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Poets bring healing process to Westinghouse High students
Friday, April 28, 2006
by Deborah M. Todd
Courier Staff Writer
Tears flowed and students embraced at Westinghouse High School April 21 following emotional spoken word performances and group exercises by “The Poets,” Kwabena Antoine Nixon and Muhibb Dyer.
While “The Poets’” Campaign Against Violence certainly hit home with Westinghouse students, who had recently lost their classmate 16-year old Franklin Sheffey Jr. to a shooting, they say their work usually receives the same reaction no matter where they are.
“I’d say about 80 percent of the time we get a similar reaction,” Dyer said. “It’s not just with kids; its across all cultural lines, its across all generational lines from the old to the young.”
Khari Mosley of the Pittsburgh Chapter of the League of Young Voters, who arranged to bring The Poets to Westinghouse and Propel Charter School in Homestead, agreed with Dyer and said he was pleased to see similar responses from very different schools.
“As you walked in you might have thought the room was full of a lot of overachievers, a lot of good kids, but as soon as it opened up, people had never seen their fathers,” said Mosley of The Poets’ experience at Propel. “It was to the point teachers were crying. You could tell that a lot of the teachers didn’t know the students were going through that. Muhibb and Kwa had opened up the door not only for the students, but also for the whole school. It was like a healing process for the whole school.”
Westinghouse and Propel were touched by only a portion of the six-week workshop The Poets conduct regularly in Milwaukee with “The Source” magazine writer and hip-hop activist Rob “Biko” Baker. The workshop uses poetry and creative writing exercises to give people an outlet for the often-suppressed anger, fear, shame and resentment that comes with living around violence. The Poets say the writing exercises, “Truth Is” and “Where I’m From” allow many to come clean with themselves about how they really feel in their lives and neighborhoods.
“I think when we come to a classroom situation, or a community situation and talk to people, I think for the first time they’re allowed to do something they’re not allowed to do in everyday life, which is, take the mask off, remove themselves from the boxes society places them in, and be real,” he said.
“We went to a juvenile detention center a year ago and this kid, 15 or 16 (years old,) had been involved in a murder,” explained Baker. “He was having such an emotional reaction (that) he started crying, but because he had been so emotionally pent-up he was like ‘I’m sweating, I’m sweating,’ and he had no clue what it was like to cry.”
Once The Poets tap into people’s emotions through the poetry exercises, they try to use that moment of clarity to present ways to improve their lives. The “Vision” component of the workshop encourages participants to see themselves in positive situations and to believe in that vision for their future. After “Vision,” participants are encouraged to create blueprints to make the lives they envisioned for themselves a reality.
“We have them write out what they are going to do, how they’re going to do it,” said Nixon. “Certain kids, right now in Milwaukee, we’re trying to employ. We’ve employed three young people that worked with us. And we have the meetings they can consistently come back to.”
Although The Poets’ primary efforts are directed toward their Milwaukee program, they say they would be more than willing to use it as a model for similar programs throughout the country. They also say that no matter how much the program is modeled, they understand that they can’t save every soul and that the true measure of the program’s success may not be seen until far into the future.
“You got to move out the way, let go and let God, because some things you’re not going to control,” said Nixon.
“I think there are certain things that we are going to do definitely, but I’m just trying to be the catalyst to set it in motion,” said Dyer. Maybe our children are going to be the ones to take us to the perfect utopia. We might not be able to see that-that might not even be our jobs. But (we) just keep pushing because we might find that Malcolm X that can inspire millions.
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