Emotive
Personally, spoken word poetry is a genre that is close to my heart. The spoken word poetry community in the Philippines is an arts sub-culture that lies just beneath the surface, always present, but almost always fleeting, with an almost snobbish air.
It is accessible, but only for those who are willing to stay put and to really listen. It’s niche, with performances often done in artisan restaurants, coffee shops, or milk tea shops. Around the tables and chairs, there will be a very small stage, usually just an elevated space, with a microphone stand. But that was all we need. We would crowd around that stage, sitting on our stools or at our tables, sipping our drinks. The people present there were often both listeners and performers; the event both a hang-out between friends and couples who came together to watch one of theirs perform and a communal art therapy between like-minded strangers who ended up listening to each other’s hearts. That small space, cozily lit with people speaking in hushed tones accompanied by acoustic guitars or soft piano, would transform into a place where people were allowed to be vulnerable and fully human.
Some spoken word artists had found mainstream success in traditional and online media. They went on to become big entertainment personalities, weaving in their poems as iconic lines in television shows or heartbreaking lines in hit songs. But being so made them vulnerable to controversies and their art subjected to the public’s capricious approval.
Yet many spoken word artists had chosen a quieter path. Many were professionals outside of the art. I belong to that category. I love how spoken word poems bare truths in a way that was subtle yet profound, but I don’t want to center them for the public to consume aggressively.
These poems had found their people then, they will find their people now: slowly, steadily, & surely. If not, that’s okay, too.
Active
I’m an educator by profession and I’ve leveraged spoken word poetry as a teaching tool. More than ten years ago, when I first started teaching in IB Diploma Programme, I taught Filipino Literature A to expat children and third world kids who could barely understand Filipino. It is such a challenge to make them read Jose Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere or Lualhati Bautista’s Dekada ’70. Let’s not even talk about poems as the deep Filipino words would act as a barrier in even basic comprehension. How can we even talk about literary analysis or the extent to which textual features shape meaning when my English-speaking students couldn’t even properly understand the language?
I had to find a way to make malalalim na Tagalog palatable and accessible to my students. High school kids, especially, were the trickiest in that they will be the first to brand the subject as boring or useless. But they had a diploma to get and a dream university to get into, so I would always just retort back that the boring was necessary.
But I knew I needed a new strategy. I also needed to build their oral skills for the Indidvidual Oral component because I knew that their perfunctory analysis and almost criminal twang would barely make it to the passing mark. If my students would experience the creative process of writers, I thought, then, then it will be easier for them to analyze the texts other writers have written.
I brought spoken word poets as speakers, coordinating with them well in advance because they needed to file for leaves from their work. They would come, sometimes tired but almost always excited, to come to school and perform for the high school kids. As the high school kids see these grown-ups so enamored by the art, slowly but surely their perspective of poetry would shift. They’ve seen how spoken word artists blend oral storytelling and songs, and those with rockstar aspirations were now listening with rapt attention. But more importantly, among them I would notice the introverted ones, those who would silently journal their thoughts and ideas, find themselves so represented. For the first time in a long time, what was once considered nerdy was now cool.
My students went on to get their IB Diplomas and university admissions, and never again will panitikan (literature) ever be useless again.
Reflective
Ten years of teaching and four schools in, I realize that there are many things that are universal. The need for a safe space to process vulnerable emotions remains a universal need. When I moved abroad, I taught English Language & Literature. Language was different, but skills remained the same. And high school kids, I realize, share similarities and patterns of thinking regardless of where they may have come from.
In my previous school (an IB continuum school in Bangladesh), I continued to lean on spoken word poetry as a teaching strategy. Handling both IB Diploma Programme and IB Middle Years Programme, I had enough of a wiggle room for the application of analytical skills in Grade 11 to Grade 12 because I could dedicate time for productive skills building during their Grade 8 to Grade 9. My students grew with me. In their MYP years, they’re writing and performing poems, and in their DP years, they’re analyzing and tracing patterns of ideas among different poems.
My previous students were amazingly more skilled in terms of technology compared to me. They’re more adept with social media, creating youtube channels where they would upload their original compositions. It had been significant because for the longest time, Bangladesh has been largely underrepresented, and what they’re doing in their MYP personal projects are actively changing that. Of course, I had to warn them about the evils of social media and how it can be a brutal place, but they’re a lot more experimental and more willing to take on the risks.
It was an interesting perspective for me. This class, they’re Grade 11 as of last year but they’ve been my students since they were in Grade 9, were composed of all-boys and it’s interesting to hear poems about the girls who broke their hearts or the pressures of gender expectations that they go through, as if being in touch with their emotions would take away their masculinity. I had to sigh, because I don’t really have an answer to them when they ask me why society was so unfair. So we listened to each other instead. Sometimes, they’d come and say, “Miss, read this“, while thrusting a newly-composed poem or “Miss, sit down” while opening the video of their new performance. Sometimes, the class will just be filled with their singing and rapping.
Yet, amidst all of this chaos, I am just glad that these boys have access to these art forms: reflecting about life, writing about it, processing it. They’re learning how to be humans, and somehow I value that for them.
When I moved to India this year, it’s difficult for me to see where spoken word poetry would fit here. The academic setting is new for me, the patterns of thinking of students and parents unfamiliar. I didn’t know how it will fit in the IGCSE curriculum and I don’t know the extent to which I could challenge the students to construct literary art forms while developing analytical skills.
But I needed something to ground me and my art has always been my grounding force. So I returned back to it, for me.
The constructivist learning theory, the one that I follow for most of my academic career, posits that “learners actively construct their own understanding and knowledge of the world by experiencing things and reflecting on those experiences, rather than passively absorbing information.” They need hands-on exploration but that needs to be normalized first through social interaction with people who lives and breathes their art. I’m working with existing mental schemas that look at the subject as a means to an end, and I need them to unlearn some schemas in order for them to truly value the understanding of the genre at its core and how it shapes meaning. Art, after all, requires creative genius to be unpacked fully. Thinking in retrospect, I share the same ambitions with my students. I also want my students to get their 7s and A*s, so I want them to learn critical thinking skills organically, even if it takes a longer time, because these transferable skills will continue to serve them long after they have finished school.
I do not know how my journey here would be. But perhaps, as long as I try my best, I’m on the right track. Even if I’m not, I can always “begin again.“.
Buy “Muli Akong Magsisimula: Mga Tula” here or listen to them here.
