Artist in Residence: Almaz Ohene
Artist in Residence: Almaz Ohene
A Journey into Sexuality, Pleasure & Reproductive Health Education with Writer & Musician Almaz
Welcome to issue two of The Ampersand’s Artist in Residence feature. This time around, I’m throwing the spotlight on , a British-Ghanaian journalist and educator. I met Almaz at an afterparty at iconic Manchester venue SOUP and we’ve been firm friends ever since. Her Substack She Dares To Say is nothing short of revolutionary, thanks to her honest, taboo-smashing, inclusive writing.
I absolutely loved writing a guest post for her Considering My Crushes segment a few months back but my favourite feature on SDTS has got to be What the Notches Said. Each issue sees Almaz bravely interviewing someone from her sexual past about their experience with her and where they’re at now. Always a fascinating read!
Almaz, over to you…
“I was brought up in the church so I didn’t exactly grow up in an environment that was comfortable talking about sex! However, I had a lot of peers who were interested in all things raunchy so I just kept following my heart.”
How it all began…
There once was a little girl who grew up in a provincial town in the north of England.
She had a very, very vivid imagination and began storytelling as soon as she started talking. She went to school, where she learned to hold a pencil, write on her own name and read fairy tales.
Soon she was reading just about everything she could get her sticky little hands on, sitting quietly for hours on end, engrossed in the imaginings of hundreds of writers.
The storybooks transported her out of humdrum small-town existence and into new and exciting worlds with incredible people who led extraordinary lives.
Pretty soon, she was scribbling adventures of her very own, magicking up fantasy worlds and filling them with a whole host of fascinating characters and outlandish creatures.
And still, her reading journey continued…
It was only a matter of time before she stumbled across the naughty stuff. She’d been both excited and surprised when she got that fluttery feeling as she watched that Jack and Rose scene in Titanic and soon began to find that feeling in books too.
Could that excitement be connected to some of the things she’d read, but only half understood, in her Where Do Babies Come From book? Could the feeling she got when she read about beautiful people touching each other all over really be related to a mother growing a baby?
Whatever the case, she carried on reading books with naughty stuff and was, by now, recommending the best passages to friends too.
By 13, she’d got all the sex stuff straightened out in her head. But she still couldn’t understand why it was something she wasn’t supposed to talk about. There were lots of boys in school that she thought were drop-dead gorgeous. She’d sometimes spend whole lessons thinking about how she would go about convincing any one of them to stick his hand down her knickers and kiss her (with tongue). Why even attempt long division when you could daydream about [insert generic Caucasian boys name here]?!
She was captivated by Bridget Jones’s antics. She completely and utterly saw herself and all her desires reflected in her, even though she herself was still only a schoolgirl. She could imagine herself making bad decisions about ‘Fuckwits’ (whilst not even sure what a ‘Fuckwit’ actually was…) and living a gloriously chaotic life in London.
Finally, the time came for her to get her head down. A-Levels had begun. In English, they were set The Colour Purple and (Oh My God), she had to read those Celie and Shug bits out loud in class. ‘I wouldn’t mind a bit of Shug’, she secretly thought. And what did that mean?
Outside class, she went on to read DH Lawrence’s highly controversial Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Ian McEwan’s much-celebrated Atonement. Properly steamy. She lapped it up. And then his freshly published novella On Chesil Beach too, which describes the wedding night of a young couple in the early 1960s in excruciating detail. The social codes of the era means that the pair have no realistic expectations of what it would be like and are disgusted and traumatised by the experience.
She had a strong reaction to it, even though she herself had yet to make her sexual debut. She was appalled at the lack of sex education, harmful cultural expectations and woeful communication depicted in the novel.
Fast forward to Autumn 2007. She was on her gap year but still hadn’t done penis-in-vagina sex (or ‘PIV’, as it’s called in sex ed circles), as she couldn’t find a partner (or, at least, a hot enough partner) who was willing to do the deed with her.
So, she was left with solo masturbation. Which she did, furiously and often.
One weekend, she took herself off to stay with a friend at a University in a far-off city and they hit the club scene, where she met a boy on the dancefloor.
“Where you from?”
“Sri Lanka, innit.”
They snogged so enthusiastically her jaw ached. He wriggled his hand down her top and squeezed her nipples really quite hard. It felt delicious.
On the long train ride back, she played the scene over and over. She took out her notebook and wrote a sexually charged fantasy inspired by memories of that thrilling evening.
