OMG!: Profanity in a Profane World

Posted on 27. Oct, 2009 by Alexander Carpenter in Editorial

Recently our Student Services and Dramatic Arts Society co-presented a free showing of Lyrics from Lockdown, a spoken word performance by Bryonn Bain. Mei Ann Teo, the director of the show, prefaced the show with a disclaimer: “This is a true story of wrongful imprisonment. There are times when profanity is appropriate to describe profane conditions.” And the saga that Bryonn shared that Sunday, of systemic racism, negotiating the various responses to it in the black community, as well as the thoughtful death row letters of a seventeen year old who was unjustly convicted, a case championed by Amnesty International, was certainly more serious than the missed quiz question I just heard a student utter a flippant “f**k” over.

But apparently, despite the director’s caveat, someone wrote in to the president to complain that they are heard some bad words: damn, piss, s**t, etc. (A smart actor, Mr. Bain mumbled some of them, emphasizing the choking injustice.) Not only that, but a few other folks on campus as well have objected to the show because of the language. As usual, no one has actually stood up and talked to the artists involved.

These mostly anonymous censors certainly have a right to express their taste, and I think that a good education should broaden folks’ vocabularies beyond the dullard’s default to a couple-a friggin adjectives. But by focusing on less than one percent of the words, they reveal that they missed the social justice message of Lyrics from Lockdown. Naturally, given our increasingly diverse student body, all of the tens of students I’ve asked about the show praised it highly. One student I heard talking to another faculty member said it made her very proud to be at our college.

It just doesn’t strike me as in good faith (in all senses of that phrase) to listen to a man who tells a story about being wrongly locked up for two nights and three days and then at the end say: “Um. Not cool, dude. You swore.” But these folks aren’t even facing the artists. They are complaining to others. This sort of behavior is not conducive to community, particularly one that wants to pursue conversations about faith, learning, and Adventist identity. The last I checked, talking over folks’ heads is not a conversation.

Of course, as a member of the audience, I felt that the lyrical profanity expressed the inanity and insanity. Bain gave us a gray world not shown by Hannity, but, it is a true reality, for far too much of humanity. Henry David Thoreau once wrote, “Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?” I’m personally glad for the chance to see and hear from New York while cloistered in Angwin. What a profane miracle.

Yes, sometimes seeing the world through anOther’s eyes can be shocking. But sometimes, that’s the point. It definitely was in Lyrics from Lockdown. It was a free show, no one was required to attend, and Bryonn Bain was a guest on our campus. Unless the folks objecting have also spent three days in New York jails because of the color of their skin or worked within the soul-sucking prison industrial complex, I imagine we probably shouldn’t be telling guests how they should describe their experiences with racism and wrongful imprisonment. There was nothing tasteless in the truth that Mr. Bain shared about how he was profiled and dehumanized. Now if someone is more offended by swearing than racism and injustice, at least going public about that confusion of priorities is a good place to start a conversation, I guess.

There is a quaint myth out there that Christians don’t use strong language. But in fact, the Bible spits plenty of vulgar language. For example, Isaiah writes, and the Authorized King James Version committee of scholars translates, “Hath my master sent me to thy master and to thee to speak these words? Hath he not sent me to the men that sit upon the wall, that they may eat their own dung, and drink their own piss with you? (36:12)” Oh, snap! And Saul calls Jonathan a “son of a bitch,” which I find repulsive, but it fits with the narrative that’s unfolding in 1 Samuel 20 of the first king of Israel destroying everyone around him. There’s more. But most importantly, Jesus calls us to care about captives and even bring freedom to the oppressed (Luke 4). And Bryonn Bain, who uses his Harvard Law degree in his prison reform work, seems to be doing the work of the Lord. And from my reading of the Gospels, especially Matthew 5:22, as long as someone is not swearing at another person, Jesus really cares less about what we say, and a lot more about what we do.

This gets back to an old problem: prooftexting in which folks focus on a word or link random verses while losing sight of always, already present truth. All too often we not only do it with the Bible, but also with folks around us, taking them out of context, and looking for a way to dismiss messages that don’t fit with our sheltered experience of the world. As the great Christian pastor Tony Campolo likes to say, “I have three things to say today. First, while you were sleeping last night, 30,000 kids died of starvation or diseases related to malnutrition. Second, most of you don’t give a shit. What’s worse is that you’re more upset with the fact that I said shit than the fact that 30,000 kids died last night.”

After all, although we teach nineteenth century literature, history and visual arts here, Pacific Union College is not a finishing school. But we do have some work to finish. And a world of actual injustice, not merely words, to get upset about.

