ChinThe small woman, barely 110 lbs. burst into lively poetry at the back of the Livity Restaurant on Old Hope Road. She abandons the microphone and winds her way through the audience, making the performance very up close and personal.
The audience has to swivel their heads to keep up with her, as she absolutely refuses to keep still. She wears a pair of sweatpants, a tank top and an Afro that is quite bigger than the rest of her. By the time she is done, the audience goes wild, and an encore is demanded, with much the same result. Her words are bold, sometimes abrasive and always personal.
"The visual in America is that I'm black and that often translates into the stereotype Black American. I open my mouth and I'm Caribbean, one; I have this big Afro, and my hair is obviously black and then I follow it up with the idea that I'm bi-racial. I'm part Chinese, part black. People are stunned by it."
These are the words the 29-year-old Jamaican poet Staceyann Chin uses to describe the paradoxes she lives. Currently in a quasi-self-imposed exile, she now lives in New York City. The Sunday Gleaner caught up with this roving poet when she was back home for a short visit recently. Staceyann had just given a rousing performance at the Livity Restaurant and was winding down before leaving the island again the next day.
Staceyann became a practising poet in 1998. Her work is a no-holds barred look at her life. She speaks of the joys and traumas of her life as she airs clean and dirty laundry alike. Her works often speak of her love for her grandmother, her hatred of her father, and the new-found understanding of her mother, who abandoned her when she was just a babe.
With her poetry, her life becomes literally an open book. "You can imagine that my family is quite pissed with me, the fact that I have so much of the family business outside," she says.
Immersed
She became immersed in the world of 'Slam' (competitive) poetry, after she left Jamaica with all of US$200 in her pocket. Although she had been writing while in Jamaica, her inspiration came while she was in the United States and she was stood up in a poetry café. She became interested in what she heard, tried it and the audience loved her. Since then her career has taken off.
She won her first two Slam competitions that year, 'The Lamda Poetry Slam' and 'Slam This'. She would again win 'Slam This' in 2000. In 1999 she was the winner of 'Chicago People of Color Slam' competition; first runner-up in the 1999 'Outright Poetry Slam'; and the winner of the 'American Amazon Slam' title in Aarhus, Denmark. In 2000 she won 'WORD: The First Slam for Television' award. Along with conducting workshops and reading her poetry in colleges across the United States, Staceyann has also performed in London, Denmark and Germany.
Various publications have also featured either the poet or her work. Her performance in Denmark allowed her photograph, history and work to grace The Politiken, Denmark's national paper. She was also featured in Ekstra Bladet, a more controversial publication. In the United States she has been featured in the newspapers New York Newsday, The Village Voice and Drum Voices and the magazines A, Everybody, Curve and Jane. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Pittsburgh Daily. She has two published books, Wildcat Woman and Stories Surrounding My Coming. Anthologies such as Taxis and Tampons, Skyscrapers, Poetry Slam and Role Call have all featured her work.
Television is no stranger to Staceyann either. She has appeared on 60 Minutes and HBO's newest hit Def Poetry Jam. You may also find Staceyann in her own feature film, Staceyann Chin, which looks at her and the world of Slam poetry.
At present, she is preparing for her first Broadway stint, during which she will join eight other poets, from the Russell Simmons production, 'Def Poetry Jam'. Def Poetry Jam has become another HBO hit and will hit Broadway in November. In addition to this Staceyann has had two off-Broadway one woman shows, Hands Afire and Unspeakable Things. There is also a novel in the works about which she says 'there is talk' but no signatures have been put to dotted lines, so its publication is not yet assured.
With all this success, Staceyann is one of those persons Jamaicans would gladly claim as their own. Unfortunately, there is a little fly buzzing happily away in this ointment. Stacey Ann is a lesbian, a fact she proclaims proudly. With the rampant homophobia in Jamaica, this makes her acceptance not complete. The issue of her sexuality is another or the paradoxes which she lives.
"I don't look butch," she says to further explain the difference between what people see and what they get, "but I open my mouth and I'm lesbian, so there goes another crumbling stereotype. I feel that I am a bunch of, at least visual, contradictions. And I guess that is kind of parallel symbolic for all the other contradictions that I am.
"The way I love Jamaica, the way I hate Jamaica. The way that I feel that I'm myself in Jamaica, the way that I'm not myself when I'm in Jamaica. The way that I'm black in Jamaica, the way that I'm not black in Jamaica. The way that I come home to 'Yeah ohh, you've been doing stuff abroad and carrying the Jamaican flag, but you've been carrying it under the pseudonym of lesbian' so the pride is a little bit clipped."
She notes that her performance at Livity was her first 'very comfortable' performance locally, as she is always nervous that local audiences are going to hate her. This performance was different because she was greatly supported by the gay and lesbian community she noted.
Interestingly, Staceyann did not leave Jamaica to become a poet. "I left to be a lesbian," she says. This pursuit, however, which she says "has been good to her in some places," led her into the poetry world. She called herself an artiste when she realised that like the other persons she viewed as artistes, there was, "something of me that exists on the edge of society."
A woman who claims the identities of Jamaican, Asian, migrant, New Yorker, lesbian, poet and black is one who belongs to many places. She notes that while it is difficult to navigate all these places, it also makes her life interesting. "I feel like I don't really belong anywhere but I really belong everywhere. It is the saddest and the sweetest of all possible existences," she explains.
Even so, she feels it is New York that has inspired her the most. She describes this poster child of the concrete jungle as 'an animal with a heart' which she appreciates for accepting all. "I like the speed of it. I like the pace of it. I like the fact that I can put your underwear on your head and walk out and nobody would say anything because its New York." So far she has not tested this underwear theory. "No matter how weird you are, there is a place there where you can belong and not be weird," she says. However, in Jamaica, even her Afro brings stares.
She is quick and ready to speak about her grandmother, the thought of whom lights up her face. The reason is soon clear. "I think she is the first person in the world who thought I was special and the only person whom I believed," she explains of this woman, in whose arms she came into the world. Staceyann lived with her grandmother Bernise Perry until she was nine years old. After that, she went to live in Montego Bay, and after living with an aunt, she boarded at several places.
Two of the poems which explains her present relationship with her parents (or at least her mental one) are 'Letter To My Father' and 'Hands Afire'. These poems indicate that she bears much hatred and anger toward her father, while she has come to understand her mother, whom she recently saw for the second time. She notes, however, that these poems show a change in her feelings toward her parents. "Years ago it used to be different," she says. She used to really hate her mother she says, and explained away her father's behaviour as a result of his manhood.
"Now that I've grown older and I've grown into a body that looks like my mother's, I understand that being crazy is just being crazy and having crazy situations to deal with, can push you towards difficult decisions." She argues that having had to make difficult decisions, including the decision to run from Jamaica, she understands that better now.
"She (her mother) had two kids, and she was running from something, whatever that may be... whether it was my father, or the responsibility of the kids, or Jamaica or poverty. She ran. The only difference is that she had two kids and I didn't." She however, does not know if she would have made the same decision, had she had two kids. Nonetheless, it makes her think about her mother's situation as a young woman. When asked if this means she is no longer angry at her mother her response is; "Tonight I'm not." It is a constantly changing relationship.
Her perspective on both parents changed the more she explored their story. Now she recognises that her father's lack of responsibility because when her mother left, he "didn't step up to the plate." She says, "I guess I discovered my mother's sainthood and my father's villainy." As such, her writing has its therapeutic value, even though in true New York style, she visits a therapist.
By embracing her lesbian lifestyle, this woman, who was born on December 25, continues to spark some controversy. Before leaving the country, many persons knew she was gay. During her final year at the University of the West Indies, where she pursued her Bachelors in Literatures in English, those who knew her knew that she was gay. However, though there are no stories of women being beaten for their lifestyle, she indicates that it is not easy.
"Some of it was not so pleasant and some of it was rather difficult," she explains of incidents where males try to 'school' lesbians on campus about the values of being straight.
"I've had friends who've been raped, because some man wanted to teach them," she says. As such, she continues to call New York home, but constantly visits the place of her birth, the place where she is quite at home, but cannot totally be herself.
