Youth Revolution Turns Two

“No, you can’t do that ​‘cause I said so,” So ran the opening line of 16-year-old Sabir Abdussabur’s hip hop narrative on the (sometimes) inadequacy of parental listening powers.

The Amistad High junior (at right in photo) rapped as he led off Youth Day 2010, the city’s first-ever entirely kid-organized celebration of the positive side of spoken word poetry and hip hop and the centrality of self expression in the lives of young people.

The event, which grew out of the two-year old The Youth Revolution (TYR) club at Amistad High, drew Imani Dial-James, her friend Mariah Ortiz and some 75 other young people from little ones to college age to an all-day event Saturday at the library’s main branch.

The parent in Sabir’s hip hop narrative is so used to saying ​“No,” that when the kid says that he wants to make a difference in the world, the parent’s answer, nearly automatic, is ​“No.”

For kids to be heard in a stronger way, through the messages of a positive hip hop, is the reason for the club and the day, but not the only reason.

The son of the social activist police officer Shafiq Abdussabur, Sabir founded the club two years ago with Alex Moore. His co-organizer of TYR is 19-year-old Ibrahim Abdul Qawiyy.

The club meets for an hour and a half twice a week at Amistad. It’s a club among many others at the high school, but it’s unique in the city, Quawiyy said, n that your grades have to be minimum B’s in order to get in to write lyrics and to perform. In other words, an academically based hip hop club.

Youth Day marked the club’s second anniversary. The venue was moved outside of the school premises to get its work of showing the positive side of teens’ rapping and poetry to the larger community.

What happened to Imani Dial-James was more than positive. When the junior was feeling sadder than usual last fall, adults in her life suggested therapy. But it was going slowly because she was having a hard time expressing herself in general and to a therapist.

Then her friends at TYR urged her to write and perform poetry. That got her feelings out.

The result was ​“Bleeding Love,” whose opening lines are:

Every day the sun rises and sets
Marking the beginning of new relationships
Not the most common of these relationships is love

It concludes with:

Love cannot be summed up

Imani said that Sabir and the others listened carefully. Other kids responded with their own work on love or a related subject. Sabir’s response to Imani was to tell her he didn’t think she was depressed, just a little sad.

“You can’t define love, you have to find it on your own. And it’s an issue for adults as well as kids,” she paraphrased the young man’s answer.

Result: The therapy progressed more quickly and was soon complete. Imani said she was looking forward to college and to becoming a veterinarian. ​“Bleeding Love” is the poem she was going to perform at Youth Day.

“We as kids [too often] get corrected, when we want to be comforted,” she added.

Mariah Ortiz’s grades were poor last year. Sabir sensed she had potential. He worked with her to get them up every chance he could. She joined the club and is now its vice president, as well as being enrolled in AP biology and English; she hopes to be an author some day. She said she writes and performs to find out who she is.

“Every part of our lives, like breaking up, is a big deal to us. But parents don’t always see it that way,” Mariah said. She said TYR was more than a place to have fun but for kids to learn to express themselves positively and make a difference.

“Since we can’t vote, the most important thing we can do is to send a positive message,” she said.

Ibrahim said he mature and thoughtful 16-year-olds like Sabir should be able to vote.

Sabir said that the music and poetry are a way for members to develop social skills. For many the club is the first venue ever where they speak in public. ​“The ultimate goal is to be leaders in the world,” he said.

More local if longer range plans are to organize TYR clubs at Amistad Middle School, then at other schools in the city, and to have a studio or center for TYR activities at a reopened Q House or other city location.