“Not every wave is for you. You have to choose your own”

“I’d swim a million miles for you/ I’d follow the star/ I wouldn’t be afraid to die if it was the only way to get to where you are/ Your love is like the ocean I wanna dive into… » (“I’d swim a million miles for you/ I’d chase a star/ I wouldn’t be afraid to die if it was the only way to reach you/ Your love is like the ocean I wanna dive in”) sings Ayo on Royal, his new album. Santa-Maria-di-Lota beach, north of Bastia (Haute-Corse), singer Joy Ogunmakin (in civil status) collects small pebbles polished by the ocean for a pearl necklace that she does not will ever do. She proclaims it to anyone who will listen: water is her element. “It all starts there and it all ends there. When I’m in the water, I feel like I’m part of the world. I am in my mother’s womb. All my problems disappear. When I was little, I licked my hand because it was salty. And when I cry, it’s salt water that flows. »

The white oleanders and the pink bougainvilleas, the fragrant fig trees and the olive bushes bend under the gusts of the libeccio, this wind ” broken cuglione », “nuts and bolts”, as a suspicious Corsican swore just now at the door of his shop. The singer, she smiles perpetually. The fault in his name: Joy, Joy, Ayo, in Yoruba, the language of his African father… “In Nigeria, the first name given to a child is the first blessing. He is what we become. » It’s even the title, playing on words, of the book she started to write: Definition of Joy. How do we define joy? “ Smiling has always been the one thing that couldn’t be taken away from me. It was even surprising for others because I smiled all the time. When I arrived in Paris, in the metro, people looked at me like I was crazy, she confides. Thanks to my first name, I have always been a happy child. And on sad days, I could create my own world, and retreat to it, and survive. Because at the end of the day, I think it always comes down to this: what you believe in, exists! Tomorrow is an invention. »

” A source of inspiration “

1976. In Cologne, West Germany, Julius-Taiye Ogunmakin, who had come five years earlier from Nigeria to study electronic engineering, DJ in the evenings to earn a living, meets Alexandra Baranowsky, a pretty Roma from ten years her junior and her son Sascha. He adopts both. Joy Ogunmakin was born on September 14, 1980. Dennis and Eileen follow. Joy was 6 years old when her mother took heroin. The children will, from there, navigate between host families and orphanages. She was 14 when she finally returned to live with her father.

You have 70.33% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.