The World According To Denise Chaila
"If someone is going to give me a quest and send me on a journey, I want it to be me..."
“I’m bemused!” Zambian-born, Limerick-based poet, rapper and spoken word artist *Denise Chaila* laughs, looking back on the last 24 hours. The previous day, Chaila had been announced the winner of the RTE Choice Music Prize for Irish album of the year for her mixtape ‘Go, Bravely’. The mixtape marked only the second hip-hop album awarded the choice prize, the Irish equivalent of the Mercury award. The first hip-hop album to be awarded the prize was ‘Let The Dead Bury The Dead’ by fellow Limerick men *Rusangano Family*, an album which also marked Chaila’s musical debut as she featured on the track ‘Isn’t The Dinner Nice’.
“I think Nialler [Nialler9, Irish music blog] said that I would be shocked, and he’s right. I’m bemused to be nominated, because I was really clear about the fact that this was a mixtape,” she explains around the project’s categorisation. Growing up in the era of Lil Wayne, J Cole, Kendrick and Chance, The Rapper, Chaila had grown to appreciate a mixtape as an artist’s chance to truly express themselves and experiment before putting out their first major body of work with their debut album.
“These are also my training hours, in hip-hop we have traditions” Chaila describes. “Everyone who I love has started with a mixtape and you felt like you were able to be part of their journey before they released an album so I thought, in case I ever have a journey that’s as significant as what I feel there’s was, I have to have a mixtape moment where I’m just allowed to be”.
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Despite having released her debut single in 2019, with dual release of ‘Copper Bullet’ and ‘Dual Citizenship’, 2020 will forever be known as Denise Chaila’s year, in particular for her single ‘Chaila’. The track went on to become the soundtrack to a summer and catapulted Chaila into widespread national and international consciousness. “People sent me pictures and videos of their children responding to my music and that’s surreal because there’s a whole generation of children who are going to grow up hearing my music like how I grew up listening to Samantha Mumba,” she smiles, adding: “The idea that I could be someone that a child listens to the same way I listened to Britney [Spears] is amazing”.
What should have been a time of great joy, however, was tinged with pain as Chaila became the target of racial abuse online. This abuse escalated with the release of ‘Go, Bravely’. “There have been a lot of very critical decisions I’ve had to make in relation to my safety and trying to protect my family in the face of some very disappointing behaviour from some undesirable members of society has taken precedence over feeling ecstatic about my career,” Chaila recalls of *the online threats to her well being* brought about by the mixtapes success, which in turn lead her to ask RTÉ not to tag her in any posts on social media relating to the mixtape’s nomination for the choice prize, for fear of attracting vitriol.
Despite such difficulties, Chaila is quick to note how important people’s support for the project has been, saying that “it’s been a mark of the way people have received the music that despite the incredible flux of terrible things, I’ve still found incredible moments of joy where I realise that people are receiving the work as its intended to be”.
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Before moving to Ireland at the age of three, Denise Chaila was raised in the Chikankata district of Zambia, a child of two medical professionals. “The people in the village around us spoke in a language that was neither my mother or my father’s mother tongue, and it separated me a lot from kids my age,” Chaila recalls of her early childhood. Due to her parent’s profession, she grew up surrounded by medics from across the world, including some from countries such as Australia, New Zealand and China, meaning she would spend most of her time with adults rather than children her own age, allowing her to gather a wider view of the world.
At the time, she was being home-schooled by her mother and her mother’s friend. One day, she was being taught the words to ‘Twinkle Twinkle’ and misheard one of the lyrics as ‘like a demon in the sky’. Due to her traditional spiritual upbringing, the ideas of demons floating high above her in plain sight brought nightmares, and months of night terrors. “I couldn’t sleep for months,'' Chaila smiles, recalling the event.
In an effort to help her child sleep, Chaila’s mother began to flood the house with gospel music, and in particular the work of Belfast Christian songwriter Robin Mark. Denise was urged by her mother to sing Mark’s track ‘Jesus, All For Jesus’ whenever she was scared in the middle of the night, and taught her that this would keep her safe.
