Reading Poems to Protest Donald Trump

Student Johari Osayi Idusuyi as a Trump rally

Monday

Here’s a small news item about how poetry was used in silent protest at a Donald Trump rally. Although the protest wasn’t planned, the poems were perfect for the occasion.

Johari Osayi Idusuyi, a student at Lincoln Land Community College (in Springfield, Illinois), was offered tickets to a Donald Trump event and decided to check it out. Probably because she and her three friends were persons of color, they were seated in the VIP section directly behind Trump, thereby giving the appearance of diversity in what was a mostly white gathering. At a certain point, Idusuyi started reading (to herself) Claudia Rankine’s poetry collection Citizen: An American Lyric (2014), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Twitter exploded, as Twitter is wont to do, and Jezebel’s Kara Brown tracked the student down. Idusuyi explains what happened:

[W]e went with an open mind and then it all started. There were some “Dump Trump” protesters. The way the supporters treated the protestors was really unbelievable and that’s what made me mad…The way Donald Trump said, “Get them out of here”—when you say those words, that activates your supporters to be able to be the same way. Then there was a man who snatched a lady’s Obama hat. She was one of the protesters and was leaving and her hair just went with the hat. Then he threw it into crowd and everybody cheered. I thought, “That’s bullying. That’s aggressive.” I don’t think Trump handled it with grace. I thought, “Oh, you’re really not empathetic at all.” That’s when the shift happened.

Interviewer: You saw his reaction and you decided to react?

Exactly. And there was also another incident. There was one protester left and the crowd started pointing at her and booing. First of all, she’s a young woman. She doesn’t have her friends anymore. If she’s the only one left, just let her be. There was just a lot of bullying going on and I didn’t like that. And some people were cheering. To hear 10,000 people cheer for something so disrespectful is what made me so mad. And that’s when I was like, I am now genuinely not interested in your speech. I wanted to leave, but I came, I’m in the middle, I’m on camera, so I might as well read because I don’t have anything else to do. I’m not going to waste my time listening to somebody who I can’t respect anymore, so I started to read.

Nothing else transpired other than a couple telling Idusuyi to close her book. Lovers of poetry, however, will appreciate how appropriate Citizen was for the occasion.

Rankine focuses on the everyday racism and tiny microagressions that are constantly being directed at people of color. As a New York Times review characterizes the book, “At best these monologues capture the liminal quality of being black and American — what Du Bois called double consciousness…”

Most whites, by contrast, are oblivious to the slights, which is why the book was so well chosen: one African American is nodding to Rankine’s observations while the thousands around her are fired up by Trump’s racism.

Not that there’s anything subtle about that racism. Trump doesn’t hold back as he goes after Hispanics, African Americans, and Muslim Americans. Rankine’s poetry fights back by validating minority experiences, and white readers as a result to see the world from a perspective not their own.

Here’s a tiny sampling of her prose poems courtesy of Poetry Foundation:

When the stranger asks, Why do you care? you just stand there staring at him. He has just referred to the boisterous teenagers in Starbucks as niggers. Hey, I am standing right here, you responded, not necessarily expecting him to turn to you.

He is holding the lidded paper cup in one hand and a small paper bag in the other. They are just being kids. Come on, no need to get all KKK on them, you say.

Now there you go, he responds.

The people around you have turned away from their screens. The teenagers are on pause. There I go? you ask, feeling irritation begin to rain down. Yes, and something about hearing yourself repeating this stranger’s accusation in a voice usually reserved for your partner makes you smile.

/

A man knocked over her son in the subway. You feel your own body wince. He’s okay, but the son of a bitch kept walking. She says she grabbed the stranger’s arm and told him to apologize: I told him to look at the boy and apologize. And yes, you want it to stop, you want the black child pushed to the ground to be seen, to be helped to his feet and be brushed off, not brushed off  by the person that did not see him, has never seen him, has perhaps never seen anyone who is not a reflection of himself.

The beautiful thing is that a group of men began to stand behind me like a fleet of  bodyguards, she says, like newly found uncles and brothers.

/

The new therapist specializes in trauma counseling. You have only ever spoken on the phone. Her house has a side gate that leads to a back entrance she uses for patients. You walk down a path bordered on both sides with deer grass and rosemary to the gate, which turns out to be locked.

At the front door the bell is a small round disc that you press firmly. When the door finally opens, the woman standing there yells, at the top of her lungs, Get away from my house. What are you doing in my yard?

It’s as if a wounded Doberman pinscher or a German shepherd has gained the power of speech. And though you back up a few steps, you manage to tell her you have an appointment. You have an appointment? she spits back. Then she pauses. Everything pauses. Oh, she says, followed by, oh, yes, that’s right. I am sorry.

I am so sorry, so, so sorry.

I have been writing recently that literature can open up our capacity to care for others (here and here). As America becomes increasingly diverse, we need it more than ever to cross ethnic and racial divides. Poetry like Rankine’s is not a luxury but vital to our survival as a nation.