Sarah Jones & Aya de Leon

There is a visual element to performance—the effect of which cannot truly be replicated on the page. Of course, timing, beat, intonation & other elements also change from page to stage, but I am thinking mainly of movement, expression and costuming—specifically in comparing Sarah Jones’ “Your Revolution” and Aya de Leon’s “Hoe Supastar.” I found both to be pretty incredible. They are going after a similar problematic element of the African American hip hop industry—the exploitation of women in the interest of self-representation. Both are edgy and cut-throat; one is straight-up declarations through rhyme, the other is satire & musical performance.

I read the Jones first—I picked up on the musical references & was singing the lines of the songs in my head that were inserted into the poem; I didn’t need a performance there. I also immediately fell into the rhythm of the lines, picked up the beat and the rhyme scheme, and was experiencing the piece as a musical critique of a music industry. The last three lines read as a bit of a letdown for me. I was grooving with the repetition and the rhyme, expecting the climax (what IS the real revolution?) but then it just.. ended. Although I could see it working in terms of content, it left me wanting a more satisfying wrap-up of the pulsing rhythm. I’d like to hear how Jones would read this, I’m think she had a plan with those last lines, as everything in the piece seems so carefully chosen. Maybe her pause, her intonation & her positioning would have made it all come together better for me.

Now, when I watched Aya de Leon’s piece (at least as much as I could because the sound cut out of the youtube video early in the second half…), I have to admit, my ears were burning. I felt shy and excited about the way she presented herself. For a moment, I wondered if I should be offended, particularly because of the intro to the piece, played with no visuals against a darkened screen:

Next up is one of the most controversial artists of our day. Also on the Mighty Ignant label. She has been called one of the 10 most negative women in the U.S. by Ms. Magazine, and her world tour was picketed by angry women in Europe and Japan. Give it up y’all for Lady XXX-Rated.

I wondered if the correct link was sent out, and braced myself for what I was going to see. Then I thought of the Performance Group—Meg, Naamen, Micah & Jennifer—and told myself: Cool it, and trust these folks. Lady XXX-Rated struts onto the stage, displaying her body in her skimpy outfit to a cheering crowd. Once she started speaking, I understood that all this—the clothes, the wig, the announcer—was part of the image she was creating. She was in character—a character in the unique position of being a participant in a misogynistic element of the hip hop industry, but also an outspoken proponent of her placement within that industry (or at least the benefits that could be reaped from it).

This was taking Patricia Smith’s skinhead poem to another level—de Leon’s character is so fluid that we are forced to wonder whether there is some truth to her, and question how we fall in relation to her. de Leon further implicates the viewer in this manner when Lady XXX-Rated calls out the feminists of the Ivory Tower for critiquing her. So we are unable to write this character off as a subjugated woman who doesn’t even realize she is creating more problems for other women because then we are those finger-pointing, disconnected critics. And everybody seemed to freaking love Lady XXX-Rated (not sure if she is a parody of an actual person..). As soon as she started singing & dancing my cheeks burned even more. I loved the beat even though the lyrics made me angry. I loved the confidence of this woman, how assured she was in her body—even though I know this was supposed to represent a false confidence and problematic representations of the body.

So we are wooed by this character while at once aware of how she is knocking “herself” down. de Leon creates a fabulously complex image with this piece: she triggers our love for a good beat & an engaging character, and uses it to break down the entrapping misogyny of the mainstream (corporate) hip hop machine. She is using her body to display the misdirected way women have used they bodies to gain a lucrative position in a classist/racist nation. The costuming & movement she incorporates are absolutely critical to the success of this piece—making me wonder what effect it could have had on the page. But de Leon doesn’t give us the easy out, either, of being disgusted by or critical of this representative character. Because this character has a voice. The final message, if there can be one in so few words, is that we need to come down not on the women in this industry, but on those who put them in these positions; and, we need to reclaim this art from, as women, for our own self-representation & direct financial gain.

And, just a minute… could that be the “real revolution?”

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?