Malian singer-songwriter Fatoumata Diawara has released her latest album, Massa, on the independent label NØ FØRMAT!. The project turns inward, examining motherhood, home, grief, and the supernatural through a blend of desert blues, folk traditions, and pop melodies.
Produced by French artist -M- (Mathieu Chedid), the album follows Diawara’s recent performances at South Africa’s Cape Town International Jazz Festival and Joy of Jazz. On stage, she is known for a fierce, energetic presence, combining dance with pointed socio-cultural commentary. Off stage, she describes a more secluded existence in the Italian mountains, where she lives with her family.
Personal Loss and Family Distance
Diawara was born into a polygamous Malian household: her father had four wives and twenty-five children. She recalls him as her best friend, the one person who understood her. “He always treated me like a special baby,” she said. “Even if he had four wives and we are like twenty-five children, he had a time to treat me as a very special child.”
His death removed that anchor. “Since my father passed away, it’s getting worse, because he was the one who could understand who I am properly when I was a kid,” Diawara explained. “I don’t feel understood by my family. They treat me with no respect, like an animal sometimes. And it is sad for an artist.”
That estrangement led her to build a life far from Mali. In her mountain home, she finds solitude. “There’s nobody here. The children go to school, so I’m alone. No noise, no cars. Only nature is very deep. Far from everything.” She cooks Malian food, prays, and speaks briefly with her mother. Yet the distance creates a contradiction: “I’ve got that ‘stranger’ feeling with my family, but at the same time I’m always talking about how to be connected with the family. That’s strange. It’s a big fight. I still have to believe, to love.”
Turning Pain into Song
Music is where Diawara processes that grief and dislocation. The album’s opening track, ‘Djanne,’ draws on the funk lineage that informed Daft Punk’s collaborations with Nile Rodgers. “Sigui” translates the experience of navigating a large, polygamous family into a blues-inflected meditation on belonging.
“The song makes me cry every day, because sigui means living in a big family. You know, like four wives all living in the same house, and that tension on the children,” she said. “My brother said, ‘You won’t see an artist at your age talking about this kind of subject, the polygamous family, and talking about it so directly, with no filter.'”
Diawara is deliberate about how she delivers difficult emotions to her audience. “When I’m writing the songs, even if the meaning is very painful, I will always think of my audience. I say, okay, you are not going to go on stage by complaining only about problems. Keep talking about your deeper feelings, but in a positive way, because people should dance to it.”
