Our Spoken Words

“What happens to a dream deferred, ...does it shrivel up and die, like a raisin in the sun?”

So wrote Langston Hughes in his famous poem that spurred the creation of various pieces of prose, music and even theater in that same theme. Langston Hughes, a famous African American poet, produced brilliant works that have been taught in schools and analyzed for years.I had a very brief encounter with this poem, but I found it unforgettable.

There is something about Black writers that resonates with me - perhaps because I studied English Literature during my academic years, which mostly featured Classical British works with very few Blacks represented. Or perhaps also because deep down I feel that we do have a certain kinship. Maya Angelou is an iconic poet, and had I been given the chance to study her works with the same intensity that I studied Shakespeare, It would have rocked my world. Chinua Achebe-can you believe his book "things fall apart" has been around more than forty years? Wole Soyinka - his poem "the Telephone booth" touched me as a teenager, through which he gave a wry, tongue-in-cheek glimpse of the prejudice he endured during his time in England in the sixties.

Now, a new genre of poetry, known as 'Spoken Word' has flourished in recent years. It speaks to me because as an African girl, our traditions, history,culture, songs and poems were all conveyed orally. Most of our vernacular languages did not have an alphabet or a written form until missionaries came and coined such forms, in order to translate the Bible into local languages. A favorite pastime of any rural-raised child, or any person of our parents' generation, is that of the evening story-time by the fire. There, a sage matriarch or patriarch would dazzle both children and adults with lively tales,that were not only memorable, but didactic in nature.

So when I hear Jill Scott, Floetry, Amani, and others speak their peace in front of rapt audiences, I sense a certain connection within. I feel a faint, yet very distinct bond with "my peoples" of the diaspora, with so many stories yet untold, so many poems yet to recite, so many songs to compose. All of them resonate and resound like that raisin in the sun, in celebration of Blackness, of a shared heritage of which we know so little.