“We Gon’ Fight, Emmett”: Performing Childhood and Innocence as Resistance in Black Youth Slam Poetry

Brave New Voices (BNV) is an annual poetry slam competition that started in 1998 with the goal of amplifying youth poets’ voices at the national level. Youth Speaks, the foundation responsible for creating BNV, got its name because “the next generation can speak for itself” (n.p.). Since 1998, BNV has continued to convene each year to determine a champion among the top ranked youth slam teams in the nation. In 2015, the Philadelphia team won with three final stage pieces that all wrestle with Blackness in one way or another; they also all utilize meticulous staging and choreography that help capture the audience’s attention and ask us to address the very real materiality of both the poets and their subject matter.

In their final stage poem “Emmett,” the Philadelphia youth slam poetry team stages their retelling of Emmett Till’s story strategically: two Black male performers, Javon and Jamal, face the audience, while two white female performers, Otter and Veronica, stand with their backs to the boys and the audience. After a deep breath, they begin with Javon saying, “I heard he was fourteen,” followed by Otter saying, “Heard he wasn’t from around here” (0:24–0:26). The repeated phrase “I heard,” which happens throughout the poem, functions as a kind of telling—a style of narration that mimics small town gossip and suggests that the youth poets are aware of their audience. Instantly, they appeal to a general audience because they establish that they are sharing a salacious story with us as a hook to get us to listen. However, immediately after grabbing the audience’s attention, Jamal says, “Heard he had eyes like mine” (0:26–0:28). From this, we are taken out of a disembodied gossip and instead forced to see the similarities between Till and Javon and Jamal. The narrative choices these youth poets make to align themselves with Till, particularly when these choices are performed in an embodied, multimodal genre such as slam poetry, confronts the viewer with the parallels between Till’s death in 1955 and the reality that many Black boys face in the contemporary United States; but perhaps more important than aligning themselves with Till specifically is Javon and Jamal’s choice to tether themselves to Romantic notions of childhood more generally. They repeatedly remind their audience that they are children, and they offer a version of childhood that purposefully invokes innocence. By relying on these Romantic conceptions of childhood, they challenge ideologies that often cast children of color—particularly Black males—as inherently dangerous. Studying the ways these youth poets construct their understanding of their own positions in childhood is one important way that we can broaden our sites of study within African American children’s literature and expand very parameters of what constitutes African American children’s literature.

In Killing Poetry: Blackness and the Making of Slam and Spoken Word Communities, Javon Johnson, nationally ranked poet and communications scholar, explains that spoken word poetry is one way that “disenfranchised black and brown youth [have] used art as a backdoor means to engage with formal political systems that had never seen them as human beings” (17). With this in mind, I am interested in the ways that youth poets sidestep institutional, adult-controlled publishing standards and demand their art have political efficacy. I first make the case that youth slam poetry is and should be respected as children’s literature.¹ While I believe this about all youth slam and spoken word poetry, “Emmett” is particularly compelling because the authors and the subject matter are all children. Youth slam is a significant contribution to the field of children’s literature because it is arguably the most accessible form of juvenilia we have, and yet we largely ignore it.² In an attempt to shed light on this underrepresented area, then, I also argue that these youth poets use the multimodal, embodied, and performative nature of slam to reinforce a Romantic conception of innocence and childhood through which they maintain rhetorical and narratological control over...