A poet’s encounter with fear

When Wayne Samuel won his first national poetry slam, some thought it was a fluke. So he decided to re-apply for the slam’s next edition, to prove his doubters wrong. Then he became afraid, of failure

“I was coming back to take everyone down.” Illustration by Nonso  Brendan for The Question Marker

As he stepped forward to the microphone, he knew what many people did not know: he was about to win the 2017 War of Words (WoW) national slam. His greatest rival and one of the slam’s favourites, the dark-skinned Charlee, had just performed an energetic eulo…