Hartford-based artist and poet Zulynette Morales looked down at a sheet of paper in front of her, then back up at the standing-room-only crowd packed into the mineral hall on the third floor of the Peabody Museum Monday afternoon. “Peace to Puerto Rico,” she said. Then she began to sing from a Willie Colón song from the 1970s. “Pronto llegará / El día de mi suerte / Sé que antes de mi muerte / Seguro que mi suerte cambiará.” I know my luck will change before I die.
Morales then launched into a searing piece about the devastation wrought by Hurricane María on Puerto Rico. Not like we heard it on the news; like she heard it over the phone, “as shorelines began to rise / As daytime skies turned to night / Within days I got the story that / I didn’t even need the news crew. / Our island is drowning.” Her voice rose. “Where was the pre-emergency help? / It was too busy with its insulting Twitter fingers to lend a helping hand / as mi gente waded in water and waiting in water / One family waited days before they could leave their house / as a dead family member floated in the other room. / A town over from my family / men were digging up neighbors’ bodies from landslides. / My island is drowning. / Cómo se dice PTSD in Spanish?”
It was a brief moment of levity, a chance for the audience to laugh before they gasped again as Morales unleashed her anger, at the bodies still being found, the waits in line for water under a tropical sun that tourists flew thousands of miles to see. “Y’all, I am sorry that there’s no hyperbole in this piece / I am sorry that this is no metaphorical piece / I’m sorry that this piece isn’t memorized / I’m saving space in case I need to identify a face / I’m trying to remember my family,” she said. “My island is drowning, but mi gente never will / Puerto Rico fuerte, siempre,” she said, her fist in the air.
Brian Slattery Photo
Hill.
She brought down the house — the first poet of the day to do so at the Zannette Lewis Environmental and Social Justice Professional Poetry Slam, held for the 22nd year in a row at the Peabody Museum on Whitney Avenue in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Part of a weekend of programming at the museum that including dance and musical performances — all for free admission — the poetry slam hosted by Ngoma Hill attracted poets from around the region and beyond who, once a year, turn the third floor of the museum into one of the best slam poetry spots around.
Before Morales, Chris Lillie had already unspooled 10 lessons he learned from spending a night in jail, his voice conveying the anger at having to choke back the anger, at having to play nice, to be at the mercy of authorities he didn’t trust. Ashley Wonder had flipped the scenario on its head to talk about the kids who didn’t survive their encounters with the police long enough to make it to jail. Joel Francois took a step back from both scenarios to talk about the dangers involved in simply being black. “Being black at night is like crying into the ocean,” he said — an ocean that was rising, flooding Louisiana, “turning all those houses back into slave ships.” He talked about the quiet terror of knowing someone he knew wasn’t going to make it to old age. “Don’t die yet,” he said, “I’m still saving for a suit.” Abioseh the Vegan Poet established himself as an early front runner with an excoriating piece about black celebrities who sell out their politics and their people to get ahead. “I’ll even tie the noose around my own black neck,” he said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “Just make sure you cut the check.”
The poems continued, tackling everything from the gentrification of Harlem to the economics and identity politics of hair products. But after the first round, after the five judges had scored all they heard, only eight of 15 poets were still standing, and Morales’s piece on Puerto Rico had just set the bar pretty high.
Nicole Najmah Abraham started off the second round strong with a piece, declaimed in the half singsong of computer-generated voice, about the downfalls of social media (“narcissism dot com, dot net…. we don’t imagine anymore because we just download a dream.”) But poet Influence garnered the first perfect score from a judge for a piece about being a health care professional, and how it seemed like he was sometimes working in a war zone. Joel Francois was hot on his heels with a poem about the cracks in the coalition of people who say “we’re all in this together” when black people were still in so much more danger than white people were. “Hands up,” he said, “show them the whitest part of you.”
The judges’s scores reduced the field to only six poets for the final round. Lynnette Johnson led the way with an excoriating piece about how rape victims can internalize what happened to them, tell themselves there’s nothing wrong. Joel Francois and Influence both came on strong. Their performances were extracting more and more perfect 10s from the judges. With the scores as tight as they had been all afternoon, Abraham, the last to take the stage, first paced the floor in silence, getting ready.
“Go ahead, girl,” someone said.
She did, becoming a mythic figure, a twin sister to Moses, buried in the sand at Medina, reappearing again south of the Mason-Dixon line to be nursed by Harriet Tubman. She was all the women left behind, still struggling, still fighting. “I washed up on the banks of Alabama / missed the bus Rosa was on by a minute / Babylon is a place in a hymn my mother sang about / where men escaped a lyncher’s rope / but I couldn’t escape the air filled with dynamite and smoke,” she said.
Someone moaned from the audience, already recognizing the reference. She picked up momentum.
“They found me in the rubble / one of four little girls unrealized / and knowing death’s purposes all too well.” She jumped forward again, seemingly reincarnated, still in danger, “as my father held an AK looking out the window / I can hear his mumbled voice to this day / ‘if you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.’”
Her words gained velocity, a gathering wave, recounting more death. “How many times must they lie in a pool of their own melanin?” she said. “Are we learning from our ancestors or are our murderers our greatest teachers? / Emmett Till’s killers drop mixtapes every season / remix how many ways to die / kill my father / kill my sons.” More sounds of affirmation from the crowd. She was stirring the pot. “I cannot find my parents / I am tired of being orphaned… We are a people lost and found.”
Her voice broke. She let her emotions come to the surface, but kept them at a low boil, enough to let off energy, but not so much that she couldn’t control it. It made the words hit harder.
“So please tell Amadou I have his wallet / Sean Bell his wedding day / Oscar Grant’s daughter, I have her childhood as a daddy’s girl.”
“Get it!” someone yelled.
“I wear Trayvon’s and Michael Brown’s graduation cap with pride,” she said.
“What!” someone said.
“I breathe again so Eric Garner can,” she said. “Stand up and straighten my spine for Walter Scott and Freddie Gray.”
Now a chorus of voices came in, affirming. Abraham wasn’t done.
“Ring the alarm / sound the trumpet, Israfil,” she said. “It’s time to wake up these orphans / let them rise from their slumber / and reconnect with their lineage.”
Abraham got three 10s from the judges, two 9.9s. A score no one else could beat. No one else needed to.
