Summer Intern Spotlight: Del'or Ehade

The Masked Griot was literally the project that I worked on since the beginning. Growing up with my family from Cameroon, Africa, I was exposed to film, animation, music, and tokusatsu, including Power Rangers, Super Sentai, and Kamen Rider from my early age while struggling to find my identity as a person with autism and a child of immigrants. At high school, I thought to myself that I want to create a soccer story about following your dreams while also, because of the influence that I had from Studio Ghibli, I'm writing a coming-of-age story about a conflict between a mother and son who wants to pursue his dream as a musician, composer, and a music producer. By the time I graduated from high school, where I was introduced to poetry at senior year, I thought to myself, maybe I want to create a Kamen Rider Saber adaptation thanks to its influence on Avatar: The Last Airbender because of the idea of storybook feel and rewriting your destiny would work well.

Throughout community college, as a theater major, I start to flesh out the worldbuilding and the magic system which are the hardest parts due to the gimmicks and the story behind them to the point where I decided to just stop writing and delete them, but when I listened to Samurai Champloo soundtrack, I was immersed by the spiritual use of hip-hop by Nujabes, which makes me wants to explore more about his work and the music of Toonami and Adult Swim, which introduced me to Uyama Hiroto, J-Dilla, Thundercat, and Flying Lotus. By the time I was in Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, I decided to switch my major to music and began to learn so much about it while rewriting a music-fantasy series, but it is set in a Cameroonian-inspired setting. Due to its influence in Avatar: The Last Airbender, I decided to use dancing styles as martial arts such as breakdance, Capoeira, and Engolo while feeling inspired by genres like Hip-hop, Jazz, and Folk and because I'm a big tokusatsu fan plus the fact that I read Weirdo by Tony Weaver Jr, I decided to create a masked African superhero inspired by Kamen Rider Gavv. The other influence is that my mother and I don't see eye to eye especially with my career choices, where I want to go to New York to pursue music. I already wrote down the story for the trilogy which is the story about the boy wanting to see the without the walls. Today, I am creating a music-poetry performance live on camera. I did the three poems which explore themes of race, gender, and disability, which I took influences and inspirations from my own experiences back home in terms of my masculinity, neurodivergence, and blerdness too as well as compositions for my ocarina. My challenge was that when mixing music and poetry together, I'm trying to find the balance between word and rhythm. The goal of this project is that I want to reconnect my identity while staying true to myself and unmasking who I really am. I really want to use this project as an opportunity to show off my skills as a composer, music producer, and a poet. I felt like as I'm creating this project more, I'm starting to understand my deeper knowledge, especially when struggling to understand my family, mostly my mom. Traveling to Brazil and Japan really changed my life a lot as a composer and as a musician. I am so grateful that I am provided a space for me to explore my creations and why I want to explore that.