Softly Spoken Word

This weekend marked the opening of the 7th annual Patois Film Fest in New Orleans. I was lucky enough to attend last night's closing event, an evening of spoken word. The headlining poet, Suheir Hammad, fulfilled the expectations of her longtime fans and rocked the core of first-time listeners, like myself.

She read from two collections, soliciting numbers from the audience and turning to those pages. Her collection Break, in which all poems' titles start with the word "break," featured pieces in which a Palestinian woman born in Jordan and raised in New York attempts to find herself, her body, her place and her identify in a fractured world.

The last piece she read, an unpublished and unfinished poem she dedicated simply to "women," left me staggering, wheeling, breathless, tearful, angry and thrilled. Before she read, she asked the cameraman to stop filming. She pulled white sheets of copy paper from a folder and let each page fall to the floor as she read its final lines. The audience didn't move once during the reading of the last poem... The host, Asia Rainey (a fierce New Orleans poet), visibly struggled to decide whether to leave the pages or pick them up.... I wish she'd left them there, as Suheir had invited the audience to come, speak, interact with the mic.