Oh, Baltimore

From April 25th – May 9th I was invited on a poetry teaching and reading tour of Baltimore, Chicago and DC.

My friend Zeina once told me “You have a look that’s foreign everywhere”. People think I’m from every country except the two I’m actually from. England and Jamaica. While travelling this can be difficult. I rarely get through an airport without the “random search” or being escorted into a backroom for questioning. Anticipating this I arrived at Baltimore airport suited, booted and clean-shaven. I also put rosary beads in my pocket in case I was searched.

Why are you travelling to the states?

I’m a poet and teacher. I’m here to work with young poets at a local college.

You’re a teacher?

Yes.

Really? … and poetry?

Yes, I teach poetry.

…and you get paid for this?

Yes.

OK, I need to check this out. You wait there for me.

Man walks away with my passport.

Soon I’m led into the backroom with four other young black men, one of them is wearing a bright yellow and green shirt, brown trousers and sandals. He is holding two folders of paperwork and is smiling but tapping his foot nervously. We make eye contact, his look says, “If you deserve to be here I have nothing to do with you”. As we wait to be questioned I’m already picturing myself on a flight back to London with my rosary beads, having to explain to people in the U.S. what happened, already saying in so many ways I look too much like the enemy of white supremacy to come to your country. After an hour and two interviews (given in my best Queen’s English), I’m let in. To celebrate I sat in the terminal, threw away the rosary beads and waited to be picked up by Ailish Hooper while playing Nina Simone in my headphones.

Oh, Baltimore
Man, it's hard just to live

Ailish had driven to the wrong airport so it was a long wait. We’d only met virtually after she came across #RayRecommends, a poetry vlog I ran for a year. I was already aware of her poetry published in POETRY magazine and that she is a teacher. When she arrived we instantly connected, talking education, poetry, Trump and May, Brexit and all things dominating the airwaves.

Over the next few days she introduces me to other poets, teachers and community leaders in Baltimore. I also got to sit in on her lessons at Goucher College and listen to seminars on peace talks, the Black Lives Matter movement and intersectionality. Ailish Hooper is a white woman who writes about race in America, a minefield to navigate. When I ask her about this she is tactful and compassionate, telling me about the work white America needs to do to acknowledge racism as a major part of its construction and that she has used her privilege to curate spaces for her white students to go on their own journey to examine the lives of marginalised people who are treated differently at the benefit of white America. She tells me about her time being taught by Cornel West and her friendships with poets who have challenged her journey. Reading Dark-Sky Society, her book of lyric poems. She writes on “the many lines I am told / not to cross”, examining the position of whiteness.

While sitting in the discussions in her classroom I was asked my thoughts on Black Lives Matter from a UK perspective. In England, a seminar with teenagers talking race and colonialism is rare. Our culture doesn’t have its own language in race politics. The average person hasn’t heard of Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy or Bonnie Greer. England in and of itself has a different history with its colonies, so a different landscape and language has emerged, forming a separateness, which is more connected than most people in England care to know. It was absurd when Michael Gove removed American Literature such as Steinbeck’s ‘Of Mice And Men’ and Lee’s ‘To Kill A Mocking Bird’ from the English curriculum. I said this in Hooper’s class that awareness of “Post-Colonial” politics is growing. A few weeks ago I saw the documentary ‘I Am Not Your Negro’ in Stratford Picture House, half the audience was white. I don’t think this would have been the case pre-Brexit. In fact, I never spoke to my white British friends about race until a few years ago and that was only because they started asking me "if race was a thing in the UK like it is the US?"

Talking about race in America for me was necessary but exhausting. I want to be careful how I say that because Donald Trump isn’t my president and although I’m racially profiled as a brown man in the UK I’m not living in constant fear of being shot by the police like black Americans. I’m not trivialising the discussion I’m saying it’s tiring. I do worry that a lot of the anger is unproductive but also I’m aware that I’m 30 years old and the students are mostly 19. When I was 19 I lived in Ohio for 3 months. A black marine solider who had served in Afghanistan threatened to “Take me outside and shoot me” because I asked him if he’d ever considered America as the terrorist. Stupid shit, I had no tact in these conversations. I was emotional and self-righteous.

