in the beginning was the word. Word up. And, word is you’ve got to listen up to the new generation of local and international spoken word artists. But, writes Julian Jonker, the word already has a long history off the page.
I fell in love with spoken word on one of those sweltering summer Cape Town days hanging out at Greenmarket Square. A friend of mine, like a hundred soap-box evangelists before him, stood and yelled the words of Alan Ginsberg’s famous poem Howl at passing Saturday morning shoppers. I’m still not sure why – my friend, like myself, was a wannabe high-school beat. We would hang out in coffee shops swopping battered copies of Jack Kerouac and tapes of weird underground music. Anything to disrupt the city’s Saturday morning complacency, anything to prick ears. The next weekend my friend was approached by somebody who told him he had done just that. I was sold.
Poetry is meant to be read – aloud. Poets are meant to speak. This is something I first suspected years ago when I heard a recording of Dylan Thomas once in a high school English class. In Europe literacy acted as a class divide, and eventually created a divide between ‘high’ and ‘pop’ culture. Spoken word, with the fierce energy of a-literacy, is exciting because it ignores that divide. Spoken word favours the disfavoured, it empowers the disempowered. It draws power from the musicality and rhythm of patois and accent and anything that is non-standard language.
Yet traditions of performed literature stretch far back before slam poetry, before hip-hop, before even Dylan Thomas and other dead poets. In Africa and the diaspora, spoken word is neither novel nor faddish. In South Africa the tradition of izibongi – or praise poets – is continued by poets such as Zolani Mkhive, Madiba’s praise singer. The tradition found an updated form during the 80s in poet of the people Mzwakhe Mbuli, whose voice, reverberating at rallies and funerals during the struggle, became synonomous with defiance.
Figures similar to the imbongi exist in countries further north. The most widely known example is the West African djeli, better known by the French term griot. The djeli belongs to a special caste of musician-storytellers, and acts also as an oral historian of the community. Traditions such as this are also mirrored in the African diaspora, in forms such as Brazil’s cordel literature: poetry printed on newspaper and hung out on washing lines strung up outside the poets’ stalls, read aloud to passers-by. In the Caribbean, calypso singers challenge each other to duels of words, a practice influenced in by ceremonial kalinda fighting.
Similar traditions exists across the world, and are brought together with contemporary forms every two years at an event in New York City. This event, the Peoples Poetry Gathering, is curated by one of the original slam poets, Bob Holman. Holman’s involvement is indicative: slam poetry has in many ways been playing an integral role in bringing the various traditions and movements of spoken word into public awareness.
Slam poetry, a movement originating in the US, involves setting poets against each other in competition and allowing the crowd to participate, raucously if possible. It is an antithesis to the academic anaemia of traditional poetry readings. The term ‘slam poetry’ is now often used simply to refer to a style of poetry that has emerged from these settings to become the public face of spoken word.
Slam started in a run-down bar in Chicago called the Green Mill Tavern when poet Marc Smith held a series of readings with rowdy audience participation in the mid-80s. The Chicago scene had roots further back than this. In 1980 poet Jerome Salla, who was reading poems like “Give piss a chance”, inspired by John Lennon’s recent death, was reading at a Chicago venue when local musician Jimmy Desmond tried to knock him over the head with a chair. Desmond later challenged Salla to a fight to the death – by poetry. The two dressed up in boxing gear and battled while bikini-clad women roamed the ring, and the audience held up score cards as if at a genuine boxing match.
Both Salla and Desmond came from the Chicago punk rock scene, and it was the confrontational, chaotic energy of punk that informed the early anti-academic, anti-art tendencies of slam.
Spoken word has always been an element of punk and post-punk hardcore music, perhaps because of its political possibilities. Jello Biafra, one time leader of the seminal punk band The Dead Kennedys, is an example of a punk rocker who has moved entirely into spoken word territory, regularly delivering his counter-establishment rants to audiences around the world.
Spoken word was also an integral part of punk’s evolution into post-punk experimentalism. This progression was typified by poet and singer Patti Smith, who started out giving public ‘readings’ of improvised poetry in the early 70s, before carrying on to become the darling of the New York art-rock scene. Smith paved the way for the strange incantations of 90s rock experimenters Sonic Youth. In a similarly experimental vein, we have our own Buckfever Underground, an outfit from Grahamstown who specialise in reciting poetry over feedback-bleeding guitars.
Punk rockers have not denied their literary influences either. Henry Rollins, vocalist of the seminal US post-punk band, Black Flag, has become equally well known through spoken word tours and for setting up his own book press, 2.13.61. Besides publishing new work by writers like Rollins and Nick Cave, Rollins also pays homage to his influences by republishing works by Hubert Selby, Jr. and Henry Miller. This association with seminal beat writer Miller is an aknowledgement of the influence of the ‘beat generation’, a group of counter-cultural writers who glorified the speed of jazz, cheap highs and living on the road, and which came to be typified by.
