Photo by Miguel Salcedo
Saturday night in the 1941 Room, Connecticut College’s spoken word performance group, Reflexion, held their second show of the semester. The first was on Valentine’s Day, and, appropriately, focused on relationships, both past and present, fulfilling and neglectful. Saturday’s show, titled Who Am I?, dealt broadly with issues of identity.
The question is a big one, to be sure, and reverberates against innumerable others—Where am I from? Who will I be? Relating the past to the present is a challenge in itself; relating the past to the future often requires a tremendous leap. As a form of expression, spoken word enacts the emotional weight and literary grace of poetry, bringing the poets’ imagery into the immediate present of a performance. That so much spoken word addresses pain and sadness is perhaps a result of its performative impact—its capacity to confront the listener/viewer with words as well as movement. The members of Reflexion delve deep, recounting memories and emotions that have formed and continue to form the identities they inhabit, question and explore in performance.
The show began with “Oh Father,” by Anthony Sis ’14, a piece addressed to Sis’s own father, in the rhetoric of a Christian prayer, conflating the father and the Father and blurring the boundaries between apology and renouncement. As an opening to the rest of Who Am I?, “Oh Father” set the tone of the show as both confessional and self-asserting, both “Who am I?” and “Who I am.” Benjamin Ramos ’14 followed with “Break Away,” an exhortation to forge one’s own path in the world. Ramos asks not only “Who am I?” but also “who will I become?” and “what have I been told to become?”
Madeline Noi ’12 performed “Double Edged Sword,” a powerful poem that explores the vacuum between two worlds, between “African” and “American” as an “African American,” and “the hypocrisy of them both.” Referencing her parents’ Ghanaian nationality in contrast to her own American nationality, Noi expresses the inner struggle between being defined as one thing and feeling entirely another, or rather several others, definite or indefinite: “May the freedom to be whoever the hell I am last.”
Following this was “Broken Identity” by Marline Johnson ’13, an honest and beautiful poem contrasting biological origin—two chromosomes, his and hers—and the origins of personhood, of who we are and are not. “I am neither my mother’s not my father’s child,” Johnson tells us. In spite of the all the physical reality to the contrary—two chromosomes, his and hers—the reality of being from somewhere, from someone, can never be so clear. She asks, “How the hell am I supposed to know who I am?” How, indeed?
Ending the first act was “Strong,” performed by Megan Hulsart, who recounted a childhood of overcoming cerebral palsy, and learning that “strong” is a relative term. The strength of every poet in Who Am I was evident, both in their words and in their presence.
Intermission featured the Dudes of the Corridor, a musical improv group comprised of Liam Lawson ’14, Prashanth Selvam ’14, David Rojas ’14, Shuyler Nazareth ’14, Benjamin Ramos ’14, and Juan Pablo ’14. The six dudes improvised songs about three different audience volunteers, à la Wayne Brady on Whose Line Is It, Anyway?
To begin the second act, Reflexion president Kelli Bannister ’13 performed “Daddy,” a one-sided dialogue with her father, couched in the extended metaphor of a basketball game. In barely-there sing-song tones, Bannister described winning and losing points against an unseen, unanswering father figure. “I was up by nine / but your choices / left me down by eight.” The game goes on, Bannister playing her hardest against her father’s choices as she would a basketball opponent. “See me survive all these fucked-up, / all these hand-me-downs you gave me.” Our own identity so often plays out this way—as bargaining, scoring emotional lay-ups against misfortune and bad memories.
Elena Rosario ’14 began her untitled poem with “Who am I?”—a question that seemed more and more impossible to answer as the show progressed. I began to ask myself how I might answer it, what I might shout into a crowded audience to explain myself. Rosario tells a story of herself with injuries—a broken tibia, a bum knee. “I am committed to this lifestyle,” she says, “I am a skateboarder.” “Who am I?” may also be a “what am I?” and a “what I do,” all of these converging on some nebulous “am,” one image never quite explaining the rest of them.
The poetry of Reflexion senior advisor Asia Calcagno ’14 is consistently right with powerful imagery, her “Ode to Be Non-Human” being no exception. Phrases like “the cracked bones of divorce” snapped from the microphone, framing Calcagno’s narrative in a cage of carefully chosen sounds. Beyond the content of her poetry, which is powerful on an intellectual level, Calcagno’s reading draws on the aural tactility of spoken word performance.
Melissa Monsalve ’14 read a piece titled “Little Miss Goody Two-Shoes,” a self-reflective account of parental expectations and youthful realities. Monsalve admits to being, and indeed proudly identifies herself as “perfectly imperfect,” adding, “and that’s the way I want to be.” In a similar vein, Benjamin Ramos ’14 returns to close the show with “Find Your Way,” a fitting corollary to his earlier “Break Away,” the two working in concert in urging the listener/viewer to “decide your future / your fate,” and, one might even add, your own identity, your who-you-are.
Even at the close of Who Am I? on Saturday night, the answer remains conclusively elusive in all cases. The revelation of even one corner of identity only highlights the inscrutability of every other corner, in a room of incalculable size. Reflexion is full of talented poets with incredible stories, begging the question Who Am I? and offering an answer, but perhaps never telling an entire story, nor ever revealing a comprehensive “am”—an end-all, be-all state of being contained in a single verb.
Later that evening, one of the poets of Who Am I? said in conversation with a friend, “There’s not one thing that’s happened to me that I haven’t told someone, it just may not be the same person.” Story-telling is so often confessional, and confession takes many forms. How many times have I told this story? She added, “There’s not one person that knows everything.” And, truly, how could there be? At the very least, Who Am I? poses the question, and the result is impressive. •
