Interview with Dr. Chika Oriuwa

Biography

Dr. Chika Stacy Oriuwa is a graduate of the University of Toronto, Faculty of Medicine, where she was named the valedictorian of her graduating medical class. She is a physician, professional spoken word poet, public speaker, writer and advocate for racialized and marginalized populations. Dr. Oriuwa is a psychiatry resident at the University of Toronto where she aims to go on to complete further specialist training in neuro-psychiatry. She also serves on Indigo's Board of Directors, using her expertise to influence their efforts, creating equal opportunity and curating spaces of wellness and inclusion.

Q: Can you provide a brief introduction of yourself?

Sure! I am Dr. Chika Stacy Oriuwa, a first year resident in psychiatry at UofT. I’m also a recent graduate of UofT where I did my medical degree and my Masters of Science in Systems, Leadership and Innovation.

Q: We know that you’re quite well known for your spoken word poetry. Could you tell us more about how you got involved in it?

I started writing poetry when I was six or seven years old and [poetry] for me just was the most natural form of communication. It made sense to me before anything else made sense. I view poetry as the lens through which I see the world and the way that I process the environment around me. And so, from a very young age, I’ve been writing poetry. I started to perform my poetry at around age ten to twelve at school assemblies. At that time, it wasn’t necessarily slam poetry but more so just reading my poetry out loud. With respect to slam poetry and getting into the competitive poetry scene, that didn’t happen until my university years where I had this love for public speaking and this love for poetry and decided to combine the two and do it in a more theatrical and organic way.

When I decided to [perform poetry] competitively in university, I would say that it was catalyzed through my love for advocacy and wanting to use my poetry as socio-political commentary. Being able to get out there and perform my poetry was not only something that I think was a testament to my art, but also important for self empowerment and also empowerment within my community. [Performing poetry] at that time was not only an art form, but a form of self preservation and a form of vocalizing the needs of the marginalized. So that’s kind of how I was able to gain that confidence. And of course, the more that I did it, the more comfortable I became with it and realized that I just love public speaking, I love being on the stage, I love sharing my poetry and that was just a marriage of all of those things.

Q: We’d love to hear about how you find inspiration for the different pieces that you’ve written and performed.

Well, that’s a great question. I feel it’s a question that I’ve never actually been asked before in interviews, but I really love it. When I was younger, I drew inspiration from the entire spectrum of emotions. So when I was really happy about something, I just felt compelled to write poetry about it because that, for me, was the most natural form of expression. And then also when I was really sad. So when my grandmother died when I was 10 years old, it was hard for me to grapple with the idea of death. In order for me to process that, I turned to poetry. I find that throughout my life, it’s kind of been this iterative process of going through and trying to understand my own lived experience through poetry, and that’s where I continue to draw inspiration.

Over the course of the last 10 years, I’ve really drawn inspiration from things that have been happening in the world, in the larger Black community, in the various ways in which I am connected to different groups and different identities. I wrote this poem called SKIN and it was specifically written in the context of the Mike Brown killing back in 2014. And when the George Floyd protests happened again, this year, I actually refilmed that poem for dissemination because I was able to draw inspiration from everything that was happening around me and also felt compelled to be able to share that narrative once again. But I also find that I draw inspiration from my own personal adversity and triumphs and things that speak to my authentic truth and rawness and vulnerability. Woman, Black, for example, I actually wrote in second year [medical school] because I wanted to be able to shed light on a narrative that was unique but was painful and also beautiful at the same time. Being able to share that through my art form was something that I felt was empowering to me.

Q: After you found your inspiration, what was your approach to writing spoken word poetry? How do you put all of these different ideas together and how do you know when you had a final product that was ready to perform?

My writing process is very interesting. Usually, I feel a “spur of the moment” – like I’m hit with a bolt of creativity and will literally sit down and write an entire poem within 14 minutes or something. I’m pretty sure that I wrote Woman, Black within a couple hours. I wrote another poem, An ode to Women’s College Hospital, I think in 30 minutes before one of my CBL sessions in second year [medical school]. And so if I’m hit with a bolt of creative energy, even if it’s in the middle of the night, I kind of have to get up and write that idea down. I’ll just have an avalanche of ideas, of metaphors, of prose, of lines, and it’ll all just kind of hit me at once. I’m definitely not the kind of person that plans out my poetry or takes days and days and days to write it. It’s kind of all or nothing for me in my writing process.

