Black Women's Spoken Word

By Melissa Panayeta

Image from Prof. Ellis-William's Presentation on Black Women's Spoken Word

Black Women's use of spoken word is described by Antoinette Ellis-Williams, a professor of Women & Gender Studies, New Jersey City University, as an empowerment and resistance tool for African American Women. Professor Ellis-Williams presented her work and ideas at the annual UTSA African American Studies Symposium.  At this event, she noted that the sole purpose for spoken word is for expression of minorities to address ethical and political issues that affect them directly. She informs us that there are many different types of spoken words that can be used to convey a message, not just simply poetry.

The different types include prose, poetry, narrative, bios, lyrics that "provide authentic voice to stories," according to Ellis-Williams. These respond to linear and hierarchial power structures such as patriarchy, heteronomativity, and white supremacy. These types of spoken word also respond to capitalism, colonization, poverty, violence, marginalization, and isolation.

Spoken word used by Black Women has been long seen as a means to voice women's discomfort with politics and society. Dr. Ellis-Williams provided us with an amazing website which praises and celebrates Black Women's spoken word all over the country. Spoken word by Black Women has been shaping the minds of thousands for generations and will continue to shape the generations to come; it is an extremely important part of the societies, not only in America, but around the globe.

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Melissa is a nursing major at Lone Star College - North Harris, with a strong admiration for Black Women spoken word artists, which according to Melissa, helped her become a better, more knowledgeable woman. She identifies as an "aspiring nurse, artist, and poetry slam dunker."

Black Culture and Resistance: A Student's Experiences at the AASS

By Lena K. Al Abbasi

Image from Professor Lewis's Presentation

The African American Studies Symposium, which was held in April at the University of Texas at San Antonio, was a rich and successful event. In the first panel, titled “Nurturing Bodies, Energizing Spirits, Feeding a Movement,” featured Richard Lewis, a professor of sociology at UTSA, who constructed a timeline detailing overt racism before the Civil War up to the present where we still see covert segregation and what he called “racism byproducts.” Lewis showed shocking statistics of how African Americans are still being discriminated against by dominant society, and are still not offered the same life chances offered to whites.

The second speaker, Derek Hicks, an assistant professor of Religion and Culture at Wake Forest University, integrated the role religion and food played in healing the oppression of African Americans, both physically and spiritually, and how it’s also a form of rebellious protest. That piece was the most memorable as it was accompanied by repulsive images showing how African American flesh was seen as consumable by whites, metaphorically, for labor, abuse, and entertainment.

Among those images was a contemporary one of a cake made in the shape of a African female body, in the color of velvet red on the inside, symbolizing human flesh, decorated by a human head - a real human head. This image, expressing extreme savagery on the part of those responsible for and partaking in the cake, struck the audience, reminding us of how realistic the anguish of this struggle against slavery and oppression is, and the depth of our responsibility to fight and eliminate it.

Collectively, those presentations provided the audience with a better understanding of African American culture and how it developed through collective and individual struggles against oppression. Religion and food express a personal preference and provide a sense of identity. Joycelyn Moody, Professor of English at UTSA, in the ending described this as the thesis of the symposium : “this is the purpose of the symposium, we don’t like where we are, and we’re changing what we don’t like, we’re moving!”

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Lena is a student at Lone Star College - North Harris.