“For a really significant part of my childhood, a part of my self-soothing and my spiritual process was singing to myself to feel better,” Chaila explains, “I would wake up in the middle of the night and I would sing until I fell asleep again because I was scared. That slowly became my coping mechanism, so when things become really, really bad, I sing”.
Looking back, Chaila admits how important a moment that was in her relationship with music, and how in times of doubt she harkens back to it. “Wherever I’m going with my life, it starts with being a four-year-old girl who’s really scared who can only sing to her God to make things better” she adds, “Now I’m 27 and I’m still doing the same thing, except now I’m writing the music that I’m singing”.
Chaila spent her first number of years living in Dublin, where her parents had secured a job in Beaumont hospital. The family moved south to Limerick in 2012, when her father had been offered a position as a consultant neurologist. Chaila went on to study politics and international relations in the University of Limerick, before dropping out in her final year.
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Around the same time, however, she was developing a friendship with Rusangano Family members God Knows and Murli, whom she met at a Brazilian church. Noticing Chaila’s interest and passion for music, the pair invited her to take part in Music Generation Limerick, a branch of Ireland’s national music education process. Before long, Chaila was an integral part of the city’s vibrant musical community, and spent hours teaching classes in spoken word and rapping.
“People were transgressing genre, transgressing lyricism, transgressing stereotypes of what it meant to be that genre of musician, at a time where it was really cool to be a hipster and think things aren’t cool,” Chaila describes of the city’s musical development: “There was a moment in the city where these things were happening and we let them happen, we trusted the process. Looking back, I can see there were several moments that happened that were such a big deal because they’d never been done before”. It was around this time that Chaila recorded ‘Isn’t The Dinner Nice’, and made her mark on one of the most acclaimed Irish albums of recent years.
After dropping out of college, Chaila took some time to understand herself and what she wanted in life, which included spending a period of time in Zambia, a time she recalls as being full of more judgement. Feeling like she was the disappointment to her family and friends for leaving college, Chaila developed Psoriasis, a stress-related immune-deficiency.
“According to the people taking care of me I was very stressed, and it manifested in my body as a psychosomatic disease” she explained of the illness. After her recovery, she went back to college to study English and sociology, and despite loving it, she dropped out in final year in order to pursue her goal of becoming a musician. “It took a lot of effort, a lot of pain and a lot of time to say no, that I couldn’t dedicate myself to something I didn’t want to be or do,” she explained of her decision to leave college. That decision was met with a period which Chaila describes as full of “a lot of confusion and depression”. “I cried for two months'' she recalls, “and while crying I was working with Murli on ‘Go, Bravely’.
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Her awarding of the Choice Prize for ‘Go Bravely’, a mixtape that touches on subjects such as racism, self-doubt, mental health and the importance of diversity with the lyrical dexterity reminiscent of some of hip-hops eternal greats and Ireland’s illustrious bards, feels like a moment where Ireland simultaneously bowed to Chaila’s greatness and admitted that this was the least they could do.
As one commentator put it, the Choice prize needed Chaila more than Chaila needed it. Does she too see this win as the first step in a bigger plan or the accumulation of almost a decade of hard work?
“For me, Denise Chaila, my narrative spins far beyond what this moment is, but I want this moment to be special and part of making it special was making it healthy for me” she replies, diplomatically, “I honestly tried so hard not think about it until five minutes before they announced it, to keep it healthy for myself, to make this about my career and not make myself happy or sad for three weeks depending on the results”.
To do so, she did what she’s always done in moments of uncertainty or doubt, wrote music, because in her own words, in reference to her recent music video ‘Anseo’ featuring fellow Irish artist Jafaris, “the aim for me is always to make myself the final boss, to make myself my own Gandalf, and if someone is going to give me a quest and send me on a journey, I want it to be me”.
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Words: *Cailean Coffey*
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