Suheir Hammad, a Palestinian-American poet, performer and activist, gave an innovative, percussive performance in List 120 Wednesday night.
Met with cheers and applause, Hammad turned an apparent microphone test into her first poem, filling the packed room with her first intensely percussive string of words.
In an event sponsored by 17 University organizations and departments, Hammad spent an hour reading and explaining her poetry, discussing her background - including her experience on the cast of Def Poetry Jam - and conversing with the audience.
Despite the large crowd, the reading was more an intimate, dynamic conversation than a lecture. Her performance was marked by her animation and determinedness to interact with the audience.
She paused after her introduction and first three poems to invite latecomers in the back to take the few open seats - and even asked the audience to applaud them for loving poetry.
Hammad spoke about her experience performing on stage and workshopping for Def Poetry Jam in San Francisco. She said some people left when she introduced herself as Palestinian, and audience members held deliberate "coughing campaigns" to silence her poetry.
Hammad was born in Jordan to Palestinian refugees and moved to Brooklyn when she was 5 years old.
This experience, she said, was what led her to consider the importance of language being heard, and the failure of language to express the atrocities of warfare. She said this led to her poem "Beyond Words," about torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
She addressed the intense political awareness of her work and her willingness to engage directly in political topics. "Why do I write?" she asked, after reading her first poem. "Because I have to. ... Slavery persists, hunger exists and mothers cry."
The topics of Hammad's poetry Wednesday night included the erotic exotification of women, the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and political activists including poet June Jordan and protestor Rachel Corrie.
One of Hammad's poems was focused entirely on the story of Corrie, a 23-year-old U.S. college student who was killed in 2003. Corrie was run over twice by a bulldozer she was trying to passively prevent from demolishing the home of a Palestinian doctor. Like most of Hammad's poems, this one was concerned both with national politics and with the politics of gender, and what it means to be a woman.
Hammad's poetry, in both rhythms and language, is a unique cross-section of racial and cultural dialects that correspond to the social conflicts she examines. Hammad said her style is influenced by "Arabic, Spanglish and Ebonics," as well as U.S. vernacular and speech patterns she heard growing up in Brooklyn.
Her performance was punctuated by movement across the stage: her pacing, shoulder jabs, hand gestures, and the intermittent jangle of her silver bracelets. Her poems spoke with a distinct tone of defiant, aggressive dissatisfaction with the social ills she chooses as her subject matter.
Hammad is the author of "Drops of This Story" and "Born Palestinian, Born Black." She is a cast member of Def Poetry Jam on Broadway and the recipient of a 2003 Tony Award.
