“Tonight these styles that you will hear will do for you what they did for me, I mean, hopefully.  Give you a sense of self, no longer so lonely.” 

Kevin Coval, the first of four performers at Campus Progress’s annual Spoken Word event, started the night off with this pledge/prospect for the audience.  I think everyone in attendance that night would agree this promise was thoroughly fulfilled by each artist. 

Even though I’d never been to a performance, I knew the concept of spoken word as a medium – a forum in which cultural, social, and political messages mix and mingle with art, poetry, and sometimes rhythm to express truth in a manner more powerful, pure, and piercing than sheer prose ever could.  Spoken word still has an underground connotation to it, but is continually increasing in popularity and publicity – case in point Russell Simmons’ Def Poetry Jam on HBO.  But “knowing” about Spoken Word is nothing compared to experiencing it firsthand.  Am I overdoing it?  Perhaps, but that’s the beauty of describing the impact of art.  

Each of the four poets (Kevin Coval, Amina Norman-Hawkins, Paul Flores, and Yellow Rage) delivered amazing performances.  Coval, a self-described “Jew from the suburbs” with an affinity for hip-hop since middle school, explained how his relationship with the genre forced him to confront his own identity.  “Hip hop kind of pushed me to look at my whiteness, my suburbaness, and my Judaism.”  It also gave him the venue to voice his protest to the conformity of ideas, to push for discussion and dialogue where disagreeing may not be so hot. 

In setting up the background for his final piece, “Hero Israel,” he reminded us that “America is a public democratic forum, and it ought to be.  So we need to have those convos.  Dudes need to talk honestly to other dudes about patriarchy and misogyny.  White folks need to talk to other white folks about colonialism and white supremacy.  And then Jews need to talk honestly about imperialism in Palestine too.”    

The piece was powerful and personal, and the crowd responded.  He did not preach from a high horse but instead tried to reason with a friend who’d lost their way. 

“I can no longer bear to witness thousands of murdered Palestinian children dragged into the empty box that stares nightly into my screens and say I can’t see what you were doing. I mean I see you Israel.  I see you.  Yes.  I think they might come for us again.  Yes, I imagine Gestapo with new uniforms.  I am paranoid with historical precedent. But who are you?  Israel, when will you stop killing yourself?”  

The next performer, Amina Norman-Hawkins, also focused her work on communication with the individual.  Between singing and rhyming she drew the connection between effecting change in one’s self as a necessary prerequisite to effecting change on society.  She challenged those who blame circumstances for their decisions to take responsibility, from prostitutes and thieves to the people in the room and herself, incorporating British poet William Ernest Henley’s “Invictus”:  “Because I am the master of my fate and the captain of my soul, so how can you blame the devil, when the devil is inside of you?”

Paul Flores fired the crowd up by singing and dancing his way onto the stage before his first piece, “Spanglish.”  A Mexican-American from the bay area, his poetry flowed back and forth across the internal fusion of his bicultural upbringing.  “I swim in this cultural molasses, if I am pure anything, soy puro Spanglish.”  In “Brown Dream” and “Ground Zero,” he sought recognition for the hypocrisy of both the American dream that sent immigrant soldiers to war in Iraq and a nation historically pursuing the myth of solidarity within its own post 9/11 borders.  

Last, but certainly not least, an aptly named duo of young Asian women called Yellow Rage roared onto the stage with the cry of “Listen Asshole!” This was hands down my favorite performance of the night.  It started with getting the audience involved, asking each third of the crowd to repeat a certain question to set the stage for the verbal knockout we were about to receive.  Like a broken record, we repeated “What are you? What are you saying?  Are you going to tell me?” until Michelle and Catzie put anyone who ever tried to impose their idea of what being Asian meant onto two Asian women in their place.

“You expert on me with your fake Asian tattoo? So what you read the Joy Luck Club too? That makes you an expert on how I should look? Fuck you! What the fuck do you know about being Asian? I’m about to put you in your place son.  What do you know about Napalm and Saigon? About Hiroshima and Nagasaki? About Gandhi? ” 

You get the idea.

They followed up with the piece “I’m a Woman, Not a Flava,” where they denounced the “culture confiscation” that takes place in ignorantly selling the exoticness of a culture for the sake of profit.  “Is it really learning when your teenager takes my eating utensils, twists them into her tresses, [insert Valley Girl voice] cuz like, it’s so trendy?” As a woman brought up in the United States with a different cultural heritage, this dynamic duo really hit home for me.  

All four artists threw down a gauntlet to the audience that night.  Challenge yourself.  Explore your identity.  Demand more from your society.  Resist those who attempt to define you.  All of these themes weaved their way in and out of the various performances and are intrinsic to the nature and goals of the spoken word scene.