Blind Plea - Introducing: Mind Your Own with Lupita Nyong’o

Episode Date: September 19, 2024

We’re excited to tell you about a brand new storytelling show – hosted and produced by the amazing Lupita Nyong’o – that we are just loving. It’s called Mind Your Own, and it’s about navigating what it means to belong, all from the African perspective.  Lupita Nyong’o knows what home feels like. But where exactly is it? In Mexico, where she was born? Kenya, where she grew up? Or the States, where she’s spent the past 20 years? Like Lupita, millions of Africans are spread out across the globe following family, searching for love, building futures and creating stories. It's these stories – wild and messy, intimate and joyous – that she wants to hear. Here’s a sneak peek of Mind Your Own episode 1. It’s about what it’s like to try to find your voice. You’ll hear a story from Lupita, and then you’ll meet a Ghanaian who rediscovered his voice after losing it. Mind Your Own – listen to the full episode wherever you get your podcasts or head to https://lemonada.lnk.to/mindyourownfd.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

LEMONADA Hey listeners, we are taking a break from our regularly scheduled programming. We want to introduce you to a brand new storytelling show, hosted and produced by the amazing Lupita Nyong'o that we are just loving. It's called Mind Your Own, and it's about navigating what it means to belong, all from the African perspective. Lupita reveals parts of her life that she's never shared before and dives into nuanced, intimate stories from Africans around the world. Get ready for some incredible original music

and sound design. This show is gonna strap you into a stunt plane, sneak you into a cemetery, and get you that plus one all access to the Oscars red carpet. Here's a sneak peek of Mind Your Own, Episode 1. It's about what it's like to try to find your voice. You'll hear a story from Lupita, and then you'll meet a Ghanaian

who rediscovered his voice after losing it. Mind Your Own, listen to the full episode and the rest of the 10-part series on podcast platforms everywhere. This is Mind Your Own, a storytelling show navigating what it means to belong, all from the African perspective. And I'm your host Lupita Nyong'o. Mind your own. That's a phrase I've heard used throughout the continent.

It's both an admonition and an invitation. It's mind your own business, like deal with what you're dealing with, you know? But it's also like mind your own people. Find them, take care of them. So when I think about that phrase, for me, this podcast is about me minding my business and my business is African stories. I grew up surrounded by African stories. Those experiences, not the hot button news reports that we get a whole lot of, but the

nuanced, intimate stories are extremely interesting to me. I want to help share them and tell a few of my own. And it is a way for me as a homesick person to feel more at home. So in this podcast series we're going to the village and the big city. We're going to sneak into a cemetery, hop onto a stunt plane, hit the red carpet at the Academy Awards, and maybe make an escape in a getaway car. We're going to Kenya and Canada, Ghana and Saudi Arabia, Nigeria and South Africa and beyond. We're going home. In order to create this podcast, I had to get very comfortable with my voice.

I'm like fixing my voice, trying to find that perfect radio voice. Welcome to The Sundowner, live from New York City. Today, a little bit of jazz as the sun goes down. It has not been easy. I've long had a complicated relationship with the way I speak. You'll see what I mean. While I was an undergrad, I held on to my Kenyan accent for dear life. I had seen so many Kenyans, not even get off the plane and all of a sudden they have an

American accent, you know. I would eat tater tots, that's okay, but I would hold on to my accent. After I graduated from undergrad, I was in New York. I was an assistant. I had to do things like QuickBooks. I have no business doing QuickBooks. I call my mom and I say, hey, I don't want to do this. I decided that I wanted to be an actor. When I showed up at the Yale School of Drama, I made this pact with myself that I

would learn how to sound American in a way that would guarantee me a career in acting. Because obviously, I didn't know very many people in movies and television with Kenyan accents. There was just no market for that. Casting is unforgiving. It's so hard to suspend people's disbelief if they've seen something in you that they have an unconscious bias about. And I knew that Africa was the unknown element, and I didn't want it in the room. So I made that commitment to myself that I would do lessons twice a week to figure out technically what this American accent actually is in my mouth.

I had an accent coach, actually two accent coaches, that's how serious I was about it. There were just these sounds that were hellish, like the word C-A-N apostrophe T. As a Kenyan, I would say that as can't, and Americans say can't. And oh my God, just like sound, can't. And it just sounded so off, couldn't. That's very American, couldn't. Because I say couldn't.

And so what it was is that the Kenyan accent is you pronounce everything. It's therefore pronouncing. So pronounce it. One of the main ways that I could test how well I was doing with my accent was automated voice messages. Hello. This call may be recorded. When you call your phone service provider or something. For billing, press one. For billing, press one. Or say, for no, press no. And so I'm practicing my American accent, so I'm going to choose to say the things.

And I want to see how far I can get. And so sometimes I got far, other times I gave up. My classmates always loved my accent. We were rehearsing a play. We had an assignment, a group of us, maybe five actors. We were devising a show together. And one of my classmates, she's giving an idea of how we should move. She says, okay, so how about you guys come over here and then we can form a curlicue

and then we can go back and then we can start the scene. I didn't fully understand what she meant. I raised my hand and said, you spoke of a curlicue. What is that? And everybody burst out laughing. In that moment, everyone was so tickled because of my choice of words. Like, you spoke of a curly Q. I guess that's not very American. Oh God, I still have work to do.