And then with respect to when I feel like it’s done, I might go through a few drafts of it after I got the bulk of the poem down. But what’s important for me is actually to be able to say my poem out loud, especially if it’s a poem that I want for performance purposes. I’ll try and see if I like the cadence, and as I’m performing it to myself, I’ll actually kind of ad lib and start to change the poem as I’m performing it at that moment. As I’m doing that, if I think, “okay, actually, that sounds better when I say this instead of what I wrote down originally,” then I’ll change it. And so as I’m rehearsing it, the poem kind of evolves and takes its own form until I reach the final product. That’s kind of when I know that it’s done and ready to go – when it feels comfortable on the paper, but also when it feels comfortable in spoken word.

Q: You’ve talked a bit about some of the pieces that you’ve written and performed. Do you have a favourite piece that you’ve written and/or performed?

I would definitely say that my favourite piece that I’ve written is my poem SKIN. And that would also probably be my favourite poem to perform just because when I wrote it, it was during a time that was really tumultuous and painful for the Black community. And every time I perform that poem, I feel like it transports me back to that exact moment of when I first wrote it. Because there is so much recurrent trauma within the Black community, I find that SKIN is the one poem that I can almost always connect to instantly. In a way, it almost transcends time – unfortunately. That poem for me is something that I think unites me with the rest of the Black community and it always has had a profound impact wherever it is that I perform it. I also performed it at my medical school interview for UofT [laughs] and so it kind of has that memory in it for me that it’s something that I’ve taken with me in various different aspects of my life. It’s almost always a poem that I return to when I think of who I am as a poet and a writer.

Q: You’ve done some amazing advocacy work for the medical community and for the racialized and marginalized populations. You’re also a fantastic role model for many young, aspiring doctors and members of the community. Can you comment on some of your role models that helped you become the person and the advocate that you are today?

I find that who I am as an advocate today, as a physician today, as a public speaker today has been molded by the amazing female clinicians who have taken me under their wing and have completely spirited me, protected me, guided me, mentored me and sponsored me throughout the last four, going on five years now. Namely, that would be Dr. Lisa Robinson, as well as Dr. Onye Nnorom and Dr. Pier Bryden. All of these women have stood as a testament to me as what it means to be an advocate and what it means to be a role model in the community. From the very first day that I started medical school, even before I started medical school, these women reached out to me. They were aware of the fact that I was the only Black medical student and they really were a community for me when I didn’t necessarily have that inherent community in my medical school class, just because of the way that the cards kind of panned out for me. But you know, what makes these women so special is the fact that they really shouldered me throughout every bit of adversity that I faced not only as a medical student, but also as an advocate. And they were always available to me to be able to talk through some of these difficult scenarios, to be able to sit with me, help me prepare for speeches, read over everything that I’ve done. They’ve seen all the poems before I’ve released them to the public. It’s just been such a special relationship and bond that I’ve had with these women. Specifically for Dr. Nnorom and Dr. Robinson, as Black women in medicine, who helped prepare me for the road ahead and gave me insight into what it means to be a Black female in medicine, including navigating the adversity that this entails. These women continue to be my role models and the giants upon whose shoulders I stand. They’ve done so much incredible work for the Black community and medical community before I even stepped foot in medical school. I think that they really laid the groundwork for me to be able to do what it is that I did and what it is that I continue to do. So to them, I owe a lot.

Q: Do you have any tips of advice for how one can go about strengthening their advocacy?

