Riding on the heels of her latest album “Alkemi,” Afro-Cuban singer Daymé Arocena has been been nominated for song of the year at this year's Latin Grammys.
The music video for her sensual song, "A Fuego Lento" celebrates body positivity and becoming comfortable in your own skin.
“Alkemi” further embodies that concept. Daymé says she could not have finished the album had she not reached that level of comfort with herself.
“The song that is nominated [“A Fuego Lento”], I wrote it when I was 19, and I have been hiding it for more than 10 years,” said Arocena, who is now 32 years old. “It was a really good exercise of liberation when I decided to put this album together.”
Daymé thanks the pandemic for helping her start the process of creating “Alkemi.” At the time, she and her husband had moved to Canada from Cuba. Dealing with immigration and a global pandemic had forced her to sit with herself and look back at what she was keeping away and why.
"Alkemi is a big lesson in my life, because, when I used to think I was a jazz singer, and when I was happy to be in that frame, I used to also hide a lot of myself, trying to … meet their expectations."
Learning more about her African roots also helped Daymé grow into herself ahead of her album. In Canada, she met plenty of Nigerians, specifically Yoruba people who helped her find peace with her identity.
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“Before connecting with Yoruba people, I didn't understand who I was, why I was that dark, why my body was this size,” she said.
Her husband was the director of a B-team for a Yoruba movie, and they had to go to a Nigerian restaurant to film. The restaurant owners then encouraged them to have a meal there. It was Daymé’s first time eating Nigerian food, but names like fufu were all too familiar to her.
She had tilapia with fried plantains and jollof rice.
“I swear I felt like the call of my ancestors … Like I'm eating the food of my family,” she said. “I remember getting so emotional at eating that.”
Without her time in Canada, Daymé says she wouldn’t have finished “A fuego lento,” “American Boy” or most of the songs on “Alkemi.”
Moving to Puerto Rico from Canada in 2021 also helped Daymé further understand and process her identity. The island felt like home and led her to rediscover who she was, unlocking parts of herself she had kept away.
Growing up she was a huge fan of R&B stars like Whitney Houston and Toni Braxton, but she concluded that pop music and the music industry weren’t for her when she saw a lack of representation.
“I don't have a Latin Whitney Houston, I don't have a Latin Toni Braxton, I don’t have a Latin Beyoncé … so I didn’t have that reference,” she said. “That’s why representation is really important because, at a certain point, I just said okay, that’s not for me.”
Of all the artists nominated for song of the year, Daymé is the only Black artist on the list. She says when she was younger she would block something like that out, but as she has gotten older and more involved in the music industry it’s been impossible to do that.
“I always say, hey, if you grew up eating fried plantains and shaking your body like come on, you're coming exactly from where I'm coming from, it’s not about my skin color,” she said. “We are Creole people that's the beauty of this continent, we got flavors from everywhere.
The 25th Annual Latin Grammy Awards will take place Nov. 14 at the Kaseya Center in Miami. It will air live on Univision, UniMás, Galavisión and ViX beginning at 8 p.m. EST.
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