Aaron Cheng won this year’s poetry slam. (Photo by Surabhi Rao).
Surabhi Rao – Staff Writer
surrao@uab.edu
Students light fire to the stage every year as Multicultural Council hosts a poetry slam as an opportunity for students to perform their poetry on stage. With a new MC, a new and growing audience, and a new group of competitors raising the bar at every turn, any praise for this event becomes an understatement.
This year, the topic of interest for performers was poetic justice, inspired by the social justice work of Audre Lorde. This concept took many forms, and the poetry seemed to highlighted many controversial social justice issues that we face.
With MC Blaqq Diamond pumping the crowd up, the event started off with a stunning performance by Quang Do for the audience to get a taste of the intensity of the spoken word poetry that was about to unfold. Poetry slams were started in 1985 by a construction worker and poet in Chicago. Tradition holds that five random members of the audience act as judges, and each competitor gets three minutes to perform. This event results in a proactive and expressive crowd to sway the judges in their decisions, and the genuine enthusiasm seen in the crowd is unmatched in its uniqueness.
Various social justice topics came to the forefront of discussion as poets were pushing the envelope and providing a forum for the audience to take something tangible away from attending.
According to third time attendee Gerrie Lim, “I’ve been to this event every year and I f**king love it. It’s a great platform for us minority and underrepresented groups to spit fire without doing the usual ‘tip toe around white people’ dance.”
Each poem brought different ideas to the table, and the way that performers managed to charm the audience into an awed gaze in one moment and cause roaring and loud shouts in the next really speaks to the power of the spoken word.
According to another third time attendee, Neuroscience major Arthi Reddy, “I really like these types of things because you don’t get many opportunities like this. I love to see the student body be raw and open. It’s the kind of activity you can’t see anywhere else.”
First time attendee Emil Kurian remarked “I think it’s really important for the artists and other people that are involved on campus to be able to express themselves because UAB is known to be a very academically engrossed institution, and these events broaden our perspectives.”
Different groups including the Aura magazine, Black Student Awareness Committee, and Gender and Sexuality Diversity Program came to represent, help and support. A representative of GSDP presented a speech written by Audre Lorde, an influential American writer, radical feminist, womanist, lesbian, and civil rights activist.
The winner of the event, Aaron Cheng, had a few words to say after the event.
“I was speaking for myself up on stage but I know that not one person in the crowd hasn’t felt what I felt. Every minority in the crowd has experienced some type of racially charged event. I take inspiration from Childish Gambino, Chance the Rapper, and Joey Bada$$.”
“I don’t think there are enough events like this on campus. There are a lot of underrepresented art forms that are missing, other than poetry too. I don’t think that it’s the school’s fault but rather it’s the general population that this is left to,” Cheng said.
