Wanawana’s “Dissonance” Takes You Through the Full Range of Being Human

The question at the heart of the first track on Wana Udobang’s new album, Dissonance, lingers long after its slightly over-one-minute runtime. Over drums, keys and the rattle of percussion, Udobang—who performs as Wanawana—asks a series of questions about the contradictions, frustrations and unfinishedness that shape a human life. Her voice carries the weight of the poem as she returns, again and again, to the same question:

Are you not tired?

Of the self-loathing

Of the dissonance

Of being a work in progress.

Are You Not Tired sets the pace for the album’s remaining 13 tracks. An album is more than a collection of songs; at its best, it is a body of work in which individual pieces contribute to a larger idea, narrative or emotional journey. On Dissonance, Udobang takes her listeners on two seemingly opposing journeys, weaving them together so naturally that, in the lucidity of her poetry, you might not notice where one ends and the other begins.

Udobang is an artist in the fullest sense of the word. Her work moves fluidly between poetry, journalism, radio, television, event hosting, essays and exhibition curation. It has been six years since she released Transcendence, yet the distance between that album and Dissonance does not feel like a pause. Udobang is constantly translating the world around her into art.

She approaches her poetry albums as explorations of violence and repair. Each album contains both darkness and light, like yin and yang—not opposing forces so much as interconnected ones, existing simultaneously and shaping each other. In Dissonance, this tension becomes especially pronounced: violence is not simply what happens to us, and repair is not simply what comes after. The two are entangled.

When I ask Udobang about her approach to themes, she explains that she doesn’t necessarily begin with them. “I’m writing about the things that have happened in my life and the lives of other women around me. I do think my life’s work is very much underpinned by an exploration of violence on the lives of women, and that is physical violence, political, economic, and psychic violence which I think is the most insidious one.”

Like her previous poetry albums, Dirty Laundry (2013), In Memory of Forgetting (2017), and Transcendence (2020), Dissonance is an exploration of darkness and light, but it is also, unmistakably, a feminist work. What makes the album sing, however, is the accumulation of Udobang’s earnest truths: the things women endure, the things they are taught to swallow, and what they carry after everyone else has moved on.

Thick Skin sits firmly in the yin of the album. It tells the story of a woman subjected to a series of painful experiences. The song moves through trauma and depressive episodes with such intimacy that the listener is made to inhabit the sting of each memory.

I wanted to tell her about the teacher at boarding school who would whip my back till the welts weeped with blood because my skin was layered with extra flesh so it needed to be open to absorb the lessons

Or the time my father asked me to drink his tea because his relatives had informed him that my mother had laced it with poison and if this was true at least I would be the one to die

The instruction that follows experiences like these is almost always the same: grow a thick skin. Udobang turns that familiar admonition into something artistic. The track becomes an answer to the expectation that people should simply become tougher in order to survive what hurts them.

It is one of my favourite tracks because, in many ways, life demands a thick skin. Get cheated at the market and cry about it, and someone will tell you to toughen up. Be betrayed by a colleague and show your hurt, and you might hear the same thing. We are taught to survive by becoming less sensitive to the things that wound us. But Thick Skin asks what happens when surviving means becoming so accustomed to pain that nobody thinks to look beyond the skin, to the person still carrying it?

When Will You Stop Writing About Trauma is the seventh track, sitting at the album’s exact midpoint. It becomes the place where the two halves meet. Here, Udobang speaks about wanting to write about love, friendship, peace, the “good” things, but finds herself unable to get there without violence intruding. It raises a question at the heart of the album: how do you write about repair in a world that hasn’t stopped producing things to repair from? And yet, she keeps writing.

What follows is Novena, Take Me Back, When Love Arrives, and A Manifesto for Friendship—poems about self-love, loving the body, romantic love, friendship and the tender possibilities of being alive. In this sense, the second half of Dissonance is not an escape from the violence of the first. It is Udobang’s answer to it. The act of writing about love, tenderness and connection becomes its own form of repair.

Udobang describes her art as an invitation: an attempt to make meaning from life while inviting her audience into the process of making sense of it with her. What distinguishes Dissonance from her previous albums, she says, is its attention to the world beyond the self, the ways it is shifting, and how those changes shape our collective experience.

Dissonance takes you through the full range of being human, acknowledging that there will be good days and bad ones, violence and tenderness, things that break us and things that help put us back together. It warns, teaches and comforts, holding darkness and light in the same body without asking either to cancel the other out. 

Udobang wants her listeners to know that they are not alone, and that repair is not a privilege reserved for those who have somehow escaped pain. We are all entitled to it, and we are already participating in it, sometimes in ways as simple as loving and choosing to remain tender in a world that gives us every reason not to.

“I hope that we know the ways in which we are actively repairing our lives and the lives of those around us through how we experience joy, love, and friendship,” she says.