- [Oscar] So my name is Oscar Lodono.
I am the project editor of the journal.
- [Madeleine] I'm Madeleine Saley,
the co-editor of the journal.
- [Oscar] And we're really
excited to have this event.
As a law student, I think it's important
to bring these conversations
into this space
and so I'm really excited
to have these speakers.
Madeleine and I hand-selected each and
every single one of them.
We think their work, their scholarship,
their art, is profoundly important
and should be brought and
elevated into these spaces.
And so we're really really excited.
We hope you are too.
We're at capacity, which is awesome.
(applause)
And in terms of format,
I just want you to know,
it's gonna be seven individual talks
followed by conversation
and then followed by Q&A.
That's cool, right?
And I'll leave it to
later to say the rest.
- [Madeleine] So before we start,
we just wanna thank a few people who,
and organizations, who were involved
in planning this event and
making this event possible.
In particular, we would like to express
our deepest gratitude to
all of our co-sponsors,
the Black Allied Law Students Association,
the Coalition on Law and Representation,
the Disability Allied
Law Student Association,
the Fair Defense Project, the
Immigrants' Rights Project,
the Mental Health Law
and Justice Association,
the National Lawyer's Guild,
the Prisoner's Rights
and Education Project,
the Public Interest Law Center,
the Public Interest Law
Students Association,
and the Suspension Representation Project.
Thank you all so much.
We could not have made this
event happen without you.
We'd also like to give a
special thanks to the school's
student intellectual life committee
for its generosity in funding this event
and in particular to the director of the
Office of Student
Affairs, Israel Rodriguez,
for his help in planning this event
and the staff of the
law schools hospitality
facilities and special events
media service department.
We'd also like to thank
just a few individuals
who helped us in planning this event.
Our faculty advisor for
this series, David Tadden,
the members of the Review
on Law and Social Change,
who've been directly
involved in making this event
a success, Viviana Bonila Lopez.
Our community and
accessibility coordinator.
Elisa Corino, and Hugh
Barrett, our editors in chief.
Kate Taylor and Erin Bishop
our managing editors.
And all the staff editors
who are here tonight.
Thank you all so much.
(applause)
- [Oscar] Before we
begin, does any one have
a seat that's available next to them?
If so raise your hand.
All right, so you guys can funnel in and
just have a seat over here.
All right, I'm gonna bring up Katrina
to introduce our first speaker.
(applause)
- [Katrina] Our first
speaker of the evening
will be Dr. Joshua Bennett.
He is a performance poet
at the Striver's Row
and author of the Sobbing School
released earlier this Fall.
Winner of the national poetry series,
he's recited his original works at events
and venues such as the
Sundance Film Festival,
the NAACP Image Awards, the
Clinton Global Citizen Awards,
and President Obama's
Evening of Poetry and Music
at the White House.
He holds a Ph.D in English from Princeton
and a Master's in theater and performance
from the University of Warwick.
He's currently working
on writing as a member
of the Society of Fellows at Harvard,
but he's thrilled to be
back here in New York
tonight talking about the
issues he cares about most.
Dr. Joshua Bennett.
(applause)
- How y'all doing?
I'm socially awkward,
I need a little bit more energy than that.
How y'all doing?
(audience applause)
Okay, okay.
Appreciate y'all.
All right, so I'm gonna do some poems
and also talk about my relationship to
the carceral state.
'Cause that's part of
why we're all here today.
I guess I wanna begin, oh,
someone help me, okay, no?
Just a little low, okay.
I don't need it.
So I'm gonna, thanks,
it's a collaborative effort.
Perfect, boom, okay.
So let's start in the classroom.
That's where a lot of this
thinking for me started.
My first time teaching as an undergraduate
was in a prison in Philadelphia,
PICC Riverside, both the
men's and women's facilities.
And so I think in so
many ways my relationship
to academia is very much
framed by the prison
as a site of knowledge production
over and against the university so.
This is I say it sing
it as the spirit leads.
It's for the first group of 12 year olds
I ever worked with.
Come celebrate with me
that every day something
has tried to kill me
and has failed.
(inaudible)
We praise always.
We elegant everywhere.
We die too soon.
We joyous anyhow.
Say it.
That every single day
is a toast to living.
An ode to the way we made survival an art,
my classroom is a self
love anthem in nine parts.
Together we unlearn shame,
we dream silly,
we sing what we cannot say anywhere else
so say it.
Say I am 12 years old
and my joy is stainless.
The next time the world calls me subhuman,
I will remind it that
spell check is a virtue
and say I think the
word you're looking for
is subterranean.
10,000 leagues too deep
for any definitions fleet
as the feet of those Harriet Tubman
kept close as kin
so yes we do start every
single day like this.
Like poetry gives us a new
grammar for our bodies.
Say it, I exist in excess of my anguish.
I am not invisible,
I'm a beam of light.
Too brilliant for untrained vision,
I am not target practice.
I'm not a bullseye with rhythm.
This breath is no illegal
substance so sing it.
A ballad for the youngest son
how he survives beat cops that sees
scissors and sees upstream.
Frees hands up to chain his flame,
praise his name, Quovanjana, LaTavia,
Debricashaw, De'vonte,
how they make a mouth.
The musicians sing it.
When you're a seventh grader in Philly
and they try to turn your
middle school into a ghost town
may your voice be atmosphere
imploding sing it,
with conviction say I'm
a ill-adele lyricist,
metaphorist everest, any
body hating on my halo
is irrelevant.
I flow like Baldwin, Clifton, Gwendolyn,
Zora, Linston, Cullen, Ellison.
The authors that offer a
glimpse of what heaven is.
Say it say we fly as Zeppelin's.
Hide at our heaviest dignified
even when strangers try to
make this beauty a burden.
Say no one will make my beauty a burden.
Say no.
Do not touch my hair.
Say for real.
The next time you try,
we will have a problem.
Say this skin is no black hole.
It is a holy blackness I cannot shake.
Say Harlem shake say the
appropriation train stops here
say Lindy hop and hip
hop are half sisters.
That's why they got the
exact same last name.
Say this is the last time
you call me out at my name.
The last time you call me anything
other than what I claimed for myself
when I woke up this morning.
Say no one will co-opt our mourning.
We will honor the dead.
Praise what they left behind.
No one can make us afraid of being alive.
My people stay liver than live.
They always have.
Say always have.
Say always will.
Thank you.
(applause)
Thank y'all.
So my first book came out
at the end of September.
It's the Sobbing School, right?
(applause)
That's how I feel every day.
I'm like oh slick, I got a book.
But I don't know I think,
much of this book is written
after August ninth, 2014,
when Mike Brown was killed.
In part because I think
that represented a kind of
existential sea change for me.
I was at Princeton, I was
working on my dissertation,
and I think seeing the
live stream from Ferguson,
it all felt pointless.
That I felt like I was
sitting here working on this
grand literary theory and
it just didn't matter.
And I felt like the kind
of safety and security
I thought my degree could bring to myself
but also people in my
family and my community
I realized that that was sort of
not just a myth, but that
very idea depended on
kinds of violence that were
obscured from view every day.
So this poem, The Odyssey,
which is for Renisha McBride,
is very much tied to
that period of my life
but also thinking about the
violence of the police state
as explicitly gendered in certain ways.
And particularly how state violence,
in its most spectacular forms
is always gendered masculine.
That even the language around
sort of police killings
is always about black boys and men
when these other forms of state violence,
children are taken away
form their mothers,
et cetera, is not talked
about and put off to the side.
But also women like Corrine
Gaines, Renisha McBride,
who lose their lives, and those
names are not always held up
with the same sort of
strength and consistency
that we see for men and boys.
So this is for Renisha.
It's an elegy for her called the Odyssey.
When yet another one of your kin falls,
you question God's wing span.
The architecture of mercy.
It is Friday morning and despair
is the only law left intact
no one knows how to stop the bleeding.
This many black bodies deep.
The synonymy between ropes and gunfire
is lost on no one you assume.
You assumed, brother, that
this was your solitary cross.
The only anguish your daughter
might actually be spared.
The bullseye.
It's glare.
This haunt you know better
than any other algorithm.
Subtraction by bullet.
Our daily negation.
How ageless it is.
The laughter, too.
Yes, the grisly surprise of every birthday
past the age of 18.
The music we have yet
to invent for mourning
this specific Detroit wails
in the wake of the gun blast
and you do not know how to write
what you can't imagine the end of.
Why don't we grieve for women?
For girls?
The same way we do our men?
Our vanishing boys?
Perhaps it is this body,
ever mutable in its danger,
always shifting between target and terror
that demands too much recognition.
This history of sun swimming and drowned
and cut up and caged but a life's revision
leaves no space for other grief.
Genuflected by disbelief.
We spend entire nights alone,
folded into the shape of a mouth.
Cursing the limit of strength.
(applause)
Thank you.
So I just have a couple
more and they're elegies.
They're not all for people.
So in this second
collection I'm working on,
I'm writing elegies for institutions.
Interlocking systems of domination.
So this is an elegy for prison.
And my older brother was incarcerated
when I was a child and I think
'cause some of his boys robbed a bodega
and I remember even as a kid thinking
well that's weird that
you go to jail for that.
Like no one was killed
or anything like that.
And I just would meditate quite a bit
on whether that is even the question.
Like it's not ethical for
human beings to be in cages.
I think like it was for abolitionists.
This century that needs
to be the question.
Is this thing ethical
in the first instance.
Not is it practical.
Is prison to expensive?
It's like that's not the point right?
The point is that people are suffering
in ways that are unthinkable.
So this is an elegy for prison
and it comes out of a college visit
where I asked a group of students
why we needed prison and they said
because when people do bad things
we need to take away something
that is irretrievable.
That they can never recover.
This poem came out of that
illuminating experience.
Elegy for prison.
Without fail at least one of my students
replies but what will we
do with all the murderers
and the answer hasn't
changed since I first
felt cuffs, read Etheridge,
Knight, Dwayne Betts,
heard iron doors too heavy to dent with
any human pair of hands that shut.
You cannot speak as if the killers are not
already among us mowing the
lawn, getting promotions,
trying on their fresh winter coats.
As if my older brother
were perpetually dressed
for the role of corner store stick up boy,
eyes preordained for
the work of making out
unmarked cop cars from a distance,
calm as Jimmy Carter while a handgun rests
below the pitched navy avarex jeans
Mama got him to celebrate high honor roll.
A's across the board even
in environmental science
where he struggled early on.
I get the argument.
Close the jails and there he goes again.
Classic Sean.
Up at seven AM mapping out
ever more intricate ways
to rob a bodega.
Sean with the shotgun.
Sean with the bulletproof skin.
Sean with the stains of his blood.
No one comes right out and
says he was born with them,
no one calls him a thug or an emptiness,
nothing so gauche as all that.
Most of those assembled
in the lecture hall
opt instead for terms like
practical or natural selection
and say let's be realistic here.
It's really a matter of public order.
I mean we have to keep
them all somewhere right?
If someone killed my mother,
money wouldn't close the wound.
I would want to take away the one thing
that they can't take back and that's time.
(applause)
Thank y'all.
And there's two more.
Okay, just making sure we're good on time.
I'm so excited to hear everyone else.
It's an honor to be in conversation.
It's weird to be reading
poems, but I'm happy,
it's my favorite thing.
(laughing)
Whatever, we'll talk more later.
So this is elegy for the police state
and I've called 911 once in my life.
And it was when I was 12 years old
and I got in a fist fight with my dad
and I wanted someone to come kill him.
And even as a 12 year old I knew
that's what the police were for.
And so out of that
experience, I wrote this poem.
What I imagined first were pruning hooks,
something biblical,
agrarian, a new use for metal
once stood for little
more than tearing the air
from the human body.
Then a gesture towards the speculative.
Improbably overdue machines.
Teleportation pads and
12 speed hover bikes.
Light sabers that can't kill
but make you feel warm and
amorphous upon contact.
Like good Ramen or when you find
someone else's money on the floor.
The exercise grew unwieldy,
so I gave my energies
over to more practical matters.
Who to call when you get
robbed or hit with a bat.
Who else to feed the dogs of
entropy and personal choice.
The price we pay to live
decent which is to say
far from the stench of the
dead and the dying interlocked.
Unintelligible with all
that gold in their mouths.
Here's a story.
Once freshly cast by my old
man to the hotel room wall
throat now full of my own unoriginal blood
I knew I needed my father dead.
Assumed the quickest route
would be to call the law.
12 years old and already
this kind of contract killer,
I took my cue from scenes at school.
Black wands buzzing before each child.
Marking us ready for class or cuffs.
No middle ground to be found really.
What I have since heard a pipeline.
More of a smooth continuum
from hold to hold,
everywhere batons and threats
of premature internment.
Everywhere taupe walls
like the ones in jail.
And someone's grand baby pummeled raw.
(applause)
Thank y'all.
So this last poem, it began as an elegy
for Vonderrit Myers who
was killed only days after
Mike Brown and his mother Syreeta Myers
wrote me a Facebook
message a couple months ago
when she saw that the
poem had been published.
It's on YouTube now,
but she said she wanted
to thank me because she spent so much time
defending her son after his death
and I think for me that
was a moment of reckoning
because I think especially for writers
it's easy to forget that these are people.
I know for everyone
it's easy to forget that
these are people and you're
watching people die on camera
and it's probably why I don't circulate
videos of black people being killed.
One because it creates ad revenue.
So there's this very
profound sort of neo-liberal
impulse to just circulate these films
in order to get clicks and
money off of black death,
but also because I think it becomes
another way to flatten black
life through black death.
It becomes a mechanism to
say no one has really died.
That person was dead already
so nothing you're seeing
should trouble you.
So this is still life with black death
and what's the last thing I should say.
Oh I come from a line of preachers.
I was gonna be a preacher but I feel like
I had a wild faith crisis
while I was in ministry.
This is on camera, but whatever.
While I ministerial
training, and a lot of it
had to do with black people dying
and I realized that certain
kinds of conservative
theology I was trained
in couldn't fit the world
that I was living in.
It couldn't fit the idea of sovereign,
that was supposed to love
everyone and protect us
if we live in the afterlife of slavery
which is what the carceral state is.
So this is a poem for Vonderrit Myers,
but for the countless and unnamed slain.
When the steel blue ghost
standing at the podium says
Vonderrit Myers was no angel,
all I can hear is the boy was a human boy.
The boy had a best friend and 206 bones.
The boy had a name that
God didn't give him.
When he died, he did not
bleed starlight or gold.
He was not half bird.
The gun spoke and no flaxen wings
shot from each shoulder as if
to carry him beyond the bullets.
Swift assignment, no.
The boy was not a pillar of white smoke,
bright enough to break a non believer,
make a holy man fall prostrate,
heaving, heavy with contrition,
so let me be clear.
They are simply running out
of ways to shame our dead.
How else to say that they
are guilty and yet unburied.
How else to erase him if they
cannot lay claim to the sky,
feign omnipotence, take aim
at the boy just one more time
while everyone watches too.
So when I say I do not believe in hell,
but there are nonetheless
men dead and living
I often wish hell upon, understand.
I am first a historian of suffering.
Let James Baldwin sign
the fire next time in 1963
and we are living in the
wake of his impossible love.
I too dream of such heat, pray for flame,
with the diligence of a saint,
scarlet tongues of light
sharp enough to cut bone
and soul just the same.
My parents praise a vengeful God.
Son of all three, what else did I inherit
but that commitment with scales
the killer woke up today.
Probably ate scrambled eggs for breakfast.
Brushed his teeth three times or fewer.
Walked in soft slippers
through the living room today.
Checked the mail while a
child decomposed underground
held still beneath the
bloodless weight of the law.
I yearn for nothing if not equilibrium.
A means to honor how my
elders taught me to pray.
Lord, if you be at all, be a blade.
(applause)