Baltimore is known as the drug capital of America. I came to understand this while sitting in Red Emma’s coffee shop. A black man with a bandage wrapped around his head and skinny veiny arms slumped onto the table next to me. I almost asked if he was ok, then I looked around and saw at least another 40 people, black, white and brown in a similar condition. People with shriveled faces and no teeth as if the air was trying to suck them out of existence. They shout and sing and groan and no one answers them. You end up feeling complicit in their suffering. But what am I going to do? I’m not completely naïve; I lived in South Africa for four months and saw a similar pain there too but this had a different intensity, there were no whales jumping out of oceans to romanticise it. Of course I walk past people in desperate situations in London. In Hackney where I’m from, I know some of them personally, staggering out of bookmaker shops, passing out in parks, some of them used to drink with my dad. They’ve known me since I was a child and I’ve seen them on park benches shouting at passers by where I’ve turned around and sucked them out of existence in my own way. The privilege to make these comments feels gross but I’ve learned to stop apologising for things out of my control. Becoming a teacher made me realise that if I’m to be there for my students, my friends and family, I need to know what I can and can’t give my energy to. If everything weighed me down I’d be no good to anyone.

Soledad & Jaida after our poetry reading

On my last night, after a successful performance at Goucher College with two student poets Soledad and Jaida, I returned to Red Emma’s Café with Ailish.  We were served by a tall energetic dreadlocked dancer called Talbot who couldn’t stop smiling, “I got it right man, finally, my steps coming together, the universe be moving my way”, he said this while making us a pot of mint tea, “I’m not even trying to do right and I’m doing right”, he was moving in flow with his body and his words, his energy radiated the whole café’. As we sat I told Ailish about what I saw when I was last in here, the people in need that barely exist, “Well, there’s a methadone clinic next door, and this café feeds a lot of these people for free so it’s something”. I then thought about her students, particularly students of colour who are growing up in and around these environments. I thought about the pictures of the Baltimore uprisings and all the young protesters that took to the streets to make themselves heard. “You know things like this café and that methadone clinic exist because of the kinds of people you met in my class, the one’s who are deeply concerned with equality”, this clicked with me, this was why I had felt so unsure of myself speaking in AIlish’s class to people who are living all the dimensions of life here. In many ways I’d need to learn more of the language in the states if I’m going to be able to speak it when I get back home.

Visiting Gallaudet University For The Deaf in Washington DC

Ailish Hooper is the poet and teacher hosting me while I’m teaching and reading poetry in Baltimore. Having taught a morning poetry workshop with her students, she drives me to DC, which is an hour away. It’s a hot day and Electric Vibrations by Tribe Called Quest is playing on the radio. I'm excited to visit the world's only Deaf university. I'd read about its history in the book 'Seeing Voices' by Oliver Sacks. We reach Gallaudet University at 2pm where Christopher, a large man with the presence of a friendly bull greets us. He notices my hearing aids instantly and asks if I sign ASL (American Sign Language)? I tell him I’m level 1 BSL (British Sign Language) he shrugs, says “We won’t understand each other, I’ll type on my phone”, I look at Ailish as if to say, Should I tell him that isn’t necessary because I’m hard of hearing rather than profoundly deaf? But he’s already typing his name in the notes section of his phone and walking us towards the statue of Gallaudet. He types in the history of the campus, the significance of Edward and Thomas Gallaudet, then hands it to me – There’s a slight wind blowing into my hearing aids which muffles everything, then I’m moved by Christopher’s consideration for me. People usually assume my hearing is better than it actually is and I end up feeling a pressure to uphold that impression. Some people have told me I have a “nervous energy” but it’s usually because those people have voices I struggle to hear, but with Christopher typing I don’t have to make that extra effort to lip-read or fill in the blanks of our conversation. As he hands me his phone with all the information in text I instantly feel a rare kind of relief.

