It began with the realization that sadness had been living in my mouth long before I ever spoke it. That grief had been rehearsing inside me, awaiting  acknowledgement.

You’ve Been Needing Sadness
is a pilgrimage into the violences within grief we carry
the adamant memories that refuse to leave
the soreness that follows us across borders and into new lives

is an attempt to name what cannot be named
to touch what has no shape
to listen to the emotional aftershocks of displacement

is a failure to forget
a refusal to move on
a surrender to feeling
until feeling becomes
performance, ritual, euphoria and release

Darling, I am Sunni, and I work with the hidden cartographies of interior wounds
the grief that colonizes the body
the loneliness of migration
the tender, unspoken weights and joys inside queer diasporic life

You’ve Been Needing Sadness invites you into a space where sorrow is not a burden, but a guide, a landing to breathe, to ache, to laugh, to witness, to participate
and maybe, just maybe, to finally let something go

Sunni Lamin Barrow (1998, The Gambia) is a literary artist, performing curator, and critical practitioner. Working across spoken word, theater, writing, and interdisciplinary performance, his work moves through the psychological terrain of trauma, memory, and displacement, shaped by the queer and diasporic realities of his life. He refuses fixed notions of identity or belonging, turning to the overlapping and unstable spaces where selves are fractured and remade instead.

Through poetic text, embodied performance, and ritualized sound, Sunni creates spaces where grief and joy, queerness and blackness, rootedness and mobility coexist. His work insists that the inner life, the traces of what is carried, forsaken, and remembered is inseparable from the social and political forces that shape it.

Trying to Hold That Which Slips: Sunni Lamin Barrow

Sunni: This research positions spoken word as both method and medium for articulating absence, grief, and relational inquiry, proposing spoken word theatre as an emergent genre. Structured in three stanzas, the work explores how language and spatial practice intersect to produce a distinct performative form.

Stanza One employs a performative invocation that draws on Saidiya Hartman’s critical fabulation to render absence affectively present, framing spoken language as a site of inquiry rather than representation.
Stanza Two investigates relational and communal processes, experimenting with the notion of a duplicated self, and engaging Fred Moten’s fugitive poetics to examine how grief, memory, and attention circulate through audience interaction, highlighting the genre’s improvisational and polyvocal tendencies.
Stanza Three extends the practice into the physical and spatial dimensions of the theatre, integrating the kinetic energies of slam and Def Jam poetry with Richard Schechner’s performance theory to demonstrate how spoken word becomes an embodied, relational event, where listening and responsiveness become central to the practice.

In the Space Between Words:

Elsemarijn Hijweege in Dialogue with Peggy Olislaegers

Peggy: When I met Sunni, I sensed an urgency and clarity of intention that aligns with what spoken word theater can hold. Spoken word theater, for me, is a form of resistance, a way for the voice to emerge when speaking feels impossible. In a theatre context, that voice does not just speak; it resonates, occupies space, and becomes present through ritual. As we explore grief in this form, I am reminded how vital it is to reclaim one’s voice in mourning.

Elsemarijn: Sunni and I’s collaboration made space for how grief could reveal itself – not by trying to give themselves a face or form, but by creating space for the connection between what is absent and what is ‘in sight’. In exploring how absence could be constitutive of being, we let the texts speak to us again and again, without trying to possess them. The core of our practice is the commitment of attention and care for the languages that exist within the evolving work.

Peggy: Spoken word theater invites a different kind of attention. You listen and drift, letting meaning arrive gradually. I experience something similar in dance, my attention moves like breath: outward to what unfolds, inward to what is stirred in my body. It is a practice of remaining present even when something is not yet fully understood.

Elsemarijn: This is a praxis of being present even when something feels incomprehensible.

Peggy: The form offers a framework for that presence. Within its crafted ritual, we rehearse receptivity and let language, body, and space work together.

Elsemarijn: We experimented with textural recompositions within the texts, seeking to lay bare and counterpose the ways in which the entanglements of our planetary condition perform.

Peggy: We could ask all the necessary questions: How can theater strengthen spoken words’ lineage and how can spoken word theater expand Western theater practice? And how might this exchange reshape the encounter with an audience?

Rebels Within The Work

Author  –  Sunni Lamin Barrow
Co-composition and Performer  –  Elsemarijn Hijweege
External advisers  –  Peggy Olislaegers x Berith Danse
Tutor  –  Zhana Ivanova
Editorial Adviser  –  Amanda Payne
Light Designer  –  Thomas Brand
Technical conductor – Zvonka Barbir
Co-Scenographers  –  Elsemarijn Hijweege, Ginger Verhagen
Sound Designer  –  Robin Plenio
Gratitude  –  Kees Roorda, Thomas Johannsen, Yinske Silva, Dwayne Toemere, Ashley Stapelfeldt, Maarten van Hinte, Phantom Wizard, Daniëlle Zawadi, Jia Ming-Yu, Mayo Hoppen, Peteris Viksna, Isobel MacKinnon,  Nicholas Kirutharshan, Lars Koning, Dean Bowen, and My DAS Theatre Peers.