Heartbeat

inveiss
Tue, 15 Nov 2016 04:35:45 +0000
Community

“Hell does not recruit with pitchforks and tightrope. Does not congregate in mobs at your front steps. It sits in your classroom, tells you to turn to unrepresentative textbooks, passes out invites to its parties and always makes sure to forget the back of the bus. College.”

The stage darkens and Tiffany Ike stands at the center, a single microphone, a single voice. “To whom it may concern,” she begins. Her tone rises, she sings, she twists her words, bends her phrases and performs linguistic gymnastics with the syllables. It’s a time where punctuation does not matter. Diction taught in high school can be thrown out the window. It’s just stream of consciousness and a moving rhythm.

“I don’t think God would go to college. He is too major to settle in minor places,” she blasts, her tongue rolling over double entendres, only tripping when getting slightly too passionate.

“They don’t teach this in classrooms, don’t show how Black people are hemmed into a system. When our pants sag, you tuck us in tight before we can belt what we are speaking, mouths opened like zippered teeth. It is a matter of time that you realize that time did not heal all who matter. The Black ones especially, time did not have our back. Time did not keep history from turning us into stars, shooting fireworks like it was a dream where you can only be red, or white or ‘I can’t breathe’ blue.”

After nearly five minutes of nonstop poetry and ardent remarks, Ike concludes.

“Signed, The Concerned.”

The room explodes with applause as Ike issues a stifled “thank you” and walks off stage right.

This is spoken word. You may not hear it on your radio or booming through the speakers of a neighboring car at a red light. It may not be mainstream, and it’s certainly not breaking records on the Billboard Hot 100, but it’s here to stay and to inspire communities across the state. It’s an emboldened voice of the youth, a community in Wisconsin that uses an art form to express desire, to press for social change and to spread love.

When Tiffany Ike, a devout track and field athlete, became injured in eighth grade, she started looking for another competition-based activity. That’s when she found spoken word, an oral art that brings poetry off the page. A good writer, she was motivated to enter her first poetry slam.

After years of practice, athletics again became her focus, and during junior year of high school, Ike entered her last — or what she thought to be her last — poetry slam. Surprisingly, that performance placed Ike on a team of the best poets in Houston and landed her a ride to an international poetry showcase called Brave New Voices.

Described as an organization that “aims to deconstruct dominant narratives in hopes of achieving a more inclusive and active culture,” Brave New Voices helps to give young people the tools for self-expression and self-love. At the showcase, Ike heard someone go to the mic and casually mention something called First Wave, the platform that would ultimately send Ike to the dairy state.

First Wave, a scholarship program through UW-Madison’s Office of Multicultural Arts Initiatives, invites 15 students a year to join an artistic and like-minded community of spoken word and hip-hop artists. While earning degrees, the First Wave class — called a cohort — combines multicultural arts and activism to engage with the campus, a primarily White environment.

Ike, now on the track and field team at the university, performed her piece “To Whom it May Concern” at the Buckinghams, a student-athlete showcase, last spring. According to Ike, the poem, a snippet from her one-woman show DROPS (Discrimination, Race, Oppression, Prejudice, Stereotyping), aims to initiate a dialogue about race relations and communications.

When she moved from Houston to Wisconsin to attend UW-Madison, Ike didn’t know what to expect. “I had never heard of First Wave, did not care for Wisconsin, did not even know what a Wisconsin looked like,” Ike jokes. “All I saw was grass.”

Differing from their counterparts in Houston, where Ike says “you know who’s the racist and who’s not,” Wisconsin residents are more subdued and less diverse. Ike believes that many members of the campus community are uncomfortable simply because they haven’t spent much time around people of color. Spoken word as an art form gives her, as well as the rest of the First Wave community, a platform to educate and transform the university to become a more culturally responsive and accessible space.

“So the cool thing about spoken word is it’s very literature-based. … Generally, people are interested in cool ways of speaking, but also, generally, it’s entertainment and people like to be entertained,” Ike says. “So if I’m going to entertain you, I might as well also give you a lesson.”

Hip-hop, an art movement defined by graffiti, breakdancing, rapping, deejaying and knowledge, grew out of Black and Latino communities in the Bronx during the early 1970s as a vehicle for self-expression. Since then, the musical aspects of the art form have exploded in popularity to become the most listened-to genre in the world, according to recent Spotify data. While they aren’t on the radio, the spoken word poets of First Wave weave the traditional elements of hip-hop into their work, seamlessly honoring the culture of the past while empowering others, according to UW-Madison’s Willie Ney.

