When the world discovers the extent of the evil it is capable of — like when the Truth and Reconciliation Commission dug up South Africa’s past, or after last week’s horror attacks on the United States — it often looks to its poets to make sense of it all.
So I asked New York-based slam poet Sarah Jones how she is coping with the atrocities that unfolded so close to her residence that, by last Friday, her area of New York was still closed off. “This is, to be sure, a time none of us will ever forget,” she says.
“I know that people have suffered in various ways, through wars and oppression, but this is the first time that tragedy has struck so close to me,” she says. “I am still not sure what to make of it, but I think that I, and other artists I hope, will take time out to reflect on these events.” Jones then offers a sense of perspective: “Maybe this is a sign that we need a different kind of global conversation.”
Since she cut her teeth at the Nuyorican Poets Café Jones has been on a mission to influence the depiction of black people, especially women, in the media. She marries activism and art. “Just because you are portraying a maid does not mean you do not have to have dignity,” she says.
Jones’s poetry and theatre work is driven by her need to find out about the lives of people, and she criticises her homeland brutally. “Our education system, media and government in general have done us a disservice by not offering us a better education,” she says, before tearing into the US’s national ethos by lamenting the ignorance of its people. This is a criticism she makes out of love, she insists. “As Americans we should be ashamed of how ignorant we are. No amount of economic [power] gives us the right to think lowly of other people,” she says.
She is fascinated by the world outside the US, researching the lives of women in places such as Kenya and Jordan, watching videotapes of people from other countries and interacting with immigrants from all over the world. The result is work such as her one-person performance Women Can’t Wait, looking at how women suffer injustices all over the world. Last year she performed the piece at a United Nations gathering in New York.
In 1998 she put together Surface Transit, which she will be performing in South Africa next week. Under the direction of fellow poet and theatre director Gloria Feliciano, the play has been described as an “incisively funny and beautifully performed series of monologues … [exploring how] hipness can sell everything from shoes to racism”. In it she portrays “eight New Yorkers connected by a degree of separation in that they know each other”.
Jones has been practising her craft fulltime for the past seven of her 28 years. “I have taken my time [to record an album because] I do not have faith in what I call the processing plants” — that is, the recording industry. “The faith they have in the arts is non-existent. They are all about marketing. Imagine if Aretha Franklin came along now, she probably would not make it because she does not look like what they want to project.”
Jones’s major misgiving about hip-hop is that it has taken on a corporate identity. But she is wise enough to realise that, given her looks and talent, she cannot avoid the clutches of Hollywood and Motown forever. Yet she is cautious: “We all have to work within certain parameters.”
Success followed Surface Transit. She turned down an offer from MTV, but took a role offered by Spike Lee in his movie Bamboozled. “He is very skilled and is open to new faces,” she says of the acclaimed director. But she is left with the classic tale of an acting debut: “The best stuff that I did ended up on the floor in the cutting room.”
Her moment to savour in poetry and music came in 1998, when she was invited to perform Blood as part of a recording of the Lyricist Lounge compilation CD at Tramps, a leading New York showcase venue, alongside De la Soul, Q-Tip from A Tribe Called Quest and Mos Def, among others.
Did she see this as the moment she had arrived? “I was honoured to be part of the project. It meant that somebody is recognising what I do, but I believe that we arrive when we are born.” Her work on Lounge was an extension of what she did at the Nuyuorican Poets Café, where she met her current partner in poetic crime, Steve Colman.
“Sarah was one of the few people who successfully mixed hip-hop and poetry,” says Colman of the moment in 1997 when Jones got up to perform at a venue he had been frequenting as an awestruck spectator since 1990.
Colman’s introduction to rap and poetry came through his upbringing in Englewood, New Jersey, home of the Sugar Hill Gang, the band that gave the world Rapper’s Delight and the melody for Queen’s Another One Bites the Dust. Colman recalls how, as a white kid in an all-black school, he was receptive to black musical influence and fell in love with being a hip-hop MC (poet). That was of course until Eminem spoilt it all by being the first white kid to turn rap on its head.
Colman has some reservations about the rise of Eminem. “As a person who works with words I can respect his technique,” he says, “but my problem with Eminem is that he has no respect for the roots of the craft. He has no awareness that his whiteness has allowed him to exert the influence he has.”
But, he adds, “the more dangerous thing for rap is the emergence of artists like Limp Bizkit. You are going to have white kids growing up believing white people started rap.” These bands, he says, are “rooted in black music but selling the whiteness”.
While waiting for his turn in the limelight, Colman has built a healthy following in poetry circles. He hasn’t looked back since winning the 1998 Nuyorican poetry championship, where he represented New York City. In 1999 he coached the city’s slam team and won the Fresh Pot of the Year at the same contest a year later.
In the past two years he has toured more than 100 colleges, appeared on Black Entertainment Television’s Soundstage Slam and was declared by CNN to be “one of the best slam poets in the country”. He co-edited a poetry anthology called Burning Down the House and has appeared at the Def Poetry Jam on Home Box Office.
He believes that the new lease on life attained by such poetic work is mainly due to “a search for an alternative to Puff Daddy … But it is also because the grassroots movement has taken time to grow,” he says. Most importantly, however, “There was no forum for people to express views and the church was not gonna offer that.”
The events of September 11 seem to have slightly altered his frame of reference. “Already there are poems of mine that I feel different about,” he says. One of these is New York, New York, “the big city of dreams”. He derides the city’s economic system and declares, “… When I win the lotto/ I will call a city-wide strike/ because if [Mayor Rudy] Giuliani has his way/ everything is going to be all white.” Not bad for a white boy with a master’s degree in history.
Catch Sarah Jones and Steve Colman at Urban Voices on September 22 at 8.30pm at the Horror Café, Newtown Cultural Precinct, Johannesburg. Jones will perform Surface Transit at the Market Theatre from September 25 to 27. Book at Computicket.