Some cool jazz cat once told jessica Care moore* that she sounds like a Miles Davis riff when she reads her poems. South Africans will be able to experience this for themselves when moore performs at the annual Urban Voices festival, which kicks off this weekend in Johannesburg.
Now in its fourth year, Urban Voices has established itself as the most exciting local festival with its mix of poetry, debate and music. Unlike other festivals, which year after year roll out the same tired programmes, Urban Voices looks wider, especially out on the left-field, for its artists.
Atlanta-based moore exemplifies this. Described as “a scriber of the black scream”, she has shared stages and studios with artists such as Nas (she features on his album Nastradamus), George Clinton, Mos Def, Gregory Hines, Gil Scott Heron and The Last Poets. She also wrote and performed the play There are No Asylums For the Real Crazy Women, on the life of TS Eliot’s first wife, Vivienne.
moore runs her own publishing house, which has published her two anthologies of poetry. She is writing her first screenplay, The Betty Davis Story — not her of Kim Carnes’s Bette Davis Eyes fame. While married to Miles Davis, Betty had an affair with Jimi Hendrix. But she was also one of the best, if sadly neglected, funk goddesses.
“Like most, I didn’t know much about her,” says moore. “About six years ago, I think … Amir [the drummer from The Roots], told me I smile with Betty Davis teeth. Then, later [rapper Talib] Kweli told me I reminded him of her album cover for They Say I’m Different. Yes! Hip-hop helped me find Betty. I love to tell women’s stories when they haven’t been told.”
moore (32) was born in Detroit, the home of Motown, Iggy Pop, Funkadelic, techno, Eminem and the White Stripes. “The Motown sound is in my music, in my work, in my spirit,” she says. “Oh, my daddy had eight tracks and I don’t remember jazz … just, Motown, Motown. Yeah, it influenced my work and the city of Detroit is filled with history and poetry.”
She has been writing since the age of nine. “I always thought I’d be a journalist, not a poet. I studied journalism, it was my major along with political science.
“I began writing more in high school, but it wasn’t until the early Nineties when I was working for Fox News that I became quite popular on the poetry scene in Detroit. After writing the newscast pretty quickly, I would begin to write poetry at work, whenever I had a free moment. In 1994 my daddy died. I was very close to him and after his death poems just came constantly.”
That was a turning point in moore’s life: “I read my first poem in front of an ‘audience’ at my father’s funeral. It was called Breeze and I wrote it the morning of his funeral … People in my family were really taken by the poem and wanted copies.
“My first reading in front of a public audience was at the Pourme Café in downtown Detroit, I guess, or maybe at Wayne State University — the college I attended nearby. I was a loud-mouth rowdy activist and I used my poetry to get apathetic students politically motivated.”
moore has become a revered poet across the United States, and internationally. But she remains a committed activist, focusing on Aids awareness — lending her voice to the Aids Walk ceremonies in New York, San Francisco and Atlanta, and working with black and Latino youth on Aids issues and literacy in a project called “Literacy through Hip-Hop”.
“I wanted to find a way to connect hip-hop culture with literature. I wanted to create literature and workshops to support the idea. The Poetry of Emcees is the anthology — featuring the work of rappers like Talib Kweli, Saul Williams, Q-Tip — that will come out first. Hip-hop is everywhere and it’s a great way to pull kids into the idea of reading.”
This upcoming visit won’t be moore’s first to this country — she visited last year. “South Africa reminded me of the black South. I had some interesting conversations and revelations. I wrote one poem, Personal Vocabulary, while I was there. I read a lot of the South African poets and found their work to be strikingly similar in theme to the work of black poets in the US.”
moore’s latest visit can be attributed to a fan in Cape Town: “This wonderful brotha e-mailed me so much and wanted to know why [rap poet Saul Williams] had been here, but not me. Hey, I was wondering the same thing.”
So moore’s fan put her in contact with Roshnie Moonsammy, Urban Voices founder and director. “When I was in Durban and Caversham Arts Centre for their residency programme, I went to Jo’burg for one night and met with Roshnie.” A deal was struck and now South Africans can hear how, as playwright T Tara Turk put it, “moore pimps the alphabet and puts the words to work on her own block”.
* The “j” in jessica and “m” in moore are lower case, moore explains, as “a statement of not accepting all that people name you, or define you as”
The details
This year’s Urban Voices festival celebrates 10 years of democracy and kicks off this weekend at the Newtown Music Hall with diva Angelique Kidjo.
jessica Care moore performs at the International Spoken Word Festival on July 30 and 31 at the Newtown Music Hall; on August 1 at the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town; and on August 3 at the Bat Centre in Durban. For a full programme, including workshop dates, Tel: (011) 726 6916.