Ney, the executive director of the Office of Multicultural Arts Initiatives, which is the home of First Wave, finds hip-hop at the intersection of art, literature and education. While rap music isn’t generally linked with systems of learning, Ney sees Broadway’s “Hamilton” as a turning point for the introduction of integrated spoken word and hip-hop music into the mainstream performance art. The production, which mixes contemporary hip-hop and rap music with American history, took home 11 Tony awards in 2016.

“There is no doubt that it has brought attention to hip-hop like nothing else in the mainstream for those that would be scared of it,” Ney says. “We’ve been doing ‘Hamilton’-esque art since the founding of First Wave … You can use it as a vehicle for deep education and outreach and make audiences talk about history and all these intersections that can take place.”

As Ney explains, breaking down the barriers of ugly, misogynistic and hate-filled stigmas that cloud hip-hop music reveal beauty and love. Citing Beyoncé, J. Cole, Kendrick Lamar and Chance the Rapper, Ney points out the growing popularity of artists with socially conscious, political messages that are honest and empowering.

According to Ney, First Wave uses the art of hip-hop to educate the campus on important issues. From hip-hop theater pieces performed at UW-Madison’s Student Orientation and Registration sessions to a variety of other performances across campus, the program uses spoken word and music to teach others about diversity and inclusion.

“I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other.” – Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

At Madison’s Overture Center in late October, students from the ninth cohort of First Wave performed pieces about their struggles in the American education system. Their words echoed a familiar truth — that in this country, students of color are often left behind to fend, and learn, for themselves. Ricardo Cortez de la Cruz II, a student of First Wave’s ninth cohort, vehemently performed a piece about the importance of Black classrooms in retaliation.

“Why are black pens conditioned for a white page?” he spits, his words almost punching the audience in the face with every word. “Why do I dream of a four-corner space where knowledge is not behind a lock and a Francis Scott Key?”

In explanation of his poem, Cruz says that he was full of anger, or in his citation of Shelley, “indulging in the other” and becoming Frankenstein’s monster. According to Cruz, his performance, like many spoken word pieces, acts as a combination of love and hate. While his piece may seem spiteful and combative, that’s only because he knows where “[the classroom] can get to.”

That idea — of a classroom that teaches Shakespeare while equally honoring the works of Black poet Gwendolyn Brooks — is his vision of the future and a better place for students of color. “That’s where my love stems from,” he says.

For Cruz, love and hip-hop connect call and response with the community. Since hip-hop artists speak about their struggles, they can act as the voice of others who identify with those struggles and have the power to organize and uplift. Growing up in Bloomington, Illinois, a city segregated across the east and west sides, Cruz used poetry and hip-hop to speak out on things he saw as wrong, including discrimination and racism. Even at UW-Madison, when met with wrongs in the residence halls or in the classroom, Cruz continues to channel his anger through his art.

“As [the rapper] Nas would say, you have to ‘let the music diffuse all the tension,’ and from that, that births love,” explains Cruz. “Even songs that express anger create love, because listeners release their stress through the art.”

First Wave allows this love to blossom into a full-grown community. Even as Cruz finishes his speech, his classmates snap and applaud louder than anyone in the room — among the cheers are “That’s my cohort” and “Fine nine! Fine nine! Ninth Co! Ninth Co!”

Acting as a reflection of Ike’s sentiments, the joyous chorus of approval shows that a First Wave cohort is like a family. Supportive and welcoming, love runs through its veins like a beating heart. It’s a community that preaches the combination of intellect and emotion, and pushes for a classroom as a space where James Baldwin and Langston Hughes are held in the same breath as Kanye West and Tupac Shakur.

For students such as Tiffany Ike and Ricardo Cruz, the pen is the sword, and the voice is the shield. There’s no need for physical violence because their fists are already held high in peaceful protest.

Hip-hop is a vehicle for their thoughts, a chorus for their community and a message of love.

And if you listen, actually listen, you may hear how to learn and how to love, too.

Sam Marchewka

Sam is a senior studying journalism, communication arts and the theory of barely getting by, to be honest. Other than fighting the inevitable struggle of the senior slide, Sam spends the the majority of his time complaining that more people don’t follow him on Spotify (cough cough). Upon graduating in May 2017, Sam is interested in any career in advertising that will allow him to pursue his main passions: defeating his mom in games of Scrabble, and keeping his emotions locked inside until they manifest as criticisms of the Green Bay Packers defense. As Curb’s dude-in-residence, he often wonders what the 20 other people on the staff are talking about.