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Students & Artists Fighting
to End Human Slavery
How to... Guide to Making Your Own Anti-Trafficking Art
Events
JOIN THE MOVEMENT!
Promote Art & Activism
Poets
Speaking Out
When asked:What makes an activist poetry event a success?
Read Brenda Kwon's response
on the success of spoken with with
re: VERSES
To begin with, the spoken word scene has done a lot to change
perceptions of poetry as inaccessible or abstract. More people
are willing to listen because the vernacular is recognizable;
they feel the poets are actually speaking to them. And those
who haven't necessarily been exposed to conscious discussion
tend to think of activists as aggressive and threatening, so
when you put the two together, when you make consciousness accessible,
you can make very strong impact.
Still, you risk audiences' feeling that you
just have a bunch of angry people ranting on the stage, and
that can turn people off fast. If you turn people off, the message
can't be communicated. As an organizer, you need to present
a good balance of readers--those who use humor to protest, those
who use narrative to protest, those who use memory to protest,
not just those who use rhetoric.
From what I've seen, it's the personal stories
that strike the deepest chords for an audience, so we have to
teach people--the writers and the listeners--to understand that
activism, meaningful activism, doesn't only come from reading
a bunch of great ideas and wanting to change the world, but
from honoring the courage of people who felt their needs were
not being met and who worked to have those needs met. For instance,
the farmers in Pyeongtaek aren't protesting the U.S. military
base because they've read books about empire and militarization;
their struggle represents that, but they're fighting because
their livelihood is being taken away and they can't eat. Their
ancestral land is being taken away and they don't know where
to live. So they're fighting to eat and to live. We have to
ground the activism in the everyday.
I think our belief in this is partly why re:VERSES
has been going strong for almost five years now. We let people
tell their stories. And that's also why the open mic segment
of the show is one of my favorites. After the features do their
thing, others want to share their stories, so they do. And that's
how we get--and maintain--community.
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