Mona Hagmagid Spring 2017 Final Philosophy Project - Spoken Word

Thursday, May 4, 2017 - 10:15am

I am at Busboys and poets
On the corner of 5th and K
DC nightlife hums but does not sing -
We pack into the small dining theater
With the stage dark and blank
The lights hover in the air
And the way that we all blend together
Glints like magic
Black girls and young men too
Lots of hues and homes that are not always in this city
Suburban brats and school kids
Old people fill in the back chairs
Hipster tourists ordering hummus and vegan nachos wander in
They have no idea what they are about to witness in this sacred room
The spilling of vulnerability
Of powerful words
from
Brilliant
Black
Minds

Not everyone here is a poet
But we all
Are feeling lost
Somehow
Our stories do not exist in enough pages in enough libraries
They way they talk about our bodies and our
Gods do not resemble the
Complexities we witness
All of us are tired of reduction tired of being
Flattened of having the most beautiful
Or just important parts of us
Erased away
or suffocated into silence

This is the canvas before the open mic.
Noisy and fluid as people sign up onto a piece of paper on the back table
Sometimes
This room becomes competition hall
Host to a poetry slam
Sometimes, it is just a microphone and a stage
And rows of faces
Craving healing and saving and enlightenment

We poets whet our mouths
Ready to spit
Calling on the gravity of this room, to command their ears to bow down
We carry the ferocity of our ancestors in the tilt of our heads and the sting of our tongues
Sharp and precise
Nothing is freestyled
Here is where we showcase our art. The children of hours of labor of musing of rewriting
Choreography
And thesis

People often talk about academic whitespaces
How people of color seemed to be squeezed out of history books and
Barricaded from entering their
Academic journals
Written off as mute brains
Or poor ones
Black and brown souls who seem to be only victims
To be only corpses or cleanup or leftovers or
Specimens
They write volumes about us
And never even site our melanin save for sometimes in the footnotes
Reduced to afterthoughts as
They say they wonder
Where we disappeared to?
The Roanoke of humanity
Lost tribe turned lost cause.
As if they haven't been trying to smother us, --bury us

But we have always been here.
In rooms like these
Basements and street corners
Bars and nightclubs and school yards
They just haven't bothered to listen to
the way that rap
Battles pick up on verse and flow
The way that students
chant about why poverty is a
vicious cycle
Why historical trauma
Is serious and painful
And crippling
we having been standing here, been shouting our own history
rewriting theories written by white men about our bodies
Spoken word reformers of political thought and morality and american dreams
We paint afros and fists and black beauty over
The walls they build to box us in
Leaping over the labels
And the police badges
We define for you here
What is our blackness, our womanhood, our Islam
Reorient you to our neighborhoods, schools, music, dance, media, and literature

When they think of philosophy
They think of kant
And hume and aristotle names of white men in high places
They can’t ever look beyond their own hypocrisy
Never seeing Shange or Angelou or Morrison
Never hearing the verses of Tupac and Kendrick
Never remembering the pages of Mos Def and Malcolm
The rhythms of Marley and the fire of Carmichael
The way we do

Our philosophy is born, worshipped, and celebrated here, in this space
In the hot air that is this restaurant
That is this stage
We have always been here
Loud and indignant
Often pained
But never have we been invisible
And never have we been silent

In between snaps and applause and exclamations bursting through the hearts of loving strangers.
In the very front rows
Something unique happens
An intellectual culture shifts
exchange of socio-political ideas
Little by little
Sometimes it erupts from under the surface
Sometimes it explodes into flames
And sometimes it wafts in gently,
Like perfume, like the scent of the nachos coming out of the kitchen

We are all equal here
Anyone
Can walk into busboys and sign up for the open mic
Anyone
Can come here
And be poetry.