Poets Set The Tone For Black History Month

by Lucy Gellman

Lyrical Faith was somewhere between Gun Hill Road and the Manhattan College Parkway, charting a course through the Bronx in her mind. In one universe, her feet click-clacked down the sidewalk, surrounded by sound and color everywhere she turned. In another, four dozen pairs of eyes watched her every move. Back on Ella T. Grasso Boulevard, twins Jada and Janada Colon listened carefully, hanging onto the story of a borough that was once their home.

Thursday morning, Lyrical Faith was one of four artists to ring in Black History Month at New Haven Adult & Continuing Education, during a celebration packed with spoken word, music, and a cheerand snap-filled talkback. Organized by High School Credit Student Support Specialist Mike Twitty, the performance brought in over 50 students for an hour of poetry and drumming.

In addition to poets Lyrical Faith, T’Challa Williams, and Tarishi “Midnight” Shuler, the event featured drummer Albear Sheffield, who is an alumnus of the program. In every moment, it was a reminder of the talent and weight of words, and their ability to hold the world together even as it burns.

Or as Lyrical Faith said, “When everything goes into flames, everybody looks to the artists.”

“Art being an access point is my whole jam,” she said in a conversation after the performance. “It’s a way in. They see this, and they feel like, ‘I can do this.’”

From the moment poets took the mic, they transformed the blue-walled room into a stage, their words weaving whole worlds out of thin air. Coming to the front of the room with a roar, Williams looked around, then cracked open a mint-green binder that nearly matched her jeans. Her eyes danced from the page to the room back to the page, picking out the right poem in seconds.

Sidestepping the microphone, she spoke straight from he ribcage.

“I will bite the hand that thinks it is feeding me/Like my life ain’t no seed/You’ve been harvesting,” Williams read.

Extending one hand as the other kept the binder steady, she traced a path from the theft and enslavement of Black people and Black histories to centuries of oppression and economic disenfranchisement to the present, when police are still killing Black people at routine traffic stops, convenience stores, and in their own homes.

“My people/Will be/Free!” she exclaimed defiantly. “See free! Taste free! Speak free! Freely confidently free—”

“Come on now!” a voice urged from somewhere in the middle of the audience.

More voices joined in, encouraging her.

“Confidently free!” she continued. “Crea-tive-ly free! Mentally free! Physically free! Spiritually Free! Sex-u-ally free! Financially free!”

FaSnaps filled the room. She imagined a world where state-sanctioned violence no longer existed. She spit into being a place where people cared more about the loss of human life than the potential of property damage. She willed attendees to vision a country where the 1619 Project was not so immediately contested, because people understood it was history. Here, between words and breath, was her framework for a liberated future. When she finished, the space exploded into applause.

She paused to take a few sips from her water bottle, then looked back at the audience. “Y’all hot?” she said. “I’m hot.”

She turned to her poem “Impossible Mission Force,” bringing that future back into focus. Looking to the unrest of the past three years—and the past four centuries before that—she challenged listeners to take action on a grassroots level, making change in their own communities instead of behind their screens or at a single action.

“The immediate change you can impact is right where you be,” she read, raising one hand over her head. “Join a committee. Take that hot air from the metaverse and transmute the energy to where it can be fully of use./We must sweep our own stoop.”

She critiqued a constant, churning media cycle that shuts down Black bodies and Black dreams. In the same stanza, she gave the antidote: listeners could believe in hope as a form of resistance. They could dream as a form of resistance.

“Tom Cruise that shit!” she read to laughs and a few cheers. “Ethan Hunt this bitch! Hope is not a strategy my behind!”

That fire ran through the end of her performance, the room transformed into a sizzling stage. When Shuler took her place, hands flitting through the air, he looked out at dozens of wide-eyed faces and smiled. While he now lives in Meriden, the artist grew up in New Haven and serves as the interim director of The Word. This was a hometown crowd. He encouraged attendees to let themselves speak back to the poets, in a style of call-and-response that separates spoken word and slam poetry from buttonedup readings. Minutes later, he would show off his own rule, slipping a laughteredged “Don’t Be Nice!” in between two of Lyrical Faith’s pieces.

After warming the audience up with his poem “The Photographer,” he paused for a moment and took an informal poll of the audience. How many people, he asked, had gotten called a name that was not theirs? Over a dozen hands went up around the room, some students audibly mmm hmmm-ing as they raised their arms toward the ceiling. Shuler nodded, and went right into his poem.

“True story,” he started, his palms cutting through the air. When he was born, Shuler’s mom wanted to name him Kunta Kinte, in honor of the release of the film Roots that same year. His aunt pushed back, and suggested Tarishi. In Swahili, the name means messenger. He later said that he did not know the origin or the meaning of his name until he was in his 30s.

Read more about this aricle by going to theinnercity.com