Tag Archives: Slam
Renaissance Live at Ringside June 2016
“Colonizer’s Language” a Spoken Word piece by Renaissance the Poet
This spoken word piece contends with the concept of the Colonizer’s Language and how we use language to describe and identify ourselves. This piece unpacks some of the history of the term “nigger” and how it impacts us in the present.
Sweetest Lie
You lied to me
You told me, that it was, just, going to be a ride, on your bike
Now, I am not upset that you lied to me; looking back…
But you still lied to me
If you would have told me then, when it was in the middle of winter, raining, icy-cold and too late to catch a bus home
because we stayed out all night studying,
that I was about to sign up for the love of my life, the greatest partner I would ever have, some of the most emotional fights and passionate nights…
Honestly,
I probably would have run for the hills half-naked and risked the frostbite crossing over Seattle to get home walking for hours in the rain, snow, slush crap that we get here, to get away from your bike
Which was the fastest way home, and I had class the next morning,
Love, terrifies me,
and back then I didn’t what a thing to do with it
Not even a nice little romp in the sheets, with no strings attached
because I am a Pinocchio with big dreams and a heart worn on my sleeves, and strings that reach from my most intimates, dangling behind me, blowing in the wind getting caught in everything I cannot detach my heart from
And I’m sorry, I must be failing as a man, but I just cannot detach my heart from my intimate connection with another human being
There is no, just romping, in the sheets for me
And I had been through the ringer with this whole love thing, had my heart torn out, stomped on and spit on, laughed at, disregarded, burned, pushed aside, forgotten…
And I had failed those who loved me, violated trusts, got too busy in saving the world to remember she needed me too, until she left me because she wasn’t receiving the attention and affection she needed me too
I was not a good lover and love terrified me
More importantly though, I already loved you and did not want to accept that as a reality
But I thought, it’s just a ride on your bike, and its cold outside, shes the homie, my study buddy
Never in a million years would I have ever thought that you were crushing on me
Funny thing is, you were testing me to see if I could check my male privilege, my patriarchal tendencies, and jump on the back of a bike being driven by a woman
Fuck a patriarchy, you are a boss, a king, always have been and always will be
and if men were so good at running things, just because they are men, then why do we have so much Hell in the world today with all its attendant sufferings?
Just saying…
You stuffed this helmet on my head, condensing and smashing all of the ego that surrounds my better nature, which blocks me from the sunlight of the spirit of who I was born to be, and you knocked me back down to size, which is the true definition of humility,
but you were also trying to save my life in the event of the unlikely circumstance of a crash
And as hard as I tried to fight it, not because I was afraid of a woman being in control, but rather, because I was afraid to lose control over my affection for you; I hesitated climbing onto your bike
And you turned around, in that wonderful way you always do, annoyed as shit because I am not moving fast enough for you, unaware of what was really running through my mind at the time
How am I going to hold on to her and not fall madly in love with her?
she will know, and I will be exposed!
And you yelled at me “Get On!”
As I climbed onto your bike and slid into the seat, wrapping my arms around you, all my fear melted away and I realized that there was in place on the world, and no person that I wanted be with more than you in that moment, right there.
Thank you for lying to me, sometimes that’s just what we need to bring us to where we belong
and it brought me to you, MyHeart, I love you.
NIGGER by Renaissance the Poet
Nigger.
Negroe.
Nigga.
Black.
African-American.
Criminal.
The colonizer language that we have imbibed
as if it was a life sustaining nectar
Afraid to, wean ourselves from the poison that is killing us
because we have been fooled and are fooling ourselves into believing that it’s beneficial,
nutritional, contra-positional, infinitesimal in the scope of things
The Pros outweigh the Cons…?
con-artists in sheep’s clothing, parading the homunculus pulling the strings in our brains, weighting our steps with second guesses, misperceptions, allegories, and ill-conceptions, but in vain…
Do we strive for something better, clueless to the range of how damaging the language we use to represent ourselves is to our dignity, self-identity, intrinsically speaking, spiritually seeking, deranged! conceptions of how we came to being and who we hope to be, to become, to arrive
Nigger, as if we arrived, materialized as slaves on plantations contrived for labor
and never existed prior to raising cotton for stock profits in American pockets,
droppin to the ground exhausted, because the master forgot to water the human stock bought on the auction block for cents on the dollar
And this, is what we holler as a greeting!
excuse me…
“NIGGA,”
Cuz, I’d rather be a N I G G A, so I can get drunk and smoke weed all day
It is a natural response to an oppressive situation to assimilate and reclaim the terms of a language used to discriminate and disseminate hatred,
like the word “Gay,” was once used to describe happiness or joy in a situation, but then it
became a derogatory term laced with inflammation and incitation to repressive anger
displacing concentration on the facts at hand
that a label to the soul burns worse than skin to a brand
But the word only had power insofar as those convicted, insisted, complicit in its imposition
buckling under the weight’s transmission, did it have capacity to defame, but
Reclaiming the term robbed it of its power and now it is adorned with praise
Nigger, unfortunately is not a term that can be rephrased in such a way as to liberate its user
To reclaim is to own, and to own a nigger is to be a nigger’s master, a colonizer, and the oppressor
so,
to call oneself a nigger is to be one’s own oppressor, but moreover an overseer whipping our own asses for a master who profits from our disasters
Because a nigger is lazy, licentious, sexually promiscuous, unsound in mind and body, pretentious, unscrupulous, vile, criminally minded, guided by the basest of natures, wild, genetically inferior, paternalism required:
to own the term nigger is to ingest this image, latch it to our sinews, hang it from our bones, as our ancestors hung lynched from branches, and pass it to our lineage because the ideology is a spiritual pestilence to the masses
The antithesis of white, the foil despite the toil of life the cradle of which it all ignites: Black
More Eurocentrically politically correct; African American
But still dislocates us from our historical heritage and infests with hatred for ourselves
As we imbibe the colonizer’s language as our own
But in truth it has no meaning or value to us
Words are just symbols and signs; semiology
vestigial coverings that have nothing to do with our actual identities and reality
Prison: A Just Desert
Deserves everything he got, and all that he has coming to him
Shit, should have never broke the law, caused the harm, knew what he was doing,
He made the choice of his own free-will, he had other options and opportunities
He could have chosen to starve instead of stealing to feed his children’s belliesCri
It’s about order and continuities, here!
The fact that I am the head of a corporation, raping and pillaging the indigenous in far off lands to increase the bottom line margins of profits for my stock holders, starving entire villages, so my kids can live like fat-cats, taking Disney Land homages, is not equitable to this man’s actions, because it is legal
What he did was wrong, it was against the law…
A line that he should have never crossed regardless of what his circumstances are
And that my friend, requires consequences, his just desert is a prison sentence
The Department of Justice is a godsend, we don’t need the Klu Klux Klan anymore to keep them in check, brutal police practices, stop and frisk policies, state and federal penitentiaries relegating convicts to slaves of the system, which keeps our domestic products competitive with international markets; shit, spin it any way you like, the D.O.J. is on our side
It’s about order, I mean, imagine if everyone acted like him and everyone’s children on the planet were fed, there would be chaos! & we wouldn’t be able to control them anymore
Truth is, we need them to violate the laws, and that is why we depress the economic situations in redlined neighborhoods and do not allow them to vacate the premises, it drives up the price because space is limited and increased demand with static supply is a sure fire way to make profit gain within in oligopoly, no jobs means resorting to crime to make ends meet, and no employers will risk establishing a business in these areas so crime is all but guaranteed
All that is left, is to lobby the legislature to impose harsher punishments on non-violent crimes, like possession of marijuana, disenfranchise them based on a clause in the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution, feed the public a few lies about crime statistics, and a colorblind language grounded in the individualistic ideology of America
And poor white Americans, who used to be Dixiecrats under F.D.R.’s New Deal during the Great Depression, now Republicans, will be lining up and signing up by the thousands, so that there white privilege in a post racial society will come to their benefit
And the blacks and other people of color who fall victim to this pit will not be able to make a difference because their right to vote will have been stripped from them, the rest of America will hold them responsible for making the choice to not die of starvation, because simultaneously, we will utilize the Central Intelligence Agency, to import Crack into Black neighborhoods via Rick Ross, and sign into Law the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, with 100-1 sentencing ratio for Crack possession and distribution
While running a “Tough on Drugs” media campaign identifying blacks as the culprits of this intrusion
Then, in 1987 with McClesky v. Kemp, we will make discretionary discriminatory practices by the police and prosecuting attorneys Constitutional in the Supreme Court, and rule out any hope of bringing forth any more racial cases against law enforcement
Convince congress to invest money for an explosion in prison capitalization, privatizing incarceration and sit back and watch how the United States, which has only 5% of the world’s population, will boast 25% of the world’s inmates
This; is America,
the land of the Dream and the home of the Slave
The backbone of any real Hip Hop show spins and scratches.
The Word “Nigga”
These Rhymes
Carry with them
Explosive obnoxious notions
And inoculations to erosive emotions
So pay attention with your best ear
Because this world is vicious
With its conspicuous ill-nutritious
& Victim-us mentalities
Dishing us pity me card sicknesses to our realities
Me
I’m just way too wild to be a Sisyphus
Held down by this society
The plot is thus…
I am a BLACK MAN
With the will to be free
Like Galileo
My mind will expand the universe
But I am just a tree from a seed
You see
The beach is but a part of the sea
It’s just harder to see
That using a stereotype to my benefit will only feed the greed
And even though Sun Zu marked that as a definite factor to a wars victory
Making my enemy think I am weak, when I am not
But that’s not the case in this plot
It’s a vasectomy
& I’ve been stripped of my pride
Like, inject the beat
Intravenously
That bullshit would have me stripped of my dignity
Crawling on all fours
Begging with pleas
The MAN
Has been disrespecting me
And however,
Incorrectly put it may be
He has miss-took me for a lesser being
The knife of his oppression- held half in my back
Held, half in your back
And he would have had more,
But the people who identified as Black
Took a stance and pushed him back
The script was flipped
But somehow we’re still off track
And while these “Uncle Tom Rappers”
Continue to profit on the exploitation
Of our modest situation
Doing the MAN’S work for him
Spewing his poisonous dominion
Into the minds of our behavior negative
Perpetuating the hate within our children
So many of us LOVE the rap
The Cadence and the flavor of
The heart of the speech in our people
Clearly there here
Where are you, my people? (repeat until they answer)
Yeah
We’re here
Standing
In defiance to the oppression we hear
Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
They bring our culture back
Better yet they give us a scope of culture to aspire to
Our mentors
Who remind us of what it means to be black
And furthermore what it means to be a people
And why the word nigger
YES
& the word Nigga
Will forever and always
Be whack.
Renaissance Revolutionary 