THE FIRST MEETING
Five young Morganite women look to disrupt the scene at Morgan State University. They’re the type to make statements; cause revolutions. Saudah Ahmad, Hannah Sawyerr, Kim Pelham, Chyna Mccombs, and Joy Barnes organized two events on Thursday, October 9th where students interested in poetry got together to read their own and get an official organization started.
I had the luxury of going to the 8:30 pm event. If you were in the Student Center around that time you may have heard the radio playing, along with a few kids in front of Auntie Anne’s. You may have also heard the cacophony of me trying to sing “Stay With Me” by Sam Smith.
A group of almost 20 of us went outside into the dark front of the Student Center. We gathered on the cold brick walls, lined up and listening to each other’s poems.
HANNAH SAWYERR
Several days later, Hannah and I sit in front of Auntie Anne’s in the student center. There’s a scent of freshly baked pretzels and we get to talking. She’s a bit anxious, but just as bubbly and cheery as she was when we first met the night of the first poetry club meeting.
“It was a rough year, but it was the same year I found what I love.” said Sawyerr describing her start in poetry. She started writing poetry after an uncomfortable move from her home of Somerset, New Jersey to another school district fifteen minutes away. Once she picks up her rhythm, she gets more comfortable and opens up a bit more.
“Poetry is an artform to me because a lot of people think that art is a painting or drawing. I believe poets are artists because even though they don’t paint or draw, they paint with words.”
It’s almost weird. Hannah has on a burgundy striped sweater. Chyna, who happened to show up a few minutes in the interview, wore a burgundy turtleneck, and I donned a burgundy skull cap.
“My favorite poem is ‘What’s In a Man’ by Miles Hodges,” she says as we start to get personal. After a quick thought, she changes it to ‘Alcatraz of Balloons, another poem by Miles Hodges. I went home after the interview to listen to the poem, a spoken word, on Youtube and it only confirmed what I knew all along. Poetry is a lifesaver. The mixed “He wrote it to tell a story and that’s what poetry is about.
“What’s your story?” I ask. If I was a good journalist, the questions I asked would’ve told it, but because I’m, if anything, slightly above mediocre, my questions are also. “It’s being written,” she says genuinely.
CHYNA MCCOMBS
“I write, I perform, I spit,” says Chyna “Remix” McCombs. I look at her confused. I know what spitting is, but I pretend not to. “Spitting is when you get on stage and put your all into what you’re saying.” If she wasn’t a poet, I’m sure she could be an actress. Chyna’s theatrical personality shows as we start our interview immediately after Hannah’s.
A character, she dives into her story of her beginning starting off with her life in the city. She grew up in the DMV and has an accent to tell. She started poetry in 10th grade she tells me. “roses are red/violets are blue”, transitioning to “I’m Chyna/ From North Carolina” – mind you, she’s not even from North Carolina – to the freeflowing, lyric spitting spirit that she is now. “Then I actually started to write and I learned not all poems had to rhyme and that’s when my poetry started to get better.”
Her parents were rappers. Her dad was in a go-go band called Backyard. “They call him Los,” she says. Chyna’s mother was also in a band, but stopped after having her. With her parents both on the stage, she wanted to be on the stage also. “I used to do my homework while she be on stage.” she says, “I knew I wanted to be on the stage so I started singing, but I noticed that wasn’t for me, so I started writing raps.”
I ask her the same question I ask Hannah. “Would you say poetry is an art form?” Her response is immediate as if it was the question she was waiting on her entire life. It’s bigger than inspirational, the passion she invests into her poetry. “Hell yeah boy!,” “Poetry is art. Poetry is fucking revolutionary, you feel me?” she says. “For some people, poetry is a lifesaver.”
There seems to be a lot in store for Chyna. Her energy is everywhere. Just listening to her tell her passion is an experience in and of itself.
SAUDAH AHMAD
Her first name means black in Arabic. She’s twenty years old and signs her emails with “Peace” or “Peace and Love”, and with just a few minutes of being around her, you can feel the laidback vibe she gives.