Facing the Light: Ethnicity, Community, and Exclusivity

Posted on 11. Oct, 2009 by Peter Katz in Debate

C2 was planning on writing an article about ethnicity and clubs.  Peter Katz asked Bryonn Bain about it, and we decided that his response was better than anything we could come up with.  Below is an excerpt of that interview. – JP

C2: One of the topics we’re bringing up for discussion in this issue is ethnicity, specifically how clubs on campus have a tendency to be divided by ethnicity.  Do you have any thoughts on that?

BB:  Wow, okay, this is going to be totally off the top of my head.  I do think that one of the most exciting things about college is that you have a privilege that most people don’t have: to spend four years reading books, writing papers to refine your ideas about what you think about those books and about the world, about what is truth, justice, freedom, spirituality.  It’s important to have a marketplace of ideas that’s as open as possible to really exchange those ideas, so that you can have the greatest, most diverse pool of thought to pull from.  I think it’s inevitable that as institutions like higher education that are “traditionally” white form begin to become more diverse, there will be groups that are based on ethnicity to make them stronger, to make them better able to deal with an institution that is not used to dealing with their experience.  Many social movements go from identity to social interest; once you figure out who you are, you work to moving toward interests.  Common interests may ultimately link multiple ethnicities together.  It’s important folks don’t get stuck, but its’ important for them to have a process, to have an internal conversation within their community.  One of my friends worked at a rape crisis center, and she says that women who experience domestic violence often times move to closed ranks, to a circle of just women.  They prefer not to have men as a part of the process.  I had a student who was raped, and I was one of the first people she called, asking how to deal with the police and so forth—but I wouldn’t expect her way of dealing with a crisis to be everyone’s way.  For the young women who don’t want men involved, I think it’s important to have that space.  Racism, like sexism, also creates trauma; it is an assault, it also creates violence—sometimes psychological, sometimes emotional, sometimes physical.  Take, for example, the constant indoctrination of “white Jesus.”  It’s in part a matter of historical accuracy—we know there weren’t any Scandinavians hanging out in the Holy Land at that time—and if we didn’t have this sort of history of problems, we could not be bothered about it.  But it’s consistent with the legacy of white supremacy.  Those kind of symbols that many institutions, including the church, have not fully dealt with yet—those are the reason that we absolutely need to have groups based on ethnicity to figure out how to challenge these things.

[…]

It’s like the allegory of the cave [Plato]; you come out of the cave, step out of the shadows, and the sun burns your eyes because you see the light.  There’s a reaction, there’s pain, there’s fear.  In some ways, I think that pain is a necessary part of what this experience should be in college.  I think people who are in tune with one another should understand that there are times when those people need to be within their groups, so that they can deal with that pain, that growth, in hopes that at some point in time, there will be a space for those groups to work together.

The Man Behind the Lyrics: An interview with Bryonn Bain

Posted on 11. Oct, 2009 by Peter Katz in Interview

Bryonn Bain interviewd by Peter Katz

C2: Race and ethnicity play a big part in your show.  Tell us a little about your family background.

BB: My family is like the United Nations.  My mom’s side is South Asian; she came to Trinidad from India.  My dad’s side came to Trinidad from West Africa.  So I’m Asian, I’m African… I grew up in Panama, […] speaking Spanish and English.  I’ve also traveled pretty extensively throughout Latin America.

C2: So, how did you get started doing spoken word/hip hop?

BB: I grew up performing.  My dad was a calypso singer, who won his way to New York City.  Calypso is Trinidad’s gift to the world.  I remember being seven years old singing “Matilda, Matilda…” [laughs]  I had no idea that there was some serious patriarchal implications; it’s like old-school “Gold digger.”  Calypso singers have names like rappers […] one of my favorites was a guy named Black Stalin.  My favorite song of his was all about evil and the afterlife, all the folks in the world who have been greedy getting their just deserts.  I grew up with that [calypso music], so it was inevitable.  My brothers and I began performing in high school talent shows, and then in local prisons during the holidays.  For us, it was a great time to connect with folks who would really appreciate it—[laughs] I mean, they’ve got nowhere to go, it’s a captive audience, right?  I had no idea that a decade later, after going to prisons around the country to raise awareness in local communities about how devastating the prison system is to society, I would have an encounter with the NYPD that would lead me to suing them.

C2: Outside of your cultural background, what else has influenced you in your work; specifically, which artists and genres?

