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HBO sits down with Def Poet Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai . . .
HBO:
How long have you been performing as a poet?
Kelly Tsai:
I've been doing this since high school, so about ten years now. One of my high school English teachers was really involved in the poetry slam community in Chicago, and she would sneak us into the bars to see the performances.
HBO:
Did you write or perform at all when you were younger?
Kelly Tsai:
Ever since I was kid I was always into writing. I would write up stories about little girls who became writers against all odds. [laughs] I was also involved in dance at an early age, and I had a natural love for performance. Poetry slams sort of connected all of these different things. Even when I do poetry shows today - the physical part, the body movement, is really important to me. It's unconscious. Sometimes people will say, 'I can see that you really created a physical text too.' But it's not something I really think about, it's just what I've always done. I am really interested in integrating dance, music and poetry. I performed two collaborations that included poetry and dance for Urban Bush Women and InSpirit - two performance groups in New York. Sometimes when we think about spoken word, we think about what's been hot - what's been publicized the most. But the integration of dance and spoken word and music has been a part of many cultures through the ages. The question for our generation is how we're going to move it forward in our way, in our spirit, and with our own languages - whether that includes movement, rhythm, music or visual dimensions.
HBO:
Do you remember your first spoken word performance?
Kelly Tsai:
I was probably in high school. One of my friends was running an open mike night, and I did a reading. I had just gone through a bad breakup, so I started off with bad love poetry. [laughs] My first journals, when I was 14, were filled with corny love poems. People knew that I liked to write, so they'd always give me these blank books. But for years I never wrote in them. It felt like I was gonna mess up the book. And writing can be so daunting - exposing your thoughts on paper. Eventually I started writing really lightly in pencil, that way it wouldn't be permanent.
The act of writing can be a huge thing. Then to perform it on stage and say, 'this is me, this is what I'm about' - it can be very hard. I didn't really know what I was doing, and I didn't even know that I loved it, but I just kept doing it. There were plenty of times when I felt that 'poetry is stupid.' But something always brought me back. I finally stopped trying to fight it. It's a continual process though - since those very first moments until today.
HBO:
What are some of the influences that shape your work and the topics you address?
Kelly Tsai:
There's been a progression of influences. I feel like I come from a lot of a different poetry bloodlines. In college I started an open mike slam night. This was at the University of Illinois's Champagne-Urbana campus. It's really a small town, and I learned a lot about how hard it is to organize something like this in a small town. We take certain things for granted in the bigger cities. People understand this form of expression.
But this was 1999, and a white supremacist had just gone on a shooting spree nearby - opening fire on a Korean church and later killing the Northwestern football coach. He was traveling the same route that we all traveled from Champagne-Urbana to Chicago.
About this time four of my friends, all women of color, organized a spoken word group called Sirenz, and we toured around Illinois. All of our pieces were group pieces, and we had a Latina women, a Sri Lankan, a Nigerian American and myself. A lot of our early performances focused on racism, and we had to be open about what hate crimes are. This was near central Illinois, where a white supremacist church is based. Every city and every state faces different racial problems. We face different problems in Midwest, for historical reasons or for many complicated reasons
HBO:
Did your focus change when you returned to Chicago?
Kelly Tsai:
After college, I lived in Chicago and became a part of the Asian American Artists Collective. We started a performance group, Mango Tribe, and at the time - this was 2001 - we were really thinking a lot about violence in the Asian American Pacific Islander community. We tried to focus on issues that affected us as Americans while also keeping a connection to what was happening in our homelands. One woman wrote a piece about a sexual predator who preyed only on Asian American women. There were pieces about domestic violence and Asian American masculinity issues, mail order brides and war. We tried to integrate all those different things
The poem you performed for this season's Def Poetry, "Aftershocks," is about the tsunami that hit Southeast Asia last December. What prompted you to write it?
I was in Manila when the tsunami hit, and though we weren't directly effected, we still felt the effects. I was getting all of these emails, and then updates about the fundraising efforts, and then the news of the Hot '97 song - the one that talked about 'the chinks better run' and 'child slavery.'
I had been in Taiwan a few weeks before studying Chinese, and some of my classmates were Indonesian. As Asian Americans we tend to have a solidarity with each other that my relatives in Asia don't have.
That's what "Aftershocks" is really about - how distant do we feel, and how divided are we from humanity? At the end of the day anywhere you go, people are people. Yet because people don't have connections to each other, they don't have the privilege to travel and see that racism is worldwide. Poverty and globalization and the effects of capitalism are worldwide. It makes me sad. As much as we have or don't have in America, how are you going to make fun of people who have nothing - these poor fishermen who died? At a certain point you just have to ask yourself - where is our humanity at?
HBO:
In "Aftershocks" you also address religion, the anger at God after something like this, trying to make sense from the Bible. Was this happening around you when you were in Asia?
Kelly Tsai:
It was a very personal piece. I was trying to make sense of everything. I'm a very spiritual person, not necessarily religious. My mother's side is Christian and from China, my father's side is more Buddhist, from Taiwan. But I went to a Baptist kindergarten because it was closest to our house, and I remember reading all of the Bible stories about Jonah and the whale.
Something catastrophic like the tsunami, it makes you ask difficult spiritual questions. Certain things test your faith. After I wrote the ending I looked at it and thought, 'what the f*** did I just write?' I didn't even really understand what I'd just written. But then I went back to it. It's that struggle to communicate what is beyond our control. How do you deal with that? We know that blame is the natural response after a devastation, but it doesn't get you any further.
It's important to keep people accountable, in terms of history. Our suffering today has a lot to do with yesterday. And it's important not to get those things confused.
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