“Never Knew Literacy Could Get at My Soul”: On How Words Matter for Youth, or Notes Toward Decolonizing Literacy

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Notes

Verses delivered in unison are in italics.

Brave New Voices is a sixteen-year running national and international youth poetry slam festival, held every July in a different U.S. city. About fifty teams of youth poets and their coaches from different parts of the United States and places like England, Guam, Trinidad-Tobago, and South Africa participate. The festival features workshops, performances, and training for literary arts organization leaders, activists, artists, and educators. In 2009, Brave New Voices was deliberately held in President Obama's hometown of Chicago in the summer following his election, whereas Brave New Voices in the presidential election year of 2008 took place in Washington DC. Brave New Voices in 2009 included an organized march to the Life is Living festival to bring attention to the disproportionate number of youth lives that are violently lost in Chicago.

I use the term racialized to convey the social structural process of racial formation (Omi and Winant 1994) in the makings of racial subject positions and racial subjectivity (Scott 1992; Spivak 1987). Racialization suggests an active, discursive process, one that is largely done to as well as by racial subjects through racial performativity (Butler 1999; Jackson 2001) and is not limited to non-whites.

Avery Gordon (1997) has compellingly written about haunting as a crucial site for social theorizing and knowledge production, as “that dense site where history and subjectivity make social life” (8). Haunting occurs when an “apparition is the principal form by which something lost or invisible or seemingly not there makes itself known or apparent to us” (63). The disappearance, in other words, surfaces. By bringing the invisible into visibility, we are doing the work of tracing. Haunting is a constitutive part of social life. Being haunted “is about making a contact that changes you and refashions the social relations in which you are located. It is about putting life back in where only a vague memory or a bare trace was visible to those who bothered to look” (22). The only reason we bother to look is “out of a concern for justice” (64).

Evidence of spoken word as a cultural movement is Brave New Voices, which provides a window into over fifty local, spoken word-based, youth literary arts programs or community efforts that have been established or are emerging. Brave New Voices reflects a multiracial coalition and network of organizations, professional artists, educators, and youth that culminate every year at the international youth poetry slam festival, from which the opening poem comes.

Paul Willis (1981) defined cultural production as “the creative use of discourses, meanings, materials, practices, and group processes to explore, understand, and creatively occupy particular positions in sets of general material possibilities. For oppressed groups, this is likely to include oppositional forms and cultural penetrations at particular concrete sites or regions” (59). Willis (1981) contended that cultural production is not necessarily “innocent,” in the sense that social justice can be achieved and guaranteed, yet can be employed to frame cultural resistance to and transgression beyond hegemonic forms of domination and violence that are socially and culturally reproduced.

Robin D. G. Kelley (2002) referred to poetic knowledge as the effort and imagination “to see the future in the present” (9) through the emancipation of language and the social urgency for it.

I attended the finals but did not participate in the festival in 2011 and 2012.

Schooling, for instance, by and large promotes rote skill development over critical thinking, emphasizes a culturally hostile curriculum (e.g., through the banning of ethnic studies in Arizona, and the push to whiten history curriculum standards in Texas), and turns a blind eye to a whole modern history of settler colonialism and its own role in the historical erasure of non-Western peoples, traditions, and worldviews.

Like with any other popular cultural form, notions and practices of resistance do shift across context, to the point where spoken word is no longer resistance per se, but a popularly accepted and encouraged as well as a co-opted and commodified form. Elsewhere I discuss how spoken word movement-building and activism come up against commercial forces like HBO, which documented and broadcasted Brave New Voices in 2008 and 2010 (Kim 2013).

Against the pervasive logic and tradition of radical individualism, agency itself is a social relation.

Examples of other literacy tools include but are not limited to voice, digital and news media, finances, and hip hop. My use of literacy relates to the body of literature known as “New Literacy Studies,” as well as other areas of critical literacy scholarship that interrupt notions of literacy as ideologically disarticulated and autonomous from social relations and power (Barton and Hamilton 2000; Brandt 1998; Duncan-Andrade 2006; Gee 1996; Haas Dyson 2003; Morrell 2004; Morrell and Duncan-Andrade 2004; Rockhill 1987; Street 2001). For example, Rockhill (1987) wrote, “[t]he politics of literacy are integral to the cultural genocide of a people, as well as the gendering of society. The construction of literacy is embedded in the discursive practices and power relationships of everyday life—it is socially constructed, materially produced, morally regulated, and carries a symbolic significance which cannot be captured by its reduction to any one of these” (165).

Because of space considerations, I am not able to take the reader deeper into an example of the pedagogical process with youth, as in the case of a writing workshop or youth working amongst themselves, that can illuminate spoken word methodology. I describe examples of pedagogy, which I define broadly beyond a teacher-learner binary, in relation to spoken word elsewhere (Kim 2013).

Most killings, assaults, and other forms of violence against youth are not captured on video, which is why the shooting death of Oscar Grant in Oakland on January 1, 2009, who was handcuffed and faced down on the platform at the Fruitvale BART station, became sorely emblematic of systematic police brutality against Black, Latino, and Asian Pacific Islander youth. As cell-phone videos of Oscar's shooting death surfaced, decades of heightened tension and conflict with and a deep mistrust of police enforcement and profiling in urban communities of color served only to fuel the indignation, discernible not only in Oakland but other major cities in the United States and around the world. On a local level, “Justice for Oscar Grant” became a rallying cry and campaign for mobilization in Oakland, demanding not merely a long-term prison sentence for Johannes Mehserle, the shooter, but a fundamental transformation of a system that hires, trains and arms police officers (Imani 2010). Public displays of outrage, urgency to further organize, and ongoing attempts to heal fused with both peaceful protest and isolated incidents of violence, quickly becoming embodied through a multitude of culturally expressive forms, ranging from graffiti tags throughout the city proclaiming “I am Oscar Grant,” to murals and countless flyers serving to visually memorialize Oscar Grant and what his death stands for, to open mic and other politically cultural youth events, to turf dancing, most notably by the Oakland-based group, Turf Feinz, through virally circulated videos co-produced by YAK films.