BB:  I’ve been in singing groups, hip hop bands, writing poetry since elementary school.  As a kid, my first rappers and poets were people like Rock Kim, Microphone Fiend … What I admired was their ability to speak intelligently through music in a way that was not preachy, but was really captivating and spoke to the realities of folks who didn’t’ have a lot of access to material wealth, but who had an abundance of spiritual wealth to give to the world.  Later on, people lie Queen Latifah in her early days, Lauryn Hill, MC Light, Run DMC, LL Cool J, the Jackson 5.  On the other hand, I have a lot of more “traditional influences.”  My English teacher in either 7^th or  8^th grade gave us The Raven by Edgar Allen Poe, and I read the line about “tap tap tapping on my door” and I was like, “This guy’s rapping in the nineteenth century.”  Other poets like Langston Hughes…that whole movement; the music of jazz singers like Billie Holiday Nina Simone, Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith.  My dad had really eclectic musical tastes.  Obviously, there was a lot of calypso, but he also played reggae…anything from Led Zeppelin and the Grateful Dead, to Chopin and Bach and Mozart.  Just this last week, I worked some classical music into the show.  I think it not only provides a really profound contrast, but it demonstrates the wider whole of the human experience, how everything ties in.

C2: Can you explain that a little more?

BB: Hip hop and theater audiences traditionally aren’t the same audience.  Hip hop appears in the inner city with Black and Latinos in the early nineteen hundreds; classical music is music that came out of Europe from 1500-1900—and that’s the period during which my ancestors were being enslaved.  I think contrasting what’s seeing as “high civilization” with what has unfortunately received the stereotype of being “low civilization” or “low art” shows on some level that they come from a similar human need to express something that’s beyond ourselves.

C2: I know that part of your play deals with a potentially wrongfully imprisoned man on death row whose sentence may be commuted to life.  Is there any news on his case?

BB:  Nanon Williams was incarcerated at seventeen for murdering someone during a bad drug deal.  He’s admitted that he was part of the drug deal, but insists that he has not killed that person.  For the last five years a newspaper revealed a series of fabrications revealing a lot of botched evidence in both his case and others involving the Houston Police Department. He’s having a new hearing around his case; his attorneys have gotten the court to rehear his case on  January 11 of next year.  There’s another man, Troy Davis, in a similar predicament.  Seven out of nine witnesses in his case have recanted.  When seven of nine say that they were lying…[unamused laugh].

The point is, though, even killing someone who has committed murder isn’t justice.  We should be thinking of restorative justice.  An eye for an eye is barbarous.  Their cases are important, but they also raise the question, “what kind of society do we want to be?”  Should one of the most modernized societies in the world still be using medieval methods to deal with social problems?  Especially when it’s been established that the criminal justice system disproportionately incarcerates, murders, etc. people of color.  It’s important to raise awareness where people would doubt a person of color, just because they might say that you’re only upset because that person looks like you.

C2: There are a couple of main themes that run through your show—race/ethnicity, the human experience, what it means to be an artist, an African-American—what do you think are some of the most important themes?

BB: I think there are a few themes that run throughout the show.  One of the main themes appears right at the beginning: things are often not what they seem.  All too often, we see people on the outside, take things at surface value, when in reality, there are always sublevels, I mean layers and layers […].  It’s wrong to suggest that people are anything otherwise, that we aren’t multiple layers; people of other backgrounds are of a far more complex background than we know.  At the same time, at some point, we have this common essence.  Some people believe that we are our bodies that have a soul.  I don’t.  I don’t think we have a soul, I think we are a soul, and our souls have these bodies.  If you have that basic point, that we have the is underlying spirit that’s beyond all this, that—at least for me—forces me to not assume that I understand the journey of someone else’s soul, however many years, decades, hundreds of years that might be.  I think that the show is getting that the idea that, though it’s almost cliché to say that we can’t judge a book by its cover, we forget, we need to be reminded of it.  Give folks the benefit of the doubt, motivating folks beyond what we see on the surface of things.

Another overall theme is the of the inhumanity of a society that is the most powerful, most technologically advanced society in history, yet still feels the need to strip more people of their rights than any other country.  I mean, they put a 17 year old kid on death row; that just doesn’t happen with white kids.  If white men were incarcerated with the frequency of black and brown, it would be a national crisis; we’d have analysts trying to figure out how to solve the problem.  But that’s the thing.  We weren’t brought here to become the president, we were brought here to be exploited.  That calls for a central message of human justice.  At the same time that I have all these serious topics, there’s a whole lot of humor, because we have to laugh to keep from crying.  I certainly don’t take these topics lightly, but humor is an aid, a part of the process.

In the end, it comes down to the idea that “We are because I am”; there is no individual without his or her community.  I think the piece is showing that.  [Being wrongfully incarcerated] was an experience that changed my life, and so it’s an iteration of that experience and the folks to had the greatest influence on my life.