The Value of Hawaii 2: Ancestral Roots, Oceanic Visions

So Listen to Me

MO‘OLELO: STORIES AND STORYTELLING HALEY KAILIEHU SO LISTEN TO ME LYZ SOTO Slam poetry is a competitive form of spoken word started in the 1980s in Chicago by Marc Smith, a poet and construction worker, who was looking for a way to get everyday people excited about poetry. At its most basic, slam poetry is an open mic event with rules and a time limit. In Hawai‘i, it has often developed a separate sense of place defined by a desire for cultural selfdefinition within colonial realities that resist this type of exploration. In other words, the poems written and performed by youth from Hawai‘i can be quite different from those heard in the continental United States. Yes, our youth are still teenagers, and much of their writing reflects the concerns of stereotypical American teenagers, and yet Hawai‘i’s youth reflect this place: an ethnically diverse community overlayed with American decorations, on top of an indigenous population that continues to fight for breathing room in their own homeland. Slam has given space to these voices, offering articulations of life in Hawai‘i that run counter to those represented in popular media, like Hawai‘i 5-0, Magnum P.I., and Pearl Harbor. For the last eight years, I have been a mentor with Youth Speaks Hawai‘i (YSH), which was founded by Melvin Won Pat-Borja, Travis Ka‘ululä‘au Thompson, and Kealoha (Wong) in 2005 with the help of Jason Mateo and Michelle Lee from Youth Speaks, Inc. (Bay Area).1 YSH works towards facilitating youth in finding their own voice through slam poetry and spoken word. Our guiding principle is that young people have important things to say, but they may need some help in discovering how to say them. Our standardized -test-obsessed educational system often mimics an industrial conveyor belt complex that restricts and/or silences those voices that step outside the mainstream box. Youth existing outside this box make up a large portion of the young people served by YSH, where we give them the latitude to find their own opinions and approaches, with mentors who will work with them for years rather than months. To evaluate the current status and future of slam poetry and spoken word in Hawai‘i, we need to reexamine complex intercultural relationships and political situations steeped in histories that, through much of the twentieth 24 SPOKEN ARTS AND YOUTH ACTIVISM century, have been sidestepped or silenced. For example, why do we not offer Hawaiian as a language option in all of our high schools? Why are we rarely taught the stories of place that predate European contact? Why do we have to work so hard to maintain cultural ties that look in any direction other than east, towards the US continent? Why are we not working harder to erradicate the systemic culture of bullying in our schools? Why don’t we have more discussions on the impact of historical events on today’s social disparities? Why are we “trouble makers” or “crazy activists” when we suggest solutions that are less about consumer growth and more about sustainable plans for a substantial future? When can we begin to imagine beyond our current social and political gridlock and start pronouncing the directions we would like to travel in the future—futures that are as daring as they are spectacular? Slam poetry from Hawai‘i offers us two opportunities: the chance to commune with those who share our life experiences, and the possibility of advocating our positions to those who are unfamiliar with Hawai‘i. Spoken word and slam poetry will continue to offer spaces for the developing voice and the story that needs to be heard. In this essay, I will be trying to stitch together multiple conversational threads that include looking at slam poetry and spoken word as points of identity exploration, personal and cultural testimony, and political activism. SAFE SPACES: TURNING SILENCE INTO WORDS Spoken word, more particularly slam poetry, was already fairly well-established on the island of O‘ahu when I stumbled into its wake in January of 2006, at the Hawaiian Hut in the Ala Moana Hotel. On a fluke, I went with a friend to see Hawai‘i Slam’s First Thursday. There were hundreds of people in attendance and they were all there to hear and see poetry. We had to wait in line for more than twenty minutes...