For a while now, the wits among us have noted that this moment on the American clock would do amazing things for art, force it to burn away fat and bullshit, and grapple with the real. And that’s happening. Black and brown poets, filmmakers, and visual artists are providing a necessary counterbalance to a mainstream media that is a proud handmaiden to the status quo. In hip-hop, Kendrick Lamar, J. Cole and Vic Mensa have all stepped up to the plate – flaws and all – and found voice and vision. For artists and their audience, bearing witness means speaking truth, and walking a fine line between finding catharsis and pouring salt in your own wounds. Truthfully, though, if a choice just absolutely had to be made, the preference would be for wack art all around, and a world in which black, brown, queer, and poor bodies were valued.
At the recent Annual Brave New Voices Festival, which hosted almost six hundred students in Washington D.C., poet Danez Smith further cemented his position as one of contemporary American poetry’s most vital voices. Though anchored in Blackness & queerness, his work speaks to experiences of all marginalized and dismissed peoples. Below is a clip of his performance.
Ask not what your country can do for you
Ask if your country is your country
Ask if your country belongs to your country folk
Ask if your comfort means broke schools and food deserts
On the other side of town
Ask if your new apartment used to belong to someone
Who couldn’t afford to look like you
All lives don’t matter the same as all lives
Some lives matter only to ourselves
Some lives matter only in they hood
Some lives matter of fact
And some lives up for debate
Diamond Reynolds is a hero
Where no one should have to be a hero
Steady as she be
With daughter in the back seat
With Philando slowly becoming a memory
Right next to her
Gun still pointed at his body
Cop outside the window
Scared of a man he already proved to be a myth
Top photo by Hieu Minh Nguyen
