On Devotion & The Black Divine

There is a particular panic in the feeling of time moving faster than you can hold it. A moment arrives between things; not before, or after, but in the middle of, suspended—when the body is still, and something in the air is not. It’s July and the sun has arrived stubbornly, prickly and overripe without any apology after months of grey patience. Months of waiting with our hands open. We stood at windows during the cold rain of February willing it into being and now the light lasts so late you forget the dark is coming, or that it ever came at all. We are resting now. Returning to the body after time long spent elsewhere. It is in this stillness, in this slow and honeyed light, that I have found myself returning, again and again, to anaiis. To Devotion and the Black Divine. Nine heavy months since its release it has followed me with an unrelenting persistence—both of us, it seems, much too stubborn to let go. 

 

The album came out last September, the fifth project from the French-Senegalese singer-songwriter born in Toulouse and raised across Dublin, Dakar, Oakland, New York and London. Whilst a solo studio album, ‘solo’ feels slightly misleading for a piece of work so full of other voices and perspectives. Songs dissolve into poetry and poetry opens up into dialogue. Thinkers, artists, and activists drift between and alongside the music talking about rest, grief, and surrender. Nothing insists upon itself too quickly. It is a body of work that allows you to remain unresolved, here and now. Uncertain, but alive and trembling—perhaps the most honest way to be. Listening to it now, months later, I am struck by the feeling of having encountered a way of moving through the world that is gentler, slower, and more open to being changed. In a world so fast moving it mistakes pace for meaning, anaiis asks what becomes possible when we are still and when we rest. I don’t think Devotion & The Black Divine offers answers to these questions. It does, however, give us permission to sit with them, as I have, stretched out beneath the sun’s heavy palm and letting it ask nothing of me, its bristling heat indifferent and forgiving, endless. 

 

When speaking to BBC Radio 6 Music presenter Zakia Sewell about the album’s title, anaiis explained that it was inspired by bell hooks and ‘the Black women who have reformed the way we think about love’ which unlocks much of what the album is reaching towards. Ja’Tovia Gary, multidisciplinary filmmaker and artist whose own practice is built upon what bell hooks termed an ‘oppositional gaze’, and upon Black feminist subjectivity and the interior life of Blackness as subject rather than object, understands this intimately. Her interlude opens with tinkling laughter before Gary offers up, ‘the idea that love is just a feeling, that’s crazy. Maya Angelou says love is the thing that holds the stars in the firmament. Like that’s how foundational, that’s how primordial, that’s how essential love is, it’s more than just a feeling.’ Throughout Devotion & The Black Divine, love emerges precisely in those terms, as not something you just feel but something you are made of— always have been and always will be. Look to the stars for your proof. 

 

This understanding of love runs into the album’s central concern with Black divinity. ‘There’s so much divinity in Blackness’ anaiis tells Sewell, asking us to think about Blackness outside the frameworks through which it is so often visible, whether that be struggle, resistance, or the very survival that makes it difficult to imagine otherwise. Here, Blackness is approached through a sacred kind of intimacy. It is an expansive site of possibility. The album feels diasporic in the truest sense as it allows multiple conversations about Black identity to exist alongside one another without demanding they collapse into a single story. The influence of Black feminist thinkers such as bell hooks, adrienne maree brown, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs threads throughout the record. This is particularly in its understanding of tenderness as a politics of survival, a refusal of the hardening so often demanded of Black life—as well as love as attention and practice, a willingness to sit with discomfort rather than seeking to immediately escape it. It’s an album unlike anything I have heard before. Tender and delicate with a fragility akin to something just born, still finding its breath, asking to be received softly. 