The beats, including characters such as Jack Kerouac, Alan Ginsberg, and William Burroughs, were the white anti-establishment of 50s America. In Ginsberg’s words, they were “angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection/to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night…” They wrote in a stream of consciousness mode that is often invoked by spoken word forms, and their poetry was strongly influenced by the wild energy of be-bop performance. For Kerouac the actual writing of each book was a performance, as he raced to finish them on a battered typewriter in qaalude and alcohol fuelled marathons. Kerouac was the high prophet of the road, Whitman on amphetamines. But the definitive text produced by this generation was a poem by Allan Ginsberg called Howl, which my friend one day yelled at passersby one Saturday morning.
If subsequently the charisma of slam has become more closely associated with hip-hop than beat poetry or even punk, it’s because hip-hop always had the best lines anyway. Hip-hop first revitalised poetry in the 80s when kids turned their baseball caps back to front and started rhyming over beats. Due in no small amount to the influence of spoken word, there is now a growing consciousness of hip-hop’s continued vitality amongst a new generation of artists. Mzansi hip-hop too, with the complex word play of new groups like Fifth Floor and the twisted rhymes of Cape Town MC Mutated Lung. Meanwhile Mitchells-Plain based MC Native Sword rhymes in Cape ghetto patois about “aktualiteite/feite/van werklose mense/in flêtse sonder ruite”.
In any case, hip-hop and spoken word have a long shared history. The punk-bred slam scene met its hip-hop roots when it spread to New York, where it found a natural home at a spot in Alphabet City called the Nuyorican Poets Café. One of the founders of the Nuyorican was poet and playwright Ntozake Shange, one of a generation of artists who came to inspire both hip-hop and spoken word during the 70s.
At the age of 19 Shange had already made a series of suicide attempts, including sticking her head in an oven and attempting to drive her car into the Pacific. She never succeeded, and several years later penned her groundbreaking classic, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf, which combined the rhythmicality of poetry with theatre to form what she called a ‘choreo poem’. Shange’s poetry was all about “rappin’ a English we make up as we go along/turnin’ nouns into verbs braids into crowns”.
There were other performers taking inspiration from Black Consciousness during this period, most notably Gil Scott-Heron and The Last Poets. The Last Poets combined street poetry and social commentary chanted over drumming, and are now often name-checked as the roots of hip-hop. The group took its name from a struggle poem by South African poet Koerapetse Kgositsile : “When the moment hatches in time’s womb / there will be no art talk / the only poem you will hear will be the spearpoint / pivoted in the punctured marrow of the villain /…Therefore we are the last poets of the world.”
There is a satisfying circularity in Kgositsile’s appearance with the Urban Voices Festival alongside the Last Poet’s descendants, Sarah Jones and Saul Williams. The Festival featured another older icon, Mutabaruka, who is known for a form of spoken word called dub poetry: socio-political commentary, often Black Conscious influenced, chanted to the stubborn riffs of reggae in the style of the toasting that accompanied Jamaican sound systems. Often credited with the ‘invention’ of this style is reggae artist and poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, who forsook Rastafarianism for a more militant socialist stance, often opening for British punk bands in the late 70s.
The influence of LKJ and dub poetry can be seen on those working outside of the reggae scene, most notably our own maverick oral poet Lesego Rampolokeng, who performed his brutally graphic poetry with the Kalahari Surfers during the early nineties. Rampolokeng’s brand of incendiary lyrics was also influenced by earlier South African poets such as Ingoapele Madingoane and Lefifi Tladi, who currently performs with jazz heavy weight Zim Ngqawana. Meanwhile Warrick Sony, who was the Kalahari Surfers in its entirety, had also been turning out stream of consciousness verse over dub and punk influenced tape experiments during the 80s.
South African poets have not been quiet since. In the Cape we have the goema inspired poetry of Loit Sols and Jethro Louw, who recently joined forces with other poets and musicians to form the Khoi Konnextion. The Khoi Konnextion poets play with Cape patois and phonetic spelling much like the dub poets do with Jamaican patois. The poetry scene in Jozi is busy with hip-hop influenced shows by Organix and Kush Kollective. In Cape Town experimentalists like Croc-e-Moses in Cape Town, and theatre-influenced performers like Warona Seane and Malaika Ndlovu thrive. Even Breyten Breytenbach recently released an album in which he recites his poems to music.
Spoken word is vibrant, unapologetic and NOW! Slam poetry especially is television literature, blaring technicolour rhymes for the satellite generation. As slam pioneer Bob Holman pointed out, it is also democratic: “The universal remote control is being passed into your hands.” Perhaps then the revolution will be televised. Locally we’ve already seen television ad campaigns for Metro FM and YFM using spoken word poetry, taking cues from similar campaigns by The Gap in the US. More substantial perhaps is the international success of Marc Levin’s movie Slam, plus the making of a documentary on the slam scene called Slam Nation. It’s a new dawn, either for literature or for pop culture. These days even MTV stages poetry tours.
Julian Jonker is a researcher at the District Six Museum, as well as a writer and academic. He writes this in his personal capacity.
this article first published on kush.co.za
