Beyond The Fad To Poetry For Social Change

Poetry is defined differently by different people. How do Africans define poetry? Is it possible to draw from the experiences of pre-colonial African oral traditions in developing an organically grown and contextualised slam poetry movement in South Africa? asks Mphutlane Wa Bofelo.

The emergence of Slam Poetry as a competitive, theatrical, participative and entertaining presentation of poetry and a social event involving a vibrant interaction between the poets is attributed to construction worker and poet, Mark Smith and the bunch of blue collar eccentric intellectuals who gathered at the Chicago Jazz Club, and the Get Me High Lounge for a series of poetry sessions in 1985. They continued the tradition under the framework of the Uptown Poetry Slam at another Chicago Jazz Club, the Green Mill from July 25,1986 to date. Looking for a way to breathe life into the open mic poetry format, construction worker and poet, Mark Smith (Slampapi) started a poetry reading series in 1985 at a Chicago jazz club, the Get Me High Lounge; which was owned by finger-popping’ hipster, Butchie (James Dukaris) who allowed anything to happen. The series' emphasis on performance laid the groundwork for a style poetry and performance which would eventually be spread across the world.

In 1986, Smith approached Dave Jemilo, the owner of the Green Mill (a Chicago jazz club and former haunt of Al Capone); with a plan to host a weekly poetry cabaret on the club’s slows Sunday nights. Jemilo welcomed him, and on July 25 that year, the Uptown Poetry Slam was born. Smith drew on baseball and bridge terminology for the name, and instituted the show’s basic structure of an open mic, guest performers, and a competition. The Green Mill evolved into the Mecca for performance poets, and the Uptown Poetry Slam still continues 18 years after its inception. Explaining the slam poetry craze and vibe at The Green Mill, the Idiot’s Guide to ? declares: “The experimenters in this new style of poetry presentation gyrated, rotated, spewed, and stepped their words along the bar top, dancing between the bottles, bellowing out the backdoor, standing on the street or on their stools, turning the west side of Chicago into a rainforest of dripping whispers or a blast furnace of fiery elongated syllables, phrases, snatches of scripts, and verse that electrified the night.”

Poetry in the Boxing ring

But in Chicago itself the idea of reading poetry in non-literary settings and in a theatrical and sporting and somewhat eccentric and experimental style often bothering on the break with conventions, could be traced to as early as the late1970s and early 1980s. Sometimes in 1978 (or 1979) Jerome Salla and Elaine Equi got for readings at Facets Multimedia. Elaine Equi recalls, “Jerome was getting bigger audiences, drawing from bars, the Art Institute scene, from clubs such as O'Banyon's, La Mer, artists, and publishers. The people around the Body Politic were one scene. But when Jerome and I would read, it was not really a literary crowd. By 1980 Salla constructed his own poetry competition based on a boxing match and the crowd was rowdy. Elaine Equi explains how this started "My husband was reading at some space in Chicago... His readings were always accompanied by a lot of audience participation. There was one particular musician, named Jimmy Desmond, who got irritated easily when he was drunk. He grabbed a chair and swung at Jerome. There was a fight, but it didn't actually come to blows." Jerome Salla continues, "A couple days later I got call from Al-Simmons. He was involved with the old poetry scene in New York’s lower east side, and in Chicago too, and hung with Ted Berrigan. He said, 'Jimmy Desmond would like to challenge you to a ten-round poetry fight to the death...” (Kurt Heintz, 1996)

Pioneer of the Slam Poetry scene in New York, Bob Holman recalls seeing Ted Berrigan and Ann Waldman in a poetry bout dressed in boxing gear, around 1979 but indicates that he didn't first communicate with Mark Smith until after he visited the Green Mill in person. Elaine Equi proposes that Simmons might have got the idea from professional wrestling, but also adds that Simmons told her that he saw a couple poets in a boxing ring in New York and would love to stage a poetry fight between her and Simmons. The first fight took place in 1980 at a fly-by-night club. Equi has very fresh memories of these ‘poetry fights’: “I read a poem called 'Give Piss a Chance' shortly after the death of John Lennon, and the crowd booed..!" They had a stage like a boxing ring and girls in bikinis, holding up cards for the number of the rounds. They also had and judges... each round Jerome and Jimmy reading one poem. Jerome won." It was not a fluke. They had a rematch and he won again. About two hundred people witnessed the second match. There match was at Tut's on Belmont at Sheffield, now The Avalon. I read in leather boxing shorts, had a robe that said Baby Jerome. Jimmy had a nickname too. We didn’t really hate each other. It was just a funny, kind of weird event we threw to make money," says Salla. "There was little story in the Trib. We were with the punk scene. A lot of forces were converging in Chicago at the same time. Suddenly there was an audience for poetry. There really isn't anything that close to the experience today except in rap music." (Kurt Heintz, 1996)