 

Devotion & The Black Divine was recorded live to tape at 5dB studios in London, a decision audible in every moment where the music shifts before you have quite prepared yourself. It unfolds like a gathering, like arriving late to a conversation already alive with meaning and finding, to your relief, that there is room for you anyways. You have always been welcome here. At the centre of this gathering is motherhood. anaiis has described the birth of her son as a ‘kind of rebirth’, an experience that fundamentally altered her relationship to music making. In conversation with poet and liberation psychologist Sanah Ahsan, whose practice is rooted in community psychology, and whose debut poetry collection was described by The Guardian as an ‘invocation to bare the soul’, anaiis traces the concept of remothering alongside Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ definition of ‘revolutionary mothering’. This understands mothering and caregiving as a political world making practice as opposed to a biological imperative. To see everyone as someone’s child is a reorganisation of perception, one that makes tenderness not a private feeling but a way of moving through the world with unconditional care. Remothering asks us to tend to the parts of ourselves that were not sufficiently held, to return to ourselves what we need and what we may not have received. 

 

It’s difficult work. anaiis makes an album out of it. 

 

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the track Here Comes The Sun, it has become my daily companion. Over warm, gradually swelling instrumentation anaiis sings, 

 

‘I know you feel alone, that you don’t feel strong right now. 

You’re hard to recognise, joy is harder to come by.
How to reconcile the love, the grief, your whole new life.
Befriend the moon, feel its light on you.
Here comes the sun.’ 

 

The confession that precedes the promise of sunlight—‘you’re hard to recognise’—is a frightening one, as it names that particular estrangement from yourself that arrives after days spent moving too fast, feeling too much, and holding too many things that were never yours to carry alone. anaiis doesn’t soften or rush past it towards the comfort waiting on the other side. She tells us that joy is harder to come by. Quietly devastating. It is not gone. It is not impossible. It is harder to come by, further away than it used to be, requiring more of you to reach. To be named in your difficulty is to be less alone in it. Perhaps that’s why this album is so resonant, it doesn’t intend to resolve the ache so much as to make it more habitable. It reminds me of Caleb Azumah Nelson’s instruction to ‘gaze at the fading scar but do not dwell.’ To look fully without flinching and then to keep it moving. It’s a generous ask—to be seen without being kept but anaiis offers us exactly that. She looks at you directly, names what she finds, and then gently points you back towards the light. 

 

Motherhood sits behind these lines, certainly. But so does grief, and transformation, and the slow process of the self changing alongside the changes of life. The word I keep returning to is ‘reconcile’. anaiis understands that some of life’s most profound experiences demand that we hold contradictory emotions simultaneously. Love and grief. Joy and exhaustion. Hope and the acute awareness that it can be taken away from you. The instruction to ‘befriend the moon’ is one of the most beautiful moments on the album. Not to conquer darkness or wait patiently for it to pass; but to sit beside it, to stay and learn its shape. To remain in love even when everything in you is telling you to flee. There is a discipline in this kind of devotion. Then, and only then, does the sun arrive. It will keep arriving, so long as you’re willing to stay. 

 

This willingness to remain beside uncertainty appears in the interludes by Sanah Ahsan, which help articulate many of the questions the music already asks. In conversation with anaiis after the album’s release, Ahsan reflects, ‘I think that in any work of love, which is kind of my orientating compass in all of the work that i do, it requires risk, a risk of a broken heart, a risk of loss, a risk of grief, of harm, of being misunderstood. I am deepening my practice and capacity to hold the discomfort of risk.’ Love, then, is not certainty. It is risk. It is fear held open. It is the decision to remain despite the possibility of being wounded, and the decision not to flee when the wounding comes anyway. This understanding of tenderness places the album within a lineage of Black feminist thought that refuses to sever the personal from the political. bell hooks argued for decades that love is a transformative political force, not strictly romantic love, but love as a practice of liberation, a refusal of domination and self-abandoment. Their influence is not simply referenced here but structures the album emotionally. Tenderness becomes a method, care becomes politics, and rest becomes resistance. Ahsan describes the album as an ‘urgent command to re-enter the body.’ It’s difficult to think of a more accurate description.