I think what’s so important to realize is that advocacy can and does look very different for everybody. For some people, all of their advocacy is within their clinical work. On a day to day basis, how it is that they interact with their patients and how it is that they collaborate with their peers is in of itself how they express their advocacy. Some people do it on a larger, more societal, or even higher than that, political level. Advocacy for me looks like educating the community, doing keynotes, sharing my art, and performing. Certainly, that isn’t something that everyone would be comfortable doing nor do they need to do advocacy in that way. Some people like to protest, some people like to write journals and go through academia to do that. Some people like to spread the word through social media. I would say that any way that you decide to go about your advocacy, ensure that you are doing it in a genuine and non-performative way. Ensure that as you’re doing your advocacy, you’re mindful about the community that you’re trying to advocate for and that you’re leveraging your privilege in order to centralize the voices of that community, and to be able to empower them and enrich that community, whether you belong to [that community] or not. Find something that speaks to you, that marries your skillset with your passion, in order to unlock the potential of your advocacy.

Q: On the topic of medicine and advocacy, what was the process like for you to choose your specialty in psychiatry? How does it unite your interest in advocacy with your interest in medicine?

My road to psychiatry is different compared to a person who might have been interested in psychiatry much earlier in medical school. Psychiatry was my last rotation in clerkship. It was August of third year and I was getting ready for CaRMS. I had all of my electives set up in internal medicine and obstetrics and gynecology, because those were my two main interests throughout medical school. And then when I did psychiatry, I just fell in love with it. Psych is one of the places in medicine that I think really relies upon a strength in being able to establish a narrative for the patient, because so much of it is a patient’s lived experience and their experience with mental illness. It’s a lot about their story and how it is that you’re able to conceptualize that and communicate that. I found that psychiatry was the one area in which I actually felt like I was tapping more into who I was as a poet and as a writer, above and beyond any other area of medicine. In my CaRMS essay, I talked about how being a poet for all of my life helped prepare me to be a good doctor, for one, but also to be a good psychiatrist. Poetry necessitates being able to stare at the raw realities, the vulnerabilities, and the fragility of life and being able to do so with an unflinching repose. I find that [in psychiatry] you really get to see the raw underbelly of life; you meet people at their most demoralized, low, often devastating places, for not only them, but also their family. Psychiatry just felt very raw and human in a way that I felt was different from other areas of medicine.

On top of that, something that I had an idea of in medical school, but it never really became super concrete until I actually started residency, was the overwhelmingly disproportionate amount of Black individuals in psychiatry. They are so desperately underserved within this area and it wasn’t until I was on my emergency psychiatry rotation that I realized I had never seen so many Black patients in my life; this issue was further magnified as I rotated through forensic psychiatry. And what was jarring to me was the realization that it’s because there is such poor infrastructure of the mental health system within the Black community that we see them at these intersections of crisis. We see them in the emergency department, or we see them through the forensic system, because they’ve been involved with some kind of legal issue before they actually were able to have their mental illness addressed. And so, for me, being able to do this work means to integrate my advocacy into my clinical work. Every single day that I’m working with my patients, either in the emerg or in the outpatient clinic, I feel like every interaction is an opportunity for advocacy. I’ve never felt that my impact has been stronger for this community that I care so much about. So this is why I chose psychiatry, why I love psychiatry, why I’m so passionate about being able to talk about psychiatry. Being involved in it is very purposeful for me.

Q: Looking towards the future, how do you envision your interests in the creative space and spoken word poetry to play out in residency?

Right now, I actually have quite a few projects on the go. Spoken word and public speaking are things that I always make a priority because I find that it’s something that fills my cup; it brings me purpose, it energizes me, it empowers me. As it currently stands, I’m doing about two to three keynotes a month while in residency; I do this because I love public speaking and educating. It’s something that I want to continue doing throughout my career. When I’m done residency and have more control over my schedule, I’ll probably make more time for it. [Public speaking] enables me to do my advocacy work, to be able to educate the community, to be able to empower the community – all these things are so important to me. I use it as a platform for my art as well. Oftentimes, people ask me to give a lecture and perform and so I find that there’s always space to be able to blend my different talents and passions into that kind of work.

Q: We also saw that you've been involved in a lot of things, one of which was your recent appointment to Indigo’s Board of Directors position. Could you comment on your initial reaction when you found out and if you have started the position, what the experience has been like so far?

