In Saul Williams’s previous performance in Johannesburg in 2002, there was an eerie moment when he suddenly broke into tears in the middle of a poem at the Bassline.
Whereas he had spent the last half-hour seemingly detached, reciting his poems as if through a bullhorn, that unexpected moment of vulnerability forced us to look beyond the diasporic ”motherland” clichés and recognise our connectedness as humanity.
”Quite often, I am overwhelmed with the history and energy of an environment while performing,” says Williams, recalling that moment. ”The struggles of South Africa have played an important role in my development as an artist and human being. As a child, I stood with my parents as they marched against apartheid. We boycotted companies like Coca-Cola and Reebok, we sponsored exiled students, artists and leaders. In fact, my first professional role as an actor was in the debut of Athol Fugard’s My Children, My Africa in Atlanta. Performance is ritual. We exorcise spirits, history, emotions and stagnant energy while on stage. I am amazed that I didn’t cry for the entirety of my performance.”
While it’s easy to dismiss Williams as an internally rhyming softy too in touch with his feminine side, his history is steeped in the macho hip-hop tradition of duelling (battling). His most recent works, like parts of the book The Dead MC Scrolls, reveal those sensibilities to be still intact.
In fact, he has built a performance career that, in many ways, is about navigating this dichotomy. ”My love of poetry didn’t happen because I grew up reading poetry, but because I grew up with strong doses of hip-hop and that is what shaped me and moulded me,” he writes in the Scrolls.
”Hip-hop made me proud of being black in ways that my parents could never do by forcing me to read a Langston Hughes poem.”
In the mid-1990s, while doing a master’s in acting at New York University, Williams began writing poetry to fill the void between ”what I was hearing and what I wanted to hear from hip-hop”. It soon led to slam championships and film stardom as directors (Marc Levin) and producers (Rick Rubin) sought out his rare talents.
Levin cast him as the lead actor in Slam, which won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival in 1998. Rubin heard him on a compilation CD and produced his debut album Amethyst Rock Star, which was released in 2001.
Although Amethyst was a hit worldwide, Williams had reservations about the way it was mixed. He split from Rubin’s label and spent the next three years honing a sound in his bedroom that he dubbed ”grippo”.
Grippo, a post-apocalyptic, electro/punk-rap style that evokes Bad Brains as much as it does Public Enemy or even M.I.A., is the foundation upon which his second, eponymous album is built. ”It differentiates itself from the traditional boom-bap [hip-hop] simply because it is its child,” explains Williams. ”It has no choice but to be different.”
Besides Urban Voices, Williams will also appear at this year’s Oppikoppi festival, where he will perform music for the first time in front of a South African audience.
Urban Voices poetry programme takes place at the Bassline in Jo’burg on July 29, at the Bat Centre in Durban on July 30 and at the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town on August 3. For more information on the poetry festival and workshops visit www.artsexchange.co.za. Book at Computicket
Also at Urban Voices
Lemon
”In the poetry scene, everybody is a poet or is some guy taking his girl on a date to show off how deep he is,” says Brooklyn-born poet/actor Lemon. It figures that Lemon should say this. His friend Beau Sia, who recommended him to the Urban Voices team, performed an insanely humorous lampoon of ”deepness” at last year’s show. More seriously, though, Lemon, who recently featured in Spike Lee’s Inside Man, has largely operated outside of the slam poetry scene, having discovered poetry in prison while serving time for drug peddling. ”I come from a line of poets who are writers and honour other writers like the beat generation and the Signifying Monkeys,” says Lemon. ”My style is a signifying style, which is an inmate style of poetry and it was about, ‘How do I make this inmate laugh so he can take his mind off things?’ Most of it is about characters and not about me. Writing about the self is easy. When you write about other people, that’s when the poetry comes out.” A hip-hop theatre enthusiast, Lemon starred in Tony Award-winning Russell Simmons’s Def Poetry Jam in 2003 and will be shooting a vampire film based on a graphic novel in New Zealand later this year.
Sekou Sundiata
Fellow Black Arts Movement pioneer Amiri Baraka considers Sekou Sundiata to be ”one of the most distinctive and original” djalis (poets, historians, musician signifiers) active today. The Harlem-born Sundiata, who is currently a professor of music, literature and poetry at Eugene Lang College in New York City, recenty completed a one-man theatre piece called Blessing the Boats that relates his battle with kidney disease and his subsequent kidney transplant in 1999. Since having received a kidney from his friend, Sundiata has dedicated himself to raising awareness about organ donation using his art. Sundiata, whose message-driven oeuvre resonates with sounds of blues, funk, jazz and Afro-Caribbean percussion, is currently working on The 51st (Dream) State, a music/theatre piece about the US’s national identity and its guiding mythologies.
Suheir Hammad
Suheir Hammad was born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Amman, Jordan, but emigrated to Brooklyn, New York, with her family at an early age. Growing up among impoverished African-Americans in the early 1980s, Hammad first encountered hip-hop and literature in these neglected confines, which unleashed her own literary and performance potential. In 2003, she became the first Palestinian on Broadway when she participated in Russell Simmons’s Def Poetry Jam. Today, her work continues to reflect the daily realities of the US and her Palestinian heritage. She tirelessly lends her talents to worthy causes. Last year, she organised an event called Refugees for Refugees in New York, which raised $5 000 for Hurricane Katrina relief.