 And today I have the privilege of introducing our guest speaker and opening keynote, Teresa Siangatonu. Teresa Siangatonu's presence in the poetry world as a queer Samoan woman and activist has granted her opportunities to perform in places ranging from the UN conference on climate change in Paris, France to the White House. Offstage, Teresa creates and facilitates workshops, leads artistic and professional development trainings, provides mental health clinical support and delivers keynote speeches across the country on issues that inform her 10-plus years of community work involving youth advocacy, educational attainment, Pacific Islander indigenous rights, climate change, LGBTQQIA rights, gender-based violence, and others. She holds a bachelor's degree in community studies and minor in education from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a master's degree in marriage family therapy from the University of Southern California, aiming to use her background as a mental health clinician and a poet to bridge the gaps in her quest for collective healing and liberation. Teresa's writing blends the personal, cultural, and political in a way that calls for healing, courage, justice, and truth. And just this past week, and she was also a keynote speaker at the Women's March in San Francisco, y'all, so I want Highline to help me get up on your feet, help show some love, and give it up for Teresa Sianca Tonu. I'm in college, how you feeling? It's a little hype to be here with you all today, and give it up for the committee who put on the MLK Convocation for 2019, y'all. Thank you, Edwina, for that beautiful introduction. 13 years ago, family, I was in my college dorm room in UC Santa Cruz, and I wrote my first poem. It was really, really crappy. 13 years later, I'm blessed to say that I've made a career out of this because I followed every whisper in me that said, this is what you're supposed to be doing. Hear me? So I want to ground my talk first in actually offering up a few poems to y'all if that's okay, is that cool? So y'all can definitely speak back to me because I get a lot of energy from the energy I get from audiences I perform with and in conversation with. So if you hear anything that you like, you can do things like snap your fingers. Let me hear you snap your fingers. You can pretend like you're taking a big bite out of something really delicious and you can say, mmm. You can say things like, okay, sis. Okay. Fuck it up, sis. My bio says I was a community