We’re huddled up by a computer in the computer lab late Thursday night right after the second meeting. Saudah and I are sitting at one computer, and Hannah sits at the one behind us, buying a ticket home to Jersey for the weekend. The clicks and clacks of keyboards and mice rattle in the background, but the room is only a third of the way full. Saudah seems anxious to start on whatever she came to do, but even more nervous about the interview than anything else. She conceals her face when I start to take pictures.
She’s a natural storyteller. Poetry was with her from the start. Her earliest recollection of poetry was in the second grade she won a poetry contest, with the most illustrious reward; a lollipop. It was in eleventh grade when she really started getting into poetry. She was obsessed with def jam poetry, listening and memorizing poems as much as she could. At her high school, there was a poetry slam. She ended up winning first place. But the attention wasn’t always positive. She became known as the poetry girl or the spoken word girl, and the feedback was abrasive due to the fact she was a girl.
After that experience, she got into the DC poetry scene.
We talk about the abundance of hair under her hijab. In between the informal chatter of the interview, she laughs and giggles, mostly about the ridiculousness of being interviewed in the computer lab at 10:03 PM. But once in the spotlight, she weaves her story of words.
Her creative process is spontaneous. “I like to look around a lot and think about things deeply” she says. Saudah is also a street photographer. Just like her poetry, her photography is beyond “lit”. I would say “illuminated” or anything on that same level. She digs through a small black purse, revealing different papers, poems, and guides. She then pulls up a piece of wrinkled tissue with scribbles on it, back from four years ago. “This is an example of ‘I write when I write’” she says, and indeed it is. She continues digging through her bag unveiling more and more. I notice a crumpled up map of the DC Metro, something I miss myself.
She likes her solitude. “I’m a person who is solo a lot of the time,” she says. When answering why, she touts her uniqueness, but its actually quite relatable and understandable. Her spontaneity guides her day, “something a lot of people might not be down with”.
Towards the end of the interview, my camera and my secondary phone dies. Not until I finish transcribing the interview for the article do I realize that a piece of the interview was cut off with the death of my pocket recorder. But I have more then what I could need. For one of the last questions I ask, she has to think about. She folds her hands in her lap and ponders, but not for too long.
“I’m a wanderer,” she says. “I live in DC; I still don’t have my driver’s license because I used to walk everywhere. I get my camera and I kinda just walk through the streets. If there’s a function going on I might roll through.”
JOY BARNES
“Hi, I’m Joy. I’m majoring in Biology. I’m minoring in Creative Writing and I’ve been writing since I was six,” she says introducing herself. It’s a few minutes after the third meeting when we get to interview. I’m excited for the interview. Joy is just as much a character as the others I’ve gotten to know. Her group poem with Chyna and another person was an excellent performance. I expected nothing less from the interview.
She too got her start in poetry, starting in the sixth grade with a poem about butterflies for her mom. Her mom had a weird obsession with butterflies, and she wrote a poem about them.
She grew up surrounded by artists. Her parents were musicians and her brothers were rappers. She started out singing before doing poetry, but after being teased continually, she went to poetry. “That’s why I originally liked poetry, because it was me. Mine. Something I was good at.
“I do poetry to relieve my stress from school,” she says laughing. It helps her study, she says, which seems to be true when she tells me something about phospholipid bilayers.
I recognize she’s very straightforward.
Once it gets personal and deep, does the conversation really begin. “I’m a female, and I don’t like when I make less money than a man does or have to work twice as hard and still don’t get as far as men do,” she says.
“It’s what you feel. If you feel like an eggplant one day nobody can tell you you’re not an eggplant.” she says, ironically, considering she hates eggplant. Poetry, for her, allows her to be whatever she wants to be. At the third poetry club meeting, I jokingly ask her if she became an eggplant.
“I definitely want it [the club] to be a place where people grow as writers.” she said about the future of the club. “I want it to feel like a family; a family of unabridged poets.”