Fatoumata Diawara (Fatumta Jawara), born in 1982 in Ouragahio, Ivory Coast, is a Malian actress, singer-songwriter and guitarist at the moment residing in France. She obtained two nominations on the 61st Annual Grammy Awards for Finest World Music Album for her album Fenfo and Finest Dance Recording for “Ultimatum” by which she was featured with the English band Disclosure.
Diawara is hailed as one of the vital important standard-bearers of recent African music. Her new album, FENFO (which interprets as “one thing to Say”’), boldly experimental but respectful of her roots, it’s a report that defines her because the voice of younger African womanhood – happy with her heritage however with a imaginative and prescient that appears confidently to the longer term and a message that’s common.
Fiercely unbiased from a younger age, Diawara grew to become a celebrated youngster actor and in 2001 starred in Dani Kouyaté’s movie Sia, The Dream of the Python. When she was eighteen, she moved to France to pursue performing. She later took up the guitar and commenced composing her personal materials, writing songs that mix Wassoulou traditions of southern Mali with worldwide influences. She has stated that she is “the primary feminine solo electrical guitar participant in Mali”.
Touring the world with Royal de Luxe, her singing grew to become a function of the corporate’s performances. She additionally started singing within the golf equipment and cafes of Paris. Concurrently with pursuing her musical profession, Diawara has continued her cinematic actions, with quite a few roles, appearances, and musical enter in a number of function movies. These she has labored with embrace a few of the greatest names in modern music, plus sharing a stage with Sir Paul McCartney.
In her songs, Diawara has addressed points such because the ache of emigration; a necessity for mutual respect; the struggles of African ladies; life underneath the rule of non secular fundamentalists, and the observe of feminine circumcision. A modern-day storyteller, the dozen songs in FENFO cowl such timeless topics as respect, humility, love, migration, household and how one can construct a greater world for our kids. Like all the very best songs her refined, poetic lyrics – sung largely in Bambara – plant the seeds of ideas and concepts to develop within the listener’s thoughts.