The philosophies of slam

Equi’s reference to rap in relation to the late 1970’s Chicago poetry phenomenon is interesting given the link that today’s slam poetry has with hip hop, of which rap is one of the components. It is noteworthy that Mark Smith took the name from the game of basketball which is also having some cordial relations with hip hop. Based on this information, one can say with Slam Poetry, Mark Smith and his crew of convention-busting poets and lovers of the spoken continued a tradition that -in Chicago-started in the late 70’s, and gave it a format and name in tune with the times.

Perhaps confirming the communal spirit of slam and the universal nature of its ideal of creating an open space for expression, Mark Smith declares on his website that Slam does not belong to him but to “the thousands of people who have dedicated their time, money, and energy to this Chicago-born, interactive format for presenting poetry to a public that has a zillion other barks and belches and flashes to hold its attention”. However he expresses his wish that the slam phenomenon should grow in accordance with the philosophies that have become what I consider to be the backbone of what we call the "Slam Family". These include:

- The purpose of poetry (and indeed all art) is not to glorify the poet but rather to celebrate the community to which the poet belongs. (This idea is paraphrased from the works of Wendell Berry)
- The performance of poetry is an art -- just as much an art as the art of writing it.
- The Slam should be open to all people and all forms of poetry.
- We must all remember that we are each tied in some way to someone else's efforts. Our individual achievements are only extensions of some previous accomplishment.
- Success for one should translate into success for all.
- The National Slam began as a gift from one city to another. It should remain a gift passed on freely to all newcomers.

Towards an organic South African Slam Movement

These are lofty communal and humanistic ideas that in the dog-eat-dog individualistic and materialistic society might be easily dismissed as too idealistic and utopian indeed! Mark Smith himself confesses that “the idealism and cooperative forces of the Slam are in constant conflict with the competitive and self-serving appetites of its ambitious nature”. He asserts that the struggle between the idealism of slam and its competitive spirit has taught the slam family much but also threatens to obliterate all that has grown to be. And unequivocally and unambiguously declares that he is “on the side of idealism and hope.”

How many of us who have latched on the slam poetry buzz share the idealism and pro-humanism spirit? And to what extent are we able to contextualise the slam movement within the tangible and concrete realities of Azania, and locate it within the particularities and peculiarities of the Azanian\South African situation? How do we relate the slam movement to our own history of using poetry in particular, and literature and theatre in general, to open the space of discourse and critical engagement with prevailing socio-economic, political and cultural conditions? Can we draw from the experiences of pre-colonial African oral traditions in developing an organically grown and contextualised slam poetry movement in South Africa\Azania?

In South Africa\Azania the idea of doing poetry in a non-literary setting and of moving away from eurocentric conventions in as far as the stylistic concerns of poetry and the manner in which poetry is delivered, is not a new phenomenon. As early as the 1970’s, groups like Dashiki fused poetry with jazz. The Allah Poets, Mihloti, Medupi Writers and others recited their poetry over the beat of the drum and sounds of horns. People like Muthobi Motloatse and Gamakhulu Diniso of Busang Thakaneng used the term Proemdra to refer to a fusion prose, poetry, music and drama, and promoted the notion of participatory theatre. Muthobi Motloatse’s theatre piece, ‘Nkosi –the Healing song’ is a typical example of the fusion of the language of story telling, music, dance and drama. Here the barriers between the audience and the performer were broken, and in the words of a character in ‘Nkosi- the Healing Song’, “myths, legends and facts are interwoven and the story can “begin in the ending and end in the middle.”

