By Button Poetry
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Carlos Andrés Gómez, performing at Storytellers VIII in Miami Lakes, FL.
Transcript provided by YouTube:
00:02
Their high school principal told me I couldn’t teach poetry with profanity,
00:06
so I asked my students,
00:09
“Raise your hand if you’ve heard of the Holocaust.”
00:12
In unison, their arms rose up like poisonous gas,
00:14
then straightened out like an SS infantry.
00:16
“Okay. Please put your hands down.
00:20
Now raise your hand if you’ve heard of the Rwandan genocide.”
00:25
Blank stares mixed with curious ignorance,
00:28
a quivering hand out of the crowd, half-way raised,
00:31
like a lone survivor struggling to stand up in Kigali.
00:34
“Luz, are you sure about that?”
00:37
“No.”
00:38
“That’s what I thought.”
00:40
“Carlos,
00:44
what’s genocide?”
00:50
You can’t hear the truth at school if a person uses the “F” word.
00:56
Can’t even talk about the “F” word
00:57
even though a third of their senior class is pregnant.
01:01
I can’t teach an 18-year-old girl in a public school
01:03
how to use a condom that will save her life
01:05
and that of the orphan she’ll be forced to give to the foster care system.
01:08
“Carlos, how many 13-year-olds do you know that are HIV-positive?”
01:11
“Honestly, none.
01:14
But I do visit a shelter every Monday
01:16
and talk with six 12-year-old girls with diagnosed AIDS”
01:19
while 4th graders three blocks away give little boys blowjobs during recess.
01:22
I met an 11-year-old gang member in the South Bronx
01:25
who carries a semi-automatic weapon to study hall
01:27
so he can make it home,
01:28
and you want me to censor my language.
01:29
“Carlos, what’s genocide?”
01:31
Your books leave out Emmett Till and Medgar Evers,
01:34
call themselves “World History”
01:36
and don’t mention King Leopold or diamond mines,
01:38
call themselves “Politics in the Modern World”
01:40
and don’t mention apartheid.
01:42
“Carlos, what’s genocide?”
01:44
You wonder why children hide in adult bodies,
01:47
lie under light-color-eyed contact lenses,
01:49
learn to fetishize the size of their ass and simultaneously hate their lips.
01:54
My students thought Che Guevara was a rapper from East Harlem,
01:57
still think my Mumia T-shirt is of Bob Marley.
02:00
How can literacy not include Phillis Wheatley?
02:02
Schools were built in the shadows of ghosts,
02:05
filtered through incest and grinding teeth,
02:07
molded under veils of extravagant ritual.
02:09
“Carlos, what’s genocide?”
02:11
“Roselyn, how old was she?
02:15
Cuántos años tuvo tu madre cuando se murió?”
02:19
“My mother had 32 years when she died.
02:22
Ella era bellísima.”
02:25
What’s genocide?
02:26
They’ve moved on from sterilizing Boriqua women,
02:29
injecting indigenous sisters with hepatitis B.
02:31
Now they just kill mothers with silent poison,
02:33
stain their loyalty and love into veins and suffocate them.
02:36
What’s genocide?
02:37
Ridwan’s father hung himself in the box
02:39
because he thought his son was ashamed of him.
02:41
What’s genocide?
02:42
Maureen’s mother gave her skin lightening cream
02:44
the day before she started the 6th grade.
02:46
What’s genocide?
02:47
She carves straight lines into her beautiful brown thighs
02:49
so she can remember what it feels like to heal.
02:52
What’s genocide? What’s genocide?
02:54
“Carlos, what’s genocide?”
02:56
“Luz, this…
02:59
this right here…
03:02
is genocide.”
03:08
(applause and cheers)
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This post was previously published on YouTube and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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Photo credit: Screenshot from video