By Button Poetry
.
.
Jahman Hill, performing at IWPS 2019 in San Diego, CA.
Transcript provided by YouTube:
00:02
Dear boy in my Slavery, Freedom and Authority class
00:05
who asked the following question:
00:07
“How did slave masters communicate with slaves
00:11
if the slave masters didn’t speak African?”
00:16
The fuck?
00:19
How does one speak African?
00:21
No, no, no, you tell me, because I’m black, and I don’t know.
00:25
So when a white teacher looking back at me and the only other black kid
00:28
in our Slavery, Freedom and Authority class,
00:30
we’re looking back at her like,
00:33
“No, go ahead, answer the question!”
00:35
“No, I want to see what you do with this one!”
00:38
See, I ain’t never heard nobody speakinh African.
00:42
I heard the slaves and they masters spoke that slave talk.
00:45
It had an American dialect,
00:46
and we never forgot the language.
00:48
It was branded onto our bodies.
00:51
The literature was cemented in the scars on our backs.
00:54
I heard a runaway body looked just like poetry.
00:58
You see the way they ingrain [imit-t-t-til] into the alphabet.
01:01
When a police officer pulls me over,
01:04
I can hear the syntax in his step.
01:06
When he says the word “boy,”
01:08
it sounds like quotation marks.
01:10
When he exercises his authority,
01:12
I find myself sitting in slang,
01:14
waiting for this grammar policeman to sentence me to a period
01:17
or leave me in fragments,
01:19
accents accentuating the sidewalk
01:22
when this subject has always been seen as object.
01:25
The predicate for police is premeditated murder.
01:28
There has never, there has never,
01:30
there has never been a perfect past tense
01:32
when my people have always been disintegrated into participles,
01:36
like going, going, gone.
01:38
See, this black skin been speaking American
01:40
since our skeletons touched these shores,
01:43
and there ain’t no way a slave master could have spoke African.
01:48
They ain’t even read the Middle Passage.
01:50
(cheers and applause)
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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