The concept of participatory theatre gained ground in the 70’s and 80’s. Participatory theatre was informed not only by ‘the anti-poetry theory’ of the of Bertold Brecht, Jerry Grotowsky’s ‘poor theatre’ and Augusto Boal’s “theatre of the oppressed”, but also by pre-colonial African of cultural and artistic forms of expression where there were no rigid borderlines between music, poetry, dance, etc. When groups like Ujamaa (in Sharpeville), Rakgalema Medupi Arts Commune and Arts in Motion (in Sebokeng), (Mafube in the East rand) and Makana Poets (in Zamdela) emerged in the 1980’s and 1990’s, they followed the same trend began by their predecessors. These groups performed poetry at political rallies and social events like wedding ceremonies and birthday parties, at schools, in churches, in beer-halls and in stadiums. Poetry was performed in prisons, hostels, squatter camps, refugee camps, and in the trenches and guerrilla training camps in exile. In the words of Muthobi Motlaotse, this kind of literature and theatre deliberately shit on conventional English-English literary forms.

It mixed languages and genres and knew no holy cows. In as far as its dare-devil, passionate and energetic, genre-crossing, convention-defying multi-media spirit and its efforts to open up the space for self-expression and dialogue between the writer and society are concerned, the slam poetry phenomenon shares stylistic and thematic concerns with the poetry, literary and theatre movement of the 1970’s up to the early 90’s in South Africa\Azania. The efforts of many slam poets\ hip hop activists in Azania today to attune their artistic expressions to the historical-material experiences, politico-economic conditions and the cultural and linguistic heritage of our country is in many ways a continuation of the tradition and legacy of the 1970’s generation that was in the main inspired by the philosophy of Black Consciousness.

Conclusion

What is missing is a conscious and well-coordinated programme to link up the present literary and cultural movement with the past and to educate the current crop of poets and cultural activists about their predecessors. The ignorance of the present-day generation of poets and spoken word activists about the contributions and achievements of their predecessors and ancestors in the literary world is reflected by the scant respect shown to the legendary Mafika Pascal Gwala during his recital at Poetry Africa. The impatient audience heckled when Gwala recited on the opening day of Poetry Africa. The presenter of the programme is to blame for not informing the audience that Gwala was entitled to recite for more than the four minutes allocated to other poets, as he was the featured poet of the day. He also introduced Gwala with just one sentence whereas he went on and on about the other poets. Given proper direction, the poetry movement and the cultural movement in South Africa have a lot to offer to this country. And acknowledging the struggles, contributions and efforts of the ancestors of South African literary and theatre movement and learning from them would be the first step in the right direction.

Names that come to mind are Mirriam Tladi, Fatima Dike, Fikile Magadlela, Nardine Gordimer; Richard Rive, James Mathews, the late Strini Moodley (who founded the first union of Black theatre and upon whose request Gwala wrote the classical piece, ‘The Children of Nonti’), Mafika Gwala, Mazisi Kunene, Farouk Asvat, Benjy Francis, Athol Fugard, John Kani, Lefifi Tladi, Lesego Rampolokeng. The list is endless. The passion of most of these individuals for literature and theatre was fanned by the desire to use the word as an instrument for transformation and social change. Their works were part of the quest for a South Africa and a world with a more humane face. It is this understanding that will motivate the present-day writer, poet and artist to use podiums like the slam poetry\spoken word scene as mediums of self-expression as well as a platform for social dialogue and an instrument for social change. When this happens, the word will not cower to the dictates of capital, but will place the collective dignity and collective interests and aspirations of the people before narrow materialistic individual gains.

• Mphutlane Wa Bofelo is a writer, activist, life-skills facilitator and performance poet who has been published in several journals, websites and anthologies and has performed at various events. He won the Slam Poetry Champion of Championship organized by the Slam Poetry Operation Team (SPOT) in 2003. He also published the booklet, ‘The Journey Within' with Yaseen Islamic Publishers. In 2005, he won the Durban Slamjam at the 9th Poetry Africa held at the BAT Center. In June 2006, Mphutlane performed at the first Cape Town International Bookfair. He co-founded the Makana Poets with Sello Hlasa in the late 80's and is currently a member of the Nowadays Poets, the Live Poets Society (LiPS), the Slam Poetry Operation Team (SPOT), and the Open Stage Society.
• Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

Sources

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3.3. www.e-poets.net/library/slam/converge.html (accessed on 13\11\06)