3 minute read
HASHTAG AMERICA
Patriotism Via Poetry Never Sounded So Honest
Let me begin by stating that THIS poem, ‘Hashtag America’ is one of my favorite poems of all time. There are people, places and poems that you come across in life that are unforgettable. This is one of those. It was a personal honor and pleasure to speak with Alex about his work. - Allié M.
ALLIÉ: Some people write for themselves, and some people write for others. Then there are those who write for both. When you wrote ‘Hashtag America’ in 2013, a poem that is just as relevant today as it was then, was this for Alex or was this for others?
ALEX: I think that when i wrote ‘Hashtag America’, in 2013, I was writing for myself. I think I was writing from myself, to myself… but to myself as a part of a collective - to the millennial generation. I think I was just trying to say something that I needed to hear as someone who was kind of like a cog in the big machine of being in your 20s in the 2010s. It was me trying to say what I wish someone had been saying already. Sometimes putting feelings and emotions into words is such a task and an undertaking. Then sometimes I just hear a sentence, a phrase, a line or a word, and it just feels like what I’ve been trying to get out of my forever. That’s how I felt writing this poem. I feel that way every day.
See page 21 in 'The America Edition' (link at bottom) to hear Alex recite 'Hashtag America'.
ALLIÉ: I have many favorite parts of this poem, one of them is “I’m so proud to be part Native American. Even though my skin tone reads like plagiarism, I still cite it in my bone structure. Know nothing of their struggle and everything of their feathers.” I’d love to hear about your experience growing up part Native American. Such a powerful statement to claim a heritage that you partially exhibit and partially understand. Was it hard as a kid?
ALEX: In those lines, I feel like you can hear me wrestling with it. I feel like in the turn of the phrase you can hear that I’m almost uncomfortable saying this because it's a heritage that as a kid it was just kind of ‘there’. It was like this like ethereal background noise that ‘we are Native American’. I grew up in small town in Oklahoma, and so everyone kind of is in some degree, or at least we were raised to believe we were. It wasn't a day-to-day part of our lives, but it was one of those things that felt like something I could latch onto like some type of stability that meant family. It meant something. It meant roots. It meant a foundation. So, I think because of that what I started wrestling with as i grew older was the longing for that connection.
Later on in the poem I talk about not just not wanting to be a part of only ‘this nation's youth’, and I think that is me calling back to those native american roots wanting to be not just written of as a young kid, not wanting to just be seen as what's wrong with the new kind of internet generation. I think that there's always been that tension that wrestling. Then just this year, I took a DNA test, and it turned out that I’m barely Native American. So it’s kind of like a weird reset for me of just trying to understand what does it mean and what did it ever mean to me to be part Native American. What does it mean now? In the video, I was still wrestling feeling like I can't say that because I knew how little I knew of that culture. I knew that I was kind of still just like grabbing for the feathers. I was still just trying to attach myself to the beauty and the romance and the sexiness of that culture and that history and kind of like pardoning myself from the majority white side of me.
See page 23 in 'The America Edition' of AwareNow (link at bottom) to catch Allié's full conversation with Alex.