The hardest was calling home. Hi mommy, how are you? It was very uncomfortable for me to do that. It was just, it felt like a shirt that just didn't fit, you know? An itchy shirt that didn't fit. And I was so afraid to let go of the exercise because I knew that it was in repetition that it would stay. And the idea was to stick to an American accent

until it became second nature so that I could reach for it whenever I wanted it. that I could reach for it whenever I wanted it. My very first meeting with a casting director and her saying, asking me about where I was from, and I said, Kenya, and she said, oh my goodness, you don't have an accent. And it was, I was at once so elated and also so crushed. I had rid myself of myself, kind of.

Right before I graduated, I auditioned for this movie called 12 Years a Slave. It starred some heavy hitters. I mean, you're talking Brad Pitt and Cheritel Ejiofor and Michael Fassbender, these names that I had, you know, people that I'd studied and grown up watching. It was just so bizarre. And now I was cast in that movie.

They had an edit of it and they had an understanding of what this might do for my career. I had this Ghanaian-British friend who also worked as an agent. Before I started press for 12 years as a slave, he asked me, Lupisa, what's the story with your accent? I can understand why you would do that for an American market, but the truth is that the stage you're going to be on is a global one. And do you want to send a message of an American accent being more valuable than your own?

I remember being so stunned by that. accent being more valuable than your own. I remember being so stunned by that. Like the truth is like at the end of the day, I never wanted to lose my authenticity. I called my reps and we had a conference call and I said, I've decided that from tomorrow, I am going to return to my original accent. I want to send a message that being an African is enough, you know? They'd never heard me speak in a Kenyan accent. So they were like, well, we look forward to hearing what that sounds like.

And I was like, yeah, I look forward to it too, you know. I gave myself the weekend, actually. I don't think it was an immediate thing because I was just like, oh my God, I don't, you know, it was like this, my American accent was this, what can I call it? It was a harness that had been holding me for so long and all of a sudden, like, how am I not gonna have my harness? I needed a few days to wrap my head around it. I'd also prepped my roommate as well.

I remember waking up and going to the kitchen to see her and trying to remember how to say good morning in a Kenyan accent. And what came out was so neither here nor there. And I realized, oh my God, there is no turning back. It sounded like what I sound like now. I say a few words that sound Kenyan, others that sound deceptively British, others that sound American, and I couldn't find myself in my mouth anymore. I just felt like, yeah, the word is imposter. And I just wept.

Then I spoke to my mom and she said, your accent is representative of your life experience. That gave me like, solace, you know, that an accent is actually born of, it comes to being from your life. And accent just like skin and hair, it can change. And it's okay, you know?

I guess this accent is called Lupita. I don't know who can claim it, but me. We'll be back in a quick second. Stay tuned. Welcome back. You're listening to Mind Your Own. In my story, I get all kinds of mixed up whenever I try to express myself. Some people don't have that issue. They know their voice.

They know exactly who they are every time they open their mouths to speak. But, does the world really hear what they have to say? Today, on Mind Your Own, we're passing the mic to Yao Atausu, someone who knows that struggle. Our story starts in Germany in the late 1980s when a young couple Yao and Mary had just moved there from Ghana.

I hope you'll listen. I got home and I said to my wife, I lied to the guy. I don't know what happened to me. I've lied to somebody and I'm still thinking about it. I shouldn't have, but I don't know what I did. This was a guy Yao met at the post office, of all places. Yao was in line, sending a letter back home to Ghana, when this man just came up to him from nowhere and said, are you a musician? I looked at his face and I said, I play the drums, because that was the only thing that

could come to mind. And he said, oh yeah, I'm looking for a drummer. So I told my wife that I was going to use the dinner table, dining table, as my drum set. While I was playing on my dining table, and my wife said, you are disturbing me because there's no way you're going to make it. My wife said, call the guy right now and apologize and tell him you're not a musician. I didn't listen to her, so I started training, playing, playing.

I wouldn't even sleep. Five days later, the guy came, picked me up. Two years into living in Germany, Yao was still struggling to find work. He didn't speak German, so he was ready to jump on any opportunity that came his way, even one as strange as this one. The man from the post office drove Yao to a big building, a rehearsal space, and he put him in front of a drum set.

As soon as I got there, for the first time in my life, I sat on the drums. And I remembered what I was playing on my dining table using both legs. I got so scared. But there was one thing that I could do. I could hold on to the tempo. By tempo I mean how fast or how slow it goes and how you are able to keep the timing.

That was, that I was very good. So after the session, I was expecting the guy to say, nah man, you can't believe that, but he said, man, you're good. And I thought he was joking. How could I be good? Yow came back home, sat down at the dinner table, and ate dinner with his wife. I told her that I didn't embarrass myself.

She didn't believe me, but that was okay because I knew I was telling her the truth. After maybe some months, two or three months, I gained confidence. And so I was able to play the way I wanted to play. The only thing that I couldn't do at that time was I couldn't play any drum phrase or drum roll. And by that I mean that I couldn't do that. But playing straight, I was so good. But Yao had a point to prove. He took his wife to rehearsal to show her the songs he'd been working on.

When she saw me, you know, playing it on drums, singing some that I had written myself, it was amazing. See my pregnant wife dancing to the tunes or singing. It was awesome. I just loved it. Yes, all that time Yao had been banging away in the middle of the night on those drums, his wife had been pregnant. But as happy as he was playing, the truth was the music, the band, the idea of building a future in Germany was over.