hammad solves page v. stage

I’m feeling really lucky that I have to post this ahead of time (I’ll be in Alaska next week, have fun being videotaped in class!) because it means I get to be the first to write about Suheir Hammad.

I started watching Suheir perform on scratchy VHS tapes borrowed from a classmate who recorded the HBO Def Poetry Jam episodes for me. She has always been a really strong example, I think, of how page and stage can intersect and still be equally beautiful on both sides of the street. In her poem “Silence,” you can hear the narrator’s voice effortlessly and immediately. That first stanza is such an incredibly accurate transcription of the way it should be read aloud that it’s hard to remember I’m still holding a book. I tried to figure out how she was doing it (because I am constantly trying to figure out how I can do it) and I think it’s less about the breath and more about the change in pitch in your voice as you move your head from one side of the audience to the other. She breaks a line before the emphasis comes, so you are always moving forward, always rocking. “I wonder what he / heard as he ran / wonder what he / thought as the,” breath, “American bullets / flew from,” breath, “Israeli hands / through,” breath, “god’s air.” She follows the typical cadence of her generation of slam poets (one that our generation has made a fool of themselves in trying to mimic), but does so on the page. I can hear it and I’m so impressed.

Later on in this same poem, she uses the space on the page to not only pace the reader the same way she would pace her voice on stage, but also directs the reader’s eyes the way she, as a performer, would direct her eyes. Toward the bottom of page 108, we have “Palestine occupied / freedom denied / my people’s genocide,” stretched across the page. I read these as stage directions, as shifting focus throughout the room as the list is spoken. I had never thought of doing this in such a physical and obvious way on the page.

She does something similar in the poem “exotic,” as well, pacing the words across the page in the way in which one might deliver it to an audience. We shift left to right like a typewriter head, and I can hear where she speeds up, where she lets the tongue go loose & trusts it.

I’m also glad we have the videos (thank god for youtube, right?) because I’m always curious about how this page-voice translates to a stage-voice without losing its integrity. I have been watching Suheir for years and yet I’m always surprised at the flatlining in her voice when she reads off a page (as opposed to when she performs), a bone I’m always picking with page poets who are confused when no one comes to poetry readings, but there’s barely standing-room-only at poetry slams.

What would happen if we embodied the page more often? What would happen if page poets memorized their shit?