Rebecca Spence, Arts & Culture Editor
Out with the guilt, in with the laughs. Sort of.
Taryn Della’s Guilt, Guilt, Go Away packs a powerful punch of comedy blended with some serious sentiments on our own self-worth. The standup comic and spoken word artist just finished her eight-show series last weekend at the Plutonium Playhouse as part of the Atlantic Fringe Festival. Though her show is over, her words should create a lasting impression on her audiences – especially for young females.
“I think we get stuck feeling guilty and making decisions to please other people,” says Della, who describes herself as “a woman beyond forty” [that’s all she would tell me].
“On a personal level I carry a lot of guilt, and it’s really hard to move forward with your life when you’re carrying all of that,” she says. “I think that as women we take that on a lot more.”
Della, an African Nova Scotian, grew up in a low-income family in St John, New Brunswick, where her father worked as a musician and a porter and her mother made a living by scrubbing floors. She was one of seven children in a household that exposed her to violence and abuse at a young age. She left school and moved to Toronto to pursue comedy. After some stints at nightclubs such as Yuk Yuk’s, she moved to Halifax to dedicate her talents to public speaking at local high schools and community events.
“I’m a comic at heart, but I don’t necessarily have the most comedic presentation,” says Della.. “It never works in a nightclub to go in and talk about rape or talk about black mother’s guilt.”
Della, who now has two degrees under her belt (including a Bachelor of Journalism from the University of King’s College), says that she and others from the same kind of background don’t often talk about their experiences a lot because of their guilt, although she admits that her past has certainly shaped who she is today.
“They are some of my defining moments,” she says.
Della adamantly believes that feeling guilty about oneself can change who you are, and sometimes start to define who you are. She especially emphasizes the impact that guilt can have on young girls.
“It’s important for us to get girls at a really young age, around 13 or 14-years-old, so that we can start talking and having a sense of how to shape things in our lives rather than always be responding to things in our lives.”
Although Della spends a lot of her time doing speaking engagements at high schools, she is also actively involved in workshops at the Dalhousie Women’s Centre, International Women’s Day, the YWCA, African Heritage Month, as well as Take Back The Night (which takes place next month). She found her one-hour show for the AFF to be particularly important because she was able to combine both comedic and serious elements to get her views across to the audience. Having performed in fringe festivals across Canada, Della particularly appreciates the flexibility and openness of the AFF.
Guilt, Guilt, Go Away also featured El Jones, a local spoken word artist and professor at King’s. She delivered a different pair of poems in each performance, all of which focused on the societal pressures placed on black girls ad young women.
“I’ve learned that there’s power in trying to get youth to understand leadership and brilliance and making decisions,” says Della. “Because of my own history, I one of those people who believes that I have an obligation to my ancestors. Absolutely, undeniably, that’s what I walk with, that’s what I work with, that’s what I wake up to, and that’s what puts me in schools and on the street driving kids crazy… All because I am a proud product of my heritage.”
Ultimately her passion is to challenge, inspire, and “get young girls on board with their brilliance.”
So how much does Della’s experience in standup comedy help her talk about heavy issues like rape and racism?
“You know what baby girl?” she says as she shrugs her shoulders. “Some things just aren’t funny.”