 

In one of Ahsan’s interludes they declare, ‘every part of my aliveness, my heartbreak, my despair, my delight and joy is welcome here. There is no denial of my humanity. And in that, there’s no denial of yours.’ It feels impossibly generous. To accept every single part of one’s aliveness is sustained and enduring work, yet there is something in this album that makes you want to try. That makes you think of the people who have hurt you and understand, with a kind of aching clarity, that their capacity to wound you was never separate from their humanity. It is an unflinching contradiction anaiis holds with extraordinary care. Elsewhere Ahsan reflects, ‘when we truly let go of the unpredictability and madness of the world, we come into this reckoning that we are the world. Where the eye is completely entangled with the wheat.’ This striking image of the self entangled with the world around it arrives as a rebuke to the stories we’re told about ourselves as isolated units in endless competition, forever striving to extract more from the world than we put back in. We are the eye, the eye is the wheat, and when we forget this we become impoverished in ways that no amount of striving can remedy.  

 

Dreamer Too is another track that continually returns to me. The song begins gently enough; ‘I’m a dreamer, you’re a dreamer too.’ What sounds like a simple affirmation gradually reveals itself as something more ambitious, as dreaming is moved from the private to the collective, no longer a solitary act but a shared endeavour that requires the presence of another person to become fully real. Later, anaiis sings; 

 

‘Out here, we found the love supply 

We put our grief to rest, tonight, we might 

Somehow we carved a breach in time 

Romanced a plea for life.’ 

 

The ‘love supply’. Love imagined as a resource collectively sustained, renewed by the act of sharing is a beautiful image. In this act of sharing grief becomes redistributed, made lighter by the weight of other hands. The song echoes maree brown’s writing on emergence, the idea that another world can become imaginable through the quality of relationships between people as opposed to individual achievements. And then, the perspective shifts entirely, pulls back, widens; 

 

‘Found a bird’s eye view.

Freedom dreams, we make the mountains move. 

From above the sea’s just a big swimming pool.’

 

From high enough, the world that once felt overwhelming resolves into something navigable. Scale was the problem all along, not the world itself but the proximity to it, the way suffering expands to fill the entire view when you are standing inside it. From far enough away even the vastness of the sea becomes something you could easily swim in. The track refuses suffering the final world, and that refusal runs alive beneath the entire album. On Moonlight, resistance becomes a question of refusing inherited narratives about who you are allowed to be. The Jamaican visual world surrounding the album, including references to the Maroon communities and their traditions of resistance rooted in the body, land, and collective memory deepens these questions without resolving them into symbol. By the time Bright Lights closes the album, there are no neat resolutions waiting for us. Instead, anaiis sings:

 

‘No time is the right time.

 No road is the right route.

 Keep looking for bright lights.

 Let truth be your guide.’

 

We end with searching as the road remains unclear and the future remains unwritten. It feels apt for an album that was never interested in conclusions. What matters, what has always mattered, is the willingness to keep moving towards something brighter. To keep looking to where the dark and the bright hold each other, which is to say, into us. 

 

I find myself thinking increasingly about rest. About music and the body. About the possibility that slowing down might itself be a form of resistance, that stillness is so readily available and that I need to make sure I am seeking it. The sun is still here, bristling and overripe, unyielding not quite in the ways we prayed for, but, we cannot complain. Things are slower in this kind of light. I find myself returning to this album, not for answers or comfort, not even for understanding exactly,  but  for company. There are records that demand interpretation and there are records that simply ask to be lived alongside. Devotion & The Black Divine belongs firmly to the latter. It doesn’t need me to have figured anything out, it meets me exactly where I am. 

 

It reminds me that grief and joy have always shared a border,  that you can stand in one and feel the warmth of the other without having to choose. That rest is not the absence of movement but a return to the self. That tenderness—quiet, persistent, and stubbornly alive, might be one of the few things capable of surviving the world as it is.

 

Nine months later, it all still feels impossibly close. 

It sings to me softly in the dark.

You’re not alone. You never were. You never will be.