Don’t call it a homecoming. Somi’s Petite Afrique might read like a love letter to New York, but as she puts it, “Home is so many places for me.” Raised in the Midwest, forged artistically in Lagos and Harlem, the jazz singer’s 2017 album is less about arrival and more about reckoning—both with identity and the disappearing cultural footprints of the city that shaped her.
“The theme would be dignity of cultural space,” she says, sounding more like a professor than a performer. “Remembering ourselves, remembering the space… the sense of home we build for ourselves whenever we want to or whenever we need to.”
That sense of home is, in this case, Harlem. But not the Harlem of Langston Hughes or boho Airbnb brochures. This is Harlem as seen through the eyes of African immigrants—cab drivers, mosque-goers, and the “other Black” community often ignored in conversations about the neighborhood’s gentrification. “They've been here for 40-plus years,” Somi points out, “and now their second generation is being raised here.”
The result is a record that sounds like a block party, protest, and poetry reading all at once. You can hear actual voices from the neighborhood woven through the album, which makes sense—Somi literally started work on it by interviewing people in taxis. “I was choosing a particular neighborhood, a particular community, a particular experience to focus on,” she says. “New York in itself is quite elusive. But I was trying to be specific without being reductive.”
That tension—between being from a place and being of a place—runs throughout the album. She admits to struggling with whether her presence in Harlem contributed to the very erasure she was documenting. “Am I gentrification in some way?” she wonders. “As a first-generation American, I’ve grown up in a way that I can negotiate my way through the world differently than someone just coming off the plane.”
On “The Gentry,” her duet with Aloe Blacc, Somi confronts this directly. But nowhere is the cultural knife sharper than in her reimagining of Sting’s “Englishman in New York.” In Somi’s hands, it becomes “Alien,” a title that carries none of the romantic outsider swagger of the original. “There’s much more of a risk from the way I’m coming at it,” she explains. “We’re the only country that refers to foreigners as aliens. There’s this stark, obscene otherness. It’s non-humane.”
Somi’s not trying to be a spokesperson. She cringes at the thought. “I’m just trying to be honest with myself,” she says. “Hopefully they can see themselves or locate themselves in the stories and the sound of the music.” Still, with lyrics like “Even if I’m not from here, green cards don’t save you,” she’s saying what many are too exhausted to voice.
The song “Black Enough” tackles another complicated tension—that between Africans and African Americans. “I was hearing a lot of Africans say they felt unwelcome in Harlem,” she explains. “But it’s bidirectional. Africans have negative perceptions of African Americans, too.” She was reading Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi at the time and said it helped her see that “we’re the same family, even with all the trauma.”
Musically, Petite Afrique doesn’t play second fiddle to its themes. It’s a sonic blend of jazz, African rhythms, and spoken word that always puts the story first. “I think of myself as a storyteller more than anything else,” Somi says. “Sometimes it starts at the piano, sometimes it’s a bassline, sometimes it’s just a lyric. But the narrative always comes first.”
And while she resists the idea of being a voice for anyone but herself, she acknowledges the importance of using her platform. “It’s unfortunately timely,” she says, referring to rising xenophobia and immigration debates. “But I feel fortunate to be in a position where I can raise awareness. Not everyone gets that.”
So, no, Petite Afrique isn’t a homecoming. It’s a cultural map, a warning, and a celebration—all sung in Somi’s voice but meant to echo far beyond her block.
Listen to the interview above and then check out the video below.
