"Does my sexiness offend you?"
Kai Huang '11 posed this question to a crowd of college poets from all over the country in a poem based on Maya Angelou's "Still I Rise."
While Angelou's poem is about the "affirmation of black women," Huang's piece is an "awkward, partly insecure affirmation of short Asian men, which ends up turning into an attack on hypermasculinity and male privilege," he wrote in an e-mail to The Herald.
Huang is among five Brown students that traveled to Emerson College in Boston for the College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational April 7–10. The other students were Phil Kaye '10, Timothy Natividad '12, Laura Brown-Lavoie '10.5 and Jamila Woods '11. All five are part of WORD!, the campus spoken word group.
The students were selected at a University competition hosted by slam poet Jared Paul and are the first team from Brown to go to the invitational.
The team placed first in both of their preliminary rounds and moved on to the semifinals. Though they did not qualify for the finals, they received recognition for "Pushing the Art Forward," an award created especially for them this year.
Woods, who wrote and performed the piece "That's What He Said" with Brown-Lavoie, won Best Female Poet. Brown-Lavoie said the honor makes Woods comparable to the Meryl Streep of spoken word poets.
The collaborative poem, inspired by Audre Lourd's essay "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House," reveals the hidden connections between language and sexism. "We thought a lot about how language — everyday language — can be a tool of oppression, of the subtle pigeon-holing of women," Brown-Lavoie said.
Brown-Lavoie added that a poet from the audience approached her and Woods after their performance, saying the poem made him rethink his own work because he had always taken for granted his language and the female characters in his poetry.
Each round in the competition involved the rotation of several teams, each of which performed multiple pieces, in one room. Each piece performed was given a strict three-minute time limit. The individual with the highest score won the round for their team.
Because it was their first time competing, the students did not know what to expect at the invitational. "Competing in the rounds was really intense, and to be honest, I didn't enjoy that part that much," Huang wrote in an e-mail to The Herald. "I can't enjoy someone else's poetry from the audience if there's pressure to score higher than them when I get up there on stage. I didn't listen to the other poets nearly as closely as I listen to kids at WORD! here on campus because I was so nervous."
Still, he added that "the experience of going with my teammates was probably the best thing that's happened to me at Brown."
Despite the differences between competition and performance, Brown-Lavoie said she knew Brown had a fresh, new voice to add to the national poetry scene and was glad to have the opportunity. She also said she felt supported by the whole Brown community, which helped raise funds to send the team to Emerson to compete.
"Now Brown has a reputation," she said.
Huang wrote there are certain conventions in slam poetry that are rewarded, such as performing serious pieces about oppression and keeping the emotion angry or sad. "We really messed with them," he wrote, which he gave as a reason for why the audience of mostly poets appreciated Brown's performances more than the judges.
"Brown poets have a healthy fear of cliche, both in terms of form and in terms of content," Huang wrote. He cited Brown-Lavoie and Kaye's collaborative piece "Cave Woman," where Kaye played a spelunker to Brown-Lavoie's cave, as an example of the team's originality. "It was absolutely mind-blowing," he wrote in the e-mail. "The piece was obviously about sex, but it ended up being about so much more — about warmth, about the promise of coming home at night, about the phrase ‘I love you' and how cave people might have communicated that feeling before they stumbled across those words."
Huang also performed an untitled collaborative piece with Natividad, which his teammates affectionately call "Kai and Tim Are Friends," and a rap in the semifinals called "Sick."
But competition is definitely not the only reason these poets write and perform. Huang wrote that "the musicality of words, a belief in social justice, and the way my own experiences connect with others' " inspire him to write.
"For me and for our team, the poetry we do is about community — the community of artists and poets at Brown," Brown-Lavoie said.
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