I was actually in the middle of preparing to write my Medical Council of Canada Qualifying Examination when I was connected to Heather Reisman, Indigo’s Founder and CEO. In the midst of studying, convocating and preparing to move into my new home for residency, I had accidentally missed a couple of her emails. When I was settled in and catching up on missed emails, I was equal parts excited and horrified at keeping such an important person waiting. We were able to quickly set up a call and she pitched the offer within that first meeting. I didn’t quite know what it meant to be on a Board of Directors. I had been on boards for different journals and non-profits but it’s quite a different world when it’s a publicly traded for-profit company. So when the weight of that finally hit me, I mean, I was quite speechless. It’s definitely one of the biggest and best opportunities I’ve ever been given. There is so much space to be able to create a national – if not international – impact. And so that, for me, has just been such an incredible blessing. Working with Heather and the other board members, as well as getting to know more about the business aspect of everything has been really quite a fascinating journey so far. And also really understanding how it is that I can scale my advocacy, because for a long time, I’ve been doing it within the community. I’ve had opportunities to give keynotes internationally and transnationally and that kind of nature, but this is a much different ballgame and can impact the lives of millions of people. So I’m really trying to kind of let that all soak in, but also not waste the opportunity – to do good and to create real tangible impacts for the community.

Q: On that topic, do you have any book recommendations that you would like to share with us or any of our readers?

Becoming by Michelle Obama is fantastic – I love it and highly recommend it. I also read Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo and that is a phenomenal read – highly, highly, highly recommend it! And then, Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid is another really excellent read. I love the books that I recommended because they paint the narrative of women of colour in a way that is refreshing and novel. They seek to empower other women of colour as opposed to typecasting them or stereotyping them, or placing them in roles and narratives in which they are inherently disenfranchised. So I think being able to see the lived experiences – both fictional and non-fictional – of women of colour in a way that is celebrated, that is inspiring, that really speaks to the boundless potential of Black women is the main reason why I would recommend these books.

Generally, what I would recommend is for people to take a stock of their bookshelves, take a stock of the various forms of media that you consume – whether it’s art, books, movies, whatever it is. Try to see if there is a way that you can diversify the kind of material that you’re consuming. So if you realize that you’re consuming media from a relatively homogenous collection of authors, maybe consider integrating different perspectives that you might not typically be looking for. In the last 10 years or so, I’ve been very intentional about trying to read more books written by Black female authors, as I spent much of my formative years reading the works of mostly White, male authors with a singular perspective. Now that I feel like I’ve read numerous works by fantastic Black, female scholars, I’m challenging myself to take my own advice. What is the next frontier? This year, I’ve been very intentional about trying to integrate more Indigenous and Latina authors into my bookshelves because I think that is something that passively but also actively informs your conscience; being able to broaden your perspective is extremely important. That’s what I would recommend everyone to do – take stock of the diversity in your life.

Q: If you had a message to tell medical students, what advice would you give them?

The advice that I would give medical students is the advice that I gave in my valedictory address, which is to define yourself. Set out ways to define yourself before anyone else can do that for you. That really is a paraphrase from Michelle Obama. I just think it’s so profound and so meaningful, especially in our role as physicians. We start medical school as individuals, and I feel like oftentimes, when we’re out at the other side of medicine, that we’re all kind of fit into this perfect homogeneous box of what a doctor should do, and look and say, and speak and act, and all of these things. I feel like there’s almost this sense of losing yourself in a way. So really holding true to who you are, what it is that you stand for, and allow that to guide all of the decisions that you make. Truly, that will help you to overcome any adversity that you will encounter in medical school, in residency and beyond.

Another piece of advice for medical students is to live in your authentic truth – whatever that means for you. I know that as a Black woman, I definitely struggled with the idea of wearing my natural hair in clinic and feeling more comfortable speaking the way that I find is most natural. I’d say that the most empowering thing that I’ve ever done is living in my truth, owning my Blackness, owning my femininity, and doing so unapologetically. That’s something that I would try and pass on to the next generation of medical students: never be afraid to stand in your truth.