And here’s what she wrote all those years ago in November 2007…
At long last, the girl did find someone to spend a night with her. And she was blessed: it was pretty damn amazing. She had such a great evening that she didn’t leave his bedroom for a whole weekend. She liked it so much that she couldn’t imagine doing it with just him for the rest of her life. There were just too many beautiful people in the world that she wanted to touch! She made it her mission to have as much fun with her body as possible. And with her stories too.
So, who did this girl become?
Me… Almaz Ohene (she/her), a multi-disciplinary writer and creative working across:
branding, including copywriting, ghostwriting and working on a brand’s Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) campaigns and activations
journalism. I write personal essays on topics like sexuality or I interview people about interesting work or campaigning that they do
sexuality education with a current focus on workshops exploring pleasure and intimacy for adults. However, I’ve also worked in schools running Sex Ed classes for young people
I try really hard to centre marginalised voices in my work because my general ethos is to take steps to help dismantle all forms of systemic oppression.
I’m really fascinated by how we each navigate our unique sexuality in global cultures that are, for the most part, very sex-negative and talk and write about sex at any given opportunity!
There are, of course, a number of obstacles to writing about sex.
It’s quite taboo and some people just aren’t comfortable delving into the topics that I write about.
I was brought up in the church so I didn’t exactly grow up in an environment that was comfortable talking about sex! However, I had a lot of peers who were interested in all things raunchy so I just kept following my heart.
A current obstacle is that social media doesn’t like any posts that are explicitly about sex. They assume it’s sex work and whilst there's nothing inherently wrong with sex work, the assumption that that’s what my work is leads to lots of my posts getting shadow banned. This means that, unfortunately, a lot less people get to see and engage with them.
So that’s the downside. But there are huge highlights too. Some years ago I founded an illustrated erotica and sexual health web platform called ‘Kayleigh Daniels Dated’. It received a fair bit of media coverage between 2018 and 2020 and that’s how I started making my name in the sex positivity space.
Sadly, as it was a non-profit making endeavour, I was forced to just use my own capital. This meant I eventually had to stop running it as it was draining my bank account.
I also got to chair a panel called ‘The Ultimate Guide to Non-monogamy’ at the Institute of Curious Minds tent at Lost Village festival in the summer of 2023. The tent was absolutely packed and there were a number of very well-known people like comedians and journalists who were in the audience too. It was such a great experience.
A typical creative day for me…
…begins with my morning routine. If I’m being good, I’ll do 10 to 15 minutes of stretching and moving my body. I also like to run three times a week. I like to get into my artistic space by reading over previous material that I’ve written, from whatever project I’m currently working on.
Sometimes it is much harder than others to really get into the work. And for that, you just have to grit your teeth and soldier on when you're working to a deadline.
To decompress at the end of the day, I really like doing yoga classes, especially hot yoga. It’s something that really helps me shake off the static stress of the day and gets me into my body.
When I’m not creating…
I like to watch TV dramas with the subtitles on. This is partly because I have Auditory Processing Disorder which is a form of neurodivergence that means it takes me longer to process speech. Having the subtitles on means I don’t miss any of the dialogue.
I’ve been a big TV addict since I was small and love, love, LOVE gripping dramas. So, as a teenager, I’d watch popular American dramas like Desperate Housewives, E.R., Lost, House M.D. and Grey’s Anatomy.
In the past few years I’ve really enjoyed Baby Reindeer, Sex Education, Never Have I Ever, Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You and financial drama Industry.
Did you know the simple act of pressing the “like” button can lead more readers to my work? Or, if you really love The Ampersand, why not give it a share?
I’m a classically trained violinist and have spent a lot of my time over the years playing music. I’ve appeared on stage, on national television and at music festivals with several collectives. Highlights include: Mighty Hoopla Festival set (2019), BBC Proms Scratch Orchestra Masterclass with Maestro Marin Alsop (2018), Britain’s Got Talent quarter-finalists with The Hip Hop Orchestra (2017), Secret Garden Party festival sets (2014, 2015, 2016, 2022) and Women of the World Festival Orchestra at Royal Festival Hall, London (2016). So, if I wasn’t doing what I’m doing now, I’d probably be trying to pursue something in music.
My biggest piece of advice for emerging creatives…
…would be to send your work out to friends and peers in your network. Ask them to take a look while it’s still a work in progress and give you feedback on it. It really is the best way to grow as an artist.
A huge thank you to the fabulous Almaz Ohene for this fascinating and enlightening issue of Artist in Residence.
I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I did.
With love,
xK
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