By the statue of Edward Gallaudet

Christopher guides us onto the campus and types, “Do you have these video booths in the UK?” He sits in the booth and explains how deaf people call a operator on the screen, then the conversation can be signed or captioned, he points at the buttons and waits for my eyes to meet his face and says “this is how the deaf can speak to anyone” and this is when I’m hit with my own memories of telephones, how it was not hearing their shrill ringing that diagnosed my deafness – I think of all the times I was nervous to call the bank or the cinema knowing the operator wouldn’t speak clearly or loud enough, I think of the black clunky rubber pads I had to put on the phone receivers so I could speak on the phone with my hearing aids in, how I would push the receiver so hard into the side of my head trying to hear the operator the pads marked my skin and left my ears burning bright red. I excused myself, trying not to weep. I thought of the stories head teachers in deaf schools had told me about some parents who are ashamed of their child’s deafness, how they spoke like grieving parents, begging them to “make my child speak”, then I sobbed audibly thinking of the stories I’d heard about the isolation some deaf elderly people experience, how long they have to wait to speak to a GP with an interpreter, tears stream down my face and I’m embarrassed. Christopher asks if I’m ok, I’m not able to explain in the moment why I’m crying, why I’d never seen anything like this in a public setting before, but Christopher doesn’t make a big deal out of my tears. He leads me and Ailish to the bookshop and I’m standing in an aisle among books, mostly written by D/deaf authors on teaching, learning sign, deaf literature, history and poetry, and it hits me again, other memories of feeling alone in my condition, completely unaware there was a library of people who share a version of my experience. Ailish puts her hand on my back, seeing how overwhelmed I am, crying like a lost child in a new home. I pull myself together and select what books to buy.

Christopher then guides us into the “Deaf space classrooms”. The rooms are brightly lit, wide and square with hard surfaces to keep the sound in the room solid. There are three wide screens at the front of the class. The tables are arranged in squares so everyone can see each other from their desks. Christopher explains how lessons are in sign, speech and captions and how Deafblind students have screens and interpreters who sit with them and sign on their palms, he takes my hand and demonstrates the Deafblind alphabet, then types on his phone “touch is it’s own language too.”

It’s easy to glorify this as a D/deaf paradise at this point, to think that I would’ve flourished in this environment – that the inferiority I felt because I couldn’t keep up with what was said at school or at home, but I doubt this to be completely true. I recognise this is also an elite and competitive school to get in to. There is still a hierarchy within Deaf culture, with people who can sign fluently in multiple languages, with people who have access to travel and greater education and those who don’t. In the UK, class, race and education play out in the D/deaf world as it does in the hearing world. How you articulate yourself indicates (sometimes inaccurately) your social status and what opportunities and conversations are open to you. Christopher confirms this tension, he types, “it’s great but still not perfect here, there’s still issues of students feeling isolated and undermined because there’s a pressure to be high achieving”. Christopher takes the phone back and types “also many executive decisions are still dictated by non-signing hearing people who do not share the needs and experiences of D/deaf people, there’s a long history of students fighting for Deaf rights and to be taught by other D/deaf people”.

After we’re led through the “Deaf Space corridors” and told about how performing ASL poetry is a rites of passage in Gallaudet, that students are given poetry anthologies by Deaf poets and are asked to learn a poem to perform to other students. Many students have a story about the poem they choose and their experience performing it to a crowd. Christopher tells us that as a student he’d stand on the table in the cafeteria and perform poems to his friends huddled around him. 

Christopher drives me and Ailish out of Gallaudet, he recommends a Mexican restaurant about a mile away. At every traffic light he types summaries of each road “this part of DC is black and has lots of poverty” then we’d get to the next block “this part is nice, look at the tall houses and wide green lawns”, then another block “lots of gentrification and tension here” and then another block “when Martin Luther King was murdered this part of DC was the first to erupt in flames and riots. People lost their lives. Cars turned upside down. Houses burned.” And that image stayed with me, a city vibrating with fire and turmoil and right in the middle of the flames, the world’s only university for the Deaf.