Today on September 20, 2008, I attended the event Speak Out! at Manilatown Heritage Foundation near Chinatown. This event is part of Kearny Street Workshop’s APAture, celebrating and displaying Asian Pacific American heritage to everyone. This was one of the most interesting events that I have ever attended in my life. It was the very first poetry slam that I went to and I found that it was really amazing.
Basically this Speak Out! event featured selected participants of Youth Speaks and adult writers who gathered together at this event to share pieces of their writing. All the Youth Speaks participants who spoke at the event are all of different ethnicities of Asian American culture and grew up and lived in different environments around the Bay Area. They all submitted their pieces of poetry and all were chosen by APAture to have the special opportunity to share their own voice in poetry at this event. Each youth participant read out two poems. One poem was dedicated to where they lived or the environment that they grew up in and the other was dedicated to an abstract idea that they feel passionate about, including justice and racism. Each had their own special means of expressing their feelings and actions for their poetry, whether or not they sang or they danced.
The adult poets were just as talented as the youth were. They were more professional in expressing their poetry and getting their ideas across to everyone. They did not talk about much about themselves but more about the larger ideas that affect us today, including religion and education. Even so, their message got across to everyone who listened to them, which I know is an important aspect of poetry and writing.
Listening is not one of my best aspects, but today I was all ears for the poetry that these people astounded me with. I was thinking, “Oh wow, how do they come up with this stuff? I could never do that.” Well I could, but then it won’t turn out to be as good as the ones that I heard today. I mean, I am talking about youth that are about my age producing pieces of work that display important messages about society and culture today. I visualized scenes from East Oakland and Korea and felt like I saw moms being beaten by their husbands and children getting killed from a stray bullet. The words were that powerful. It was very personal for them because they were talking about their own experiences from their own lives. What they spoke was what they went through, and they wanted people like me who were in the audience to understand and appreciate what they put out there by their body language, emotions, and their voice. I had a great sense of pride for them for being advocates for what they believed in and represented. It takes lots of courage to go up to the microphone and show who they were. Even though they stumbled with their words and actions at times, it does not matter because the focus is not on what goes wrong in the performance, but rather what is being said and what message is being sent out there for everyone to know about.
What also made this event unique is the diversity represented by the people who went up to the microphone today and contributed a piece of themselves as literary artists. There were some presenters who are of mixed races and some who come from areas that are misrepresented in Asian American culture. All had something to say about their culture and had similar and different ideas that they strongly believed in. There are not many Asian Americans who take part of the literary movement, but what I saw and heard today convinced me to believe that the literary movement is going to soon have a very significant change. As I listened to these speakers, I could relate and agree to the many ideas that they put out there. What they said about many ideas, including racism, justice, and education was all very true. I understood what they were going through because the same things have happened to me and I had embraced the same, effected feelings that they had.
My first poetry slam was an awesome experience. It felt great for me to take some time out to listen to what others had to say about their own culture and society. Experiencing culture does not have to be just walking around and looking at aspects of culture but it can come in many forms, such as the form that I got to witness today: the language of speaking and poetry. You learn a lot about culture in so many different ways and you also learn when you least expect it.
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