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HBO sits down with Def Poet Denizen Kane . . .
HBO:
Tell us a little about your background?
Denizen Kane:
I was born and raised in three cities, and wherever we went we were in the periphery. We were never in the mainstream. Whether it's the Bay area or New York, Chicago, Atlanta, there's the city people see - the public face - then there's the city you don't know unless you're inside of it.
HBO:
What first inspired you to start writing and performing?
Denizen Kane:
I was living in Chicago when I was 17, and I stumbled on this group of poets called Isangmahal, which means literally "one love." They're based out of Seattle, but they were on tour. I saw some of them perform and they were just f**king sick. My friends and I, we were writing too. We were part of the hip-hop generation, and we were writing our little raps, thinking we were fresh. But I went to check these guys out and they were f**king off the hook.
HBO:
What struck you most about them?
Denizen Kane:
The way they carried themselves, what they had to say about life. There was self-love there. They were Philippine. I'd never seen anything like it. To see the quality of their work, we wanted to write they way these guys write.
How they did it is kind of how we envision slam poets today. But they weren't corny or pretentious, they were heartfelt. And everywhere they went, another group would form in that city. So we became part of a collective called Two Tongues. We performed in our community, then we'd travel to do shows, and soon other groups would form in our wake. By 2001 we had an Asian poets summit in Seattle, and about 30 groups convened and performed together.
HBO:
Is it difficult to define for people what you do, whether its poetry or hip hop, performance or activism?
Denizen Kane:
The real story of it is that you can't neatly qualify the experience that we're having here. There really isn't a model for what we're doing. If you trace our lineage back it goes through the spoken word movement and hip-hop, but it also goes through the third world student movement. It stretches back to artists that were doing their thing in the late 60s early 70s, the student movements at Berkeley and San Francisco State. Artists from that era really cast a long shadow over what we do in a positive way. I'm part of a generation that has not only linked to what they've done, but has deliberately made the re-connection back. Isangmahal, the Seattle-based collective, has been really influential in that linking back.
I think to understand who we are in this country at this time, is really to have to formulate new thoughts on all the relevant subjects. I don't even like using those words any more - race, class, sex, gender. All that shit is relevant and cool, but the way they have us thinking, it's linear. There's poor and there's rich. You're either a 6.7 and I'm a 2.4. Shit is not like that. There are hundreds of different factors going on at any one time. You change one, you change a lot of different things.
HBO:
Can you tell us a little about the poem you read for Def Poetry, 'The Patriot Act'?
Denizen Kane:
I perform it in acapella, more like a song. I liked music and writing growing up, and I'm one of those who never really wanted to separate the two. People look at something and say, is this a poem? Sometimes you don't really know.
A lot of us who grew up listening to rap music almost exclusively, we wrote down lyrics to songs. A lot of kids do that. You just have a f**king compulsion to do that. It makes you pay attention to words. You pick up on strings of things, interpret them. I liked catching the little clues, the little twists in meaning.
HBO:
You bring up religion a lot in the poem. Has it been a big influence in your life?
Denizen Kane:
Religion's a big deal to me, the farce that is modern day Christianity. There are two kinds of religion: there's faith that deals with improving a person's ability to travel through life, and then there's a certain type that's fear-based, huddling together in small groups for comfort and safety, and villainizing other people.
If this life we're living in is a body, and we are all ourselves in this body, they believe that God is the super self. There's another type of religion that believes that God is the wisdom of that body that we're all a part of. That's different. The things that Christians think they're reacting to aren't original responses anymore, they're heavily conditioned responses. It's the conditioning of previous generations. And it's more about upholding the personal respectability factor of so-called Christians, rather than doing what could actually be done with the understanding that's there. C'mon now, this is about blame and about shame - this shit is not religion. If you claim that God was embodied and walks among you, then why are you acting the way you're acting? I can't see that.
Doesn't the book that you quote from say that by the fruit of their actions you will know them? Their fruit is all bad. The Bush Administration - the fruit is all bad, all the actions the administration has perpetrated. And they're the most religious administration ever. By their own words they will be judged.
HBO:
Were you raised in particular faith?
Denizen Kane:
I was raised a Christian. I was one of those kids made to study the bible. We went to church four of five times a week. Most of us in my community grew up with it. But if you go to the old countries, Christians are a small minority. An overwhelming number of Asian immigrants came here through missionary groups. The immigrants that are coming are pre-programmed to embrace Christianity, and this idea of the American work ethic.
It's a puzzling time. We grow up here, but we feel so adrift in the massive ocean of American culture. You want to be able to hold onto something, and link back to some traditions that will keep you stable. But sometimes you go back and your own parents or the elders in your community have modified those traditions. They've stripped them for the sake of conforming more easily to this other thing - this conditioned, Christianized version of something you thought would tell you who you are.
I definitely see it through the filter of my experience, but I really do see it all over. It's difficult to talk about, it's so embedded in how people live. It's hard to talk to someone who doesn't even know they're hypersensitive, and Americans are hypersensitive to race and religion. The two are linked more than we think. There's all this baggage to unpack, especially if you're a person of color and raised in church. It's confusing.
HBO:
Do people ever come up to you afterwards and take issue with what you've said?
Denizen Kane:
Oh yeah, people say they're praying for you, they hope they see you in heaven. If you don't 'adhere to the path,' they're concerned about the welfare of your soul. This is really real to them. It's hard to explain to somebody you may believe, but you believe what you experience; I don't feel compelled to believe what somebody else has invented. To me it's clear, but to others it's hazy.
We're all a part of life, and life seeks to preserve itself. I think we seek to evolve without even knowing it. We cling to traditions in ways that bring us pain. There are always parts of our mind and our being that question those things. It's f**king bizarre how children will have had no other experience than what their childhood gave them, but they can still have a huge and powerful yearning for something more and better. They might not even be able to define it, but they'll do all sorts of crazy things to fulfill that yearning, to answer that call within them. They leave home, leave their families and all their traditions. They just have to try and make sense of things, and we're all doing that in our own way.
HBO:
Why do you think you started writing as a kid?
Denizen Kane:
There were questions that I had that people refused to answer, a parent or an elder or someone I respected. Pointing out what seemed to be obvious, I'd say, what about this? Rather than being like, Oh that's true, or acknowledging what you said is real, they'd say, don't think about that, think about this instead. You either swallow that or not. We went to church all the time, and we weren't allowed to listen to the radio or see certain things. Maybe that world is internally found, and people feel fulfilled. They don't have to leave that world to find what they're looking for.
It says in the Book of Isaiah: your actions are not religion, these are just rules made by men. That's scripture. But if you point to that, people say, who are you to interpret?
You quote things in the gospel that say the Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath. We're following these crazy-ass rules. Sunday is supposed to be a day of quiet and mediation that benefits you. So why am I here at this f**king fashion show called church? And they tell you, who are you to interpret, you don't know yet. When will I know? And why are you telling me I don't know? If you do not become like little children again you can't enter the kingdom of God.
In our culture, we oppress and suppress the child. We tell the child they have no value until they can successfully conform to the adult world. And by the time we do that, the thing that was precious that we needed from them is gone. Our shit is backward. And this is what they claim to be running the world successfully with.
I feel like the American mind is schizophrenic because we're separated from what's tribal in us. I don't know if that's the right word, but I feel like if we could turn back the hands of time from highly developed capitalistic culture, you might find a road that makes sense. But now you can go through your whole f**king day and feel like you have not touched the world. You feel like you haven't impacted the world in any physical way. A farmer can feel that way; even if he draws a line in the dirt he can see what he did. I f**king touched the world today.
Me, I may have to go provide customer service in a fluorescently-lit Gap, expend my energy folding crew neck shirts. And you can't tell if you touched the world or not. You start to tweak out. We're a part of this world and we're meant to connect with it. Until you find a way to touch the world again, you're gone. And that's why we cling together so much. We want to find something that feels like that again.
Hip hop - it's a scene and a culture that's been exploited to death, fashion lines and everything. We're going to have to create something from the dust again. We're gonna have to make it all over again, cause we're yearning to find our place in the world and figure how we're supposed to relate to each other. We still need that. We still need to cultivate that.
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