Oriane Sohai - Poet/Writer

Oriane is a 20 year-old writer, poet, and DJ. She is Senegalese-Cape Verdean, born in Senegal, Dakar, but was raised in Amsterdam.

@origine._ on Instagram

“I’ve been writing poetry for a very long time, since I was little. I was a very active kid but at the same time I was very introverted. I noticed that, at a very early age, I was thinking about a lot of stuff that most of my peers didn’t, so writing it down [...] was a way for me to understand myself better. I used writing as a way to cope mentally and emotionally. That’s how writing and poetry started. I found this whole new way of expressing myself through words and metaphors. It gave me a lot of joy. It was my own little hidden treasure that nobody knew of, you know. [Now], except from poetry, I write articles, which I really love to do. It could be articles about anything, and I’m currently focusing on writing about music and the effects of music in today’s society. I don’t have a blog yet but I’m working on putting that up because I really want other people to see what I write and make. I’ve [also] been DJing for a while now, and I’m really liking it. I’m hoping that I can get some gigs soon (laughs). I have a new EP coming out as well. It’s music combined with poetry—it’s my first solo project. It’ll be an extension of the sounds of where I come from, my heritage, and my thoughts and words of the past few years. It’ll be called ORÍ.”

What place does writing take in your everyday life?

“I write at random moments throughout the day. I have so many thoughts and I feel so many ways about certain things that I usually have my phone with me. I have this tendency when I hear words or something and I’m like ‘Oh, I gotta write this down.’ Whenever I have a thought, an emotion, I just put it down in my phone and then I start writing something to it. So I guess I incorporate it in that way at certain moments of the day and then it flourishes into something like a piece. I also tend to carry a notebook around with a pen in it, and I take it everywhere with me. It’s just like this little black book that I take everywhere. It looks so official (laughs) but it just has the feeling, you know. I just write random things in there. Some of the things I write [...] I don't even consider them to be poetry, like spoken words. It’s just thoughts on paper. It’s also a very nice thing to just do."

What would you suggest for someone who wants to write?

“Don’t doubt what you write because I feel like, for you to really believe in what you write, you have to have pride in what you’ve written, whether it be good or bad.

I think the pride is in being able to express a certain emotion within you that you never had thought you could have written in that way. So that, to me, that’s the pride. Just like: ‘oh wow! I can have pride in having a certain emotional intelligence which enables me to write it down in real life.’ So I guess that’s the pride: being able to just intelligently deal with your emotions and being proud of what you write. Imagine if I write something and I’m really feeling this, my own validation of it is already what can make me feel proud of myself, you know.

Having pride in what you do makes your work automatically good, you know. Don’t doubt what you write, and be willing to be vulnerable. [Also], if you write something down, and you want to scratch it away—this is something I do a lot—write it somewhere else because everything that you write down has a significance. You don’t necessarily have to add something to it. You can always scratch something away but a lot of times, when you leave something out, you don’t honour the piece. That’s what I think."

On Instagram: @origine._