For political poet Bianca Modi, art is personal
South-Asian Canadian female poet, Modi, believes that with poetry, people can tune in to their emotions and ultimately inspire a path of change by sharing it. Through leveraging her own identity to write and being a leader in her community, she aims to do just that.
Bianca Modi’s fingers move swiftly while she clicks away on a smooth, grey, metal typewriter in a small confectionery called Chocolate de Kat. Thin but sturdy rectangular paper, only large enough to cover her hand, slowly inches up from the machine as she stays in the momentum of writing. The fresh black-inked letters peek through the top as she gets closer to finishing up her piece.
Sitting tall and parallel to the soft wood, a muted aqua-coloured bench attached to the wall on the right, Modi is here today as a professional poet to craft poems for customers who purchase a box of four chocolates as a Valentine’s Day special. It also happens to be a slightly different avenue from her usual political activist-poetry.
The shop is situated at a streetcar stop close to Arlington Avenue and St. Clair Avenue West. Heat blankets the inside of it, and the faint sweet scent of chocolate bonbons wafts through the air. Warm, blinking fairy lights hang over the entrance door, and serve as a welcome for customers as they usher in from the piercing wind outside. Modi offers me a friendly smile as she asks if I’d also like her to write me a poem, to which I reply with “Sure, I’d like that.”
Modi says she had always engaged in the craft of writing, whether that was poetry or songwriting, but truly began pursuing poetry after writing a poem, titled “Gold is Your Colour,” to comfort a struggling friend took off on Instagram during the COVID-19 pandemic. “It’s really scary to share certain parts of yourself,” says Modi, slightly spinning side-to-side in her chair from her North York home.
On her personal webpage, Modi recalls her interest in writing starting when she was as young as six-years-old. The art of words, she says, has always been her “favourite method of healing” because they serve as a creative outlet for her to talk about her feelings.
Modi can’t pinpoint the exact moment she decided to use poetry for advocacy. She says it’s just always been a part of her creative work due to the intersectional pieces of her identity as a first-generation Canadian woman of South-Asian descent. She says writing was a way of reflecting on her own emotions about intergenerational trauma and her family’s story of immigration.
“As I started doing that, I became a lot more connected to and aware of people’s experiences and the things that they might be facing that lead to their own senses of identity and emotion,” Modi says. One of her first memories revolving around activism involved researching information about inequity, women’s autonomy, expression and the gender gap, then blogging about these topics in her late teens.
“Art is always the best place to advocate [for] or spread awareness about something because you can layer it in there and it’s just not in your face,” Modi says. As she wrote more, Modi says she gravitated towards speaking about issues that truly mattered to her, including the atrocities in Palestine.
As many know, the destruction of life in Palestine is a pressing humanitarian crisis. Sudan is another country which is currently experiencing its own devastation. A silent genocide is also taking place in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the exploitation of mine labourors and political strife is a continuous issue.
In an Instagram reel, Modi speaks about how “politics naturally informs” the way artists create. Modi explains how her idea of politics encompasses “who we are,” which is essentially people’s identities and the way they interact with their surroundings. “The country’s laws, governance, its underlying assumptions and history…” Modi says. “All that context affects all the other things about how you experience your life and the world that we live in.”
When inspiration comes to her, Modi says she’s quick to turn to her notebook and when she’s in public spaces like restaurants without one, the nearest napkin will also do. She says her poem writing process begins by tapping into her feelings and determining what her goal is with creating her piece.
Light reflects from Modi’s wide-framed, squarish-round silver glasses as she softly laughs while delving deeper into each step of the process. “I always do a second draft,” Modi says. “And that draft is basically tearing apart the first — it looks nothing like it did in the beginning.” She says the third and final draft involves going over her writing line-by-line and carefully considering each detail.
When it’s time to share her poems, Modi says she’s appreciative of her welcoming and supportive circle. She co-founded a non-profit organization named Stay Woke in 2017 with the aim to empower youth, motivate change and encourage discussions on social justice through art. With the organization, she’s formed a community of open-minded individuals. She places a maroon henna-stained finger on her chin as she looks upwards in careful thought before sharing some of the organization’s work.
Modi says Stay Woke hosted a fundraiser for Sudan last year and often does open mics for Palestine too. She says her activism is heavily intertwined with Stay Woke because of its collective purpose of fostering social awareness.
According to Modi, the secondary benefit of sharing poetry expressed from your feelings about world affairs is that others learn something new. She says her community and friends have not only been incredibly supportive of her art but have also become more keen on educating themselves on current global events. “There’s a human connection that you promote when you share that type of writing or poetry,” Modi says.
“It kind of humanizes people’s lives and allows you to feel empathy and in turn, inspire others to care about those things.”
Monika Sharma, former team lead and project co-ordinator with Stay Work, initially worked with Modi. Her journey with the organization began as a spoken word performer. Sharma says she developed a better understanding of the current political climate by listening to performers like Modi in the Stay Woke circle.
“I think resistance poetry is very meaningful,” Sharma says. “When the people we respect and care about are opening up about things that are either happening to them or [to] people around them… that's when we’re able to fully understand the capacity of what’s happening.”
For Farah Talaat (also known by her stage name Pharoah), Modi is a well-respected community member-turned friend. She met Modi when she was invited to perform at an event hosted by Stay Woke in collaboration with the Sudan Solidarity Collective, Poetry Decoded and Sister’s Circle TO.
A few months later, they performed together at one of Stay Woke’s biggest annual events at the University of Toronto Mississauga campus. “Her passion shows up in the spaces she creates and how she shows up in them, whether that’s as an artist or mobilizer,” Talaat says.
Performing her pieces is one of the best parts of being a poet for her, Modi says. Weaving together events from personal experiences and real-life facts grants her a true storytelling experience. “What I love most is when the room is feeling it as well and you can feel that,” Modi says.
On Modi’s Instagram, there’s a video of her performing at the Flaunt It Movement’s open-mic. In the video, Modi is seated on a soft, velvet pink couch, her eyes scanning her poem on her iPhone screen. Her breath pauses for a moment before reading each line at a steady pace, the air still with silence as the audience actively listens. Her poem of choice is an expression of her own family’s story of immigration and generational survival.
Fingers in the audience click, a form of applause considered appropriate in poetry culture. The last words of her poem drifted softly into the air.
“I think the best part about that and why it was one of my favourite performances was because it didn’t feel glamorous, like with a stage,” Modi says. “But it was very raw and real.”
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