Poetry paints painful, hopeful picture of race in Columbia

In the midst of a stormy social climate, with race, in many ways, the strongest barometric factor, Columbia artists turned to poetry and dance Wednesday to turn issues, ideas and emotions into words and movement.

“They who were there when the rain fell relentless were sure that we won. That we won,” Monifa Lemons Jackson said, performing her poem “The Storm.” “So happens, we are wonderfully and beautifully made survivors.”

“Blank Page Poetry,” a show performed by eight local poets and a dancer at Columbia’s 701 Center for Contemporary Art, blended elements of place, history and current events to convey the influence of race on Columbia and South Carolina, in both their past and present.

Performing from behind a large white screen, the artists relied on their shadows and voices to illustrate their bonds with shackled ancestors, their disappointment in a failing education system, their frustration with ignorance, their sadness over society’s blindness.

“You can’t hear my song if your eyes are closed to my pain,” said Terrance Henderson, performing his poem “I See Faces.” “And you can’t appreciate my poetry if there are no vacancies for faces like me on the top shelf of your ego disguised as your policies. Exploitation lives at your comfy omission of my rightful place here.”

Attending the show, 27-year-old Ethan Fogus considered art a unifying force at a time when communities have increasingly – or more noticeably – found themselves splintered.

“We can’t pretend that there isn’t a hateful history. We can’t pretend that there wasn’t and doesn’t continue to be mass inequality,” Fogus said. “I think art helps us not necessarily to talk about it, but it helps us to start to talk about it, to start to evaluate where we think the fissures are in a society.”

The artists did not shy away from recent sources of unrest: the fatal shooting of Walter Scott, an unarmed black man in North Charleston; a school resource officer throwing a black student from her desk at Spring Valley High School; the massacre of nine black parishioners by a white man who wanted to start a race war; the furling of the Confederate flag honored as historic by many yet reviled as hateful by many others.

Ed Madden, Columbia’s current and first poet laureate, delivered a closing performance of his “The Lesson That Night,” written to mark this summer’s one-year anniversary of the Emanuel AME Church killings.

“Are we somehow different now? How would we know?” Madden read, his dark shadow cast from behind the white screen.

This story was originally published September 28, 2016 at 10:42 PM with the headline "Poetry paints painful, hopeful picture of race in Columbia."