Spoken word artist and best-selling author Becky Siame brings her powerful new Fringe Festival show, The Shape of Belonging, to the stage. Blending poetic storytelling with healing ambient soundscapes, the 50-minute performance explores identity, displacement and self-worth. We caught up with Becky to talk patterns, belonging, and why she believes we’re not broken – just patterned.
At the weekend you’ll find me...
Either on my computer writing or creating something or cocooned on the lounge with music or Netflix – my cat, Hakim curled up somewhere close – and sometimes my kids too.
I’m a real nerd about...
Patterns - behavioural, linguistic, somatic, psychological. Especially where data meets humanity. In my work I track digital behaviour and conversion pathways; in my books and storytelling I explore the language patterns shaping identity. Different arenas - same obsession: what drives us, and why.
At a party you’ll find me...
You’ll probably hear me before you see me, my thunderclap of a laugh gives me away. Usually outside, meeting new people and drifting between deep conversations… and occasionally on the dance floor.
When I need advice I go to...
Myself. The answers are already there. Most of the time, I’m not searching for wisdom, I’m untangling inherited scripts so I can hear my own voice clearly.
The world would be a better place with more...
Self-awareness and nervous-system literacy. So much of the harm we cause isn’t intentional, it’s patterned. It’s inherited language, unconscious scripts, and dysregulated bodies reacting to perceived threat. If more of us understood how our nervous systems shape our responses, how words wire belief, and how identity is often built on borrowed narratives, we’d pause more. We’d question more. We’d project less. And we’d raise children who don’t have to spend decades untangling what was never truly theirs.
Something I learnt way later than I should have...
That even though I was adopted - the only black child in a white Kiwi family - I was always wanted. I always belonged. By the family who raised me and by the biological family I later found. I was never an accident. I was chosen – TWICE.
My simple pleasures are...
Clean, fluffy towels, good friends, cold bubbles, strong coffee, and unhurried conversations with my two now-adult children; discovering who they’re becoming.
One thing I’ll never do again...
Bungy jump. I’d absolutely skydive one day! It’s not the jumping I mind. It’s the rope burn on my ankles.
I wish more people knew...
You’re not broken. You’re patterned. And patterns can change.
The biggest risk I’ve ever taken...
At just 17, I went to Zambia to volunteer as a teacher in a school in the Kalingalinga compound. It was the first time I truly stepped beyond everything familiar, and it changed how I see the world. It cracked open my understanding of privilege, resilience, and what community really means.
In ten years, this popular trend will be ridiculous...
Hustle-as-identity. We’ve confused productivity with worth and burnout with ambition. One day we’ll look back at glorifying exhaustion the way we now look at smoking in offices, socially normal at the time, quietly destructive underneath.
The colour that best describes me is...
Deep blue - calm on the surface, infinite underneath.
The person who knows me best is...
Me. Finally.
