we best construct the story of thriving for all peoples? How do we, informed by the social determinants of health, create environments that promote good physical and mental health, robust and edifying education, financial stability, and the circumstances that ensure continued thriving? How do we address the cost of not living in these situations, and what is the bridge from here to there over time?
I envision this as Century work that requires systems change and an interconnected dedication to shifting habits of mind and action over time and through immediate changes in practice.
For me, the story of the possibilities, the creation of what is needed from what currently exists, and dreaming outside the boxes get us where we want to go. All good adventures need a story. The story of a thing is our why and how; it will be the roadmap to embrace or ignore as time progresses.
I am proud of the breadth of the work and its single-mindedness — it’s all about humans thriving and finding/having resources, time, space, and inclination to be the best human possible.
I have worked with, for, and in the community for over 4 decades in these formations. I have worked with multiple generations within families and raised a family in a community of creatives — we are deeply rooted and perpetually productive. We pray with our hands moving and create community one story at a time.
As an indie artist, I am producing a new stage series. Government Housing is onstage in April, and then I will go into production for Wilson’s Two Trains Runnin,g which is a mainstage production for the 7th BAMBDFEST, a month-long International Arts Festival produced by BAMBD CDC. I am copublishing a new anthology while working on a new full-length book of poetry. My latest album, Ghetto Grimoire, will be released in late spring 2025.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

You will be tested on any worthwhile quest. It is a talent to know when to change course. We plan so we know when we are off course. It can be brave to admit you are not going where you thought; conceding and beginning again is sometimes refreshing.
I have been presented with situations where quitting was expected and could be easily understood. For example, when the theater was built for my use, the Sister Thea Memorial in the Lower Bottoms at the now-defunct Joseph Prescott Center went dark. I was in the middle of the chronological production of Wilson’s Century Cycle. We were in rehearsal for Fences, and my angel, the center’s director, told me we needed to pause production for a year, and then we could continue the project. Having built the theater and being in control of the center where the theater was gave my angel the upper hand, or so he thought.
In fact, my troupe had outgrown the space, and we were ready to level up.I pulled the production without a dime of production money, and we did theater in a museum on our way to our venue on Broadway in downtown Oakland.
We fell forward. It’s become a habit!
Knowing when to ignore everything, pulling up your blinders, and putting one foot before the other until it’s done is also a talent.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

The ability to find ways out of no way time after time—the feeling of innovation, inspiration, and the certainty of being limitless. The power to bring beauty and joy into spaces that yearn for it. The privilege of changing hearts and minds through the presentation of art.
I am fulfilling my purpose. I am the storyteller. My stories save lives, do battle, help folks out of ditches, and makes you taller than you were before you encountered them. Their presentation validates my being.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://ayodelenzinga.com
• Instagram: wordslanger
• Facebook: wordslanger, lower bottom playaz, black arts movement business district community developement corporation
• Linkedin: ayodele nzinga
• Twitter: wordslanger
• Youtube: wordslanger
• Other: BlueSky wordslanger
  Band Camp wordslanger

Image Credits

we inhale production and publishing
eeesu orundide
Jim Dennis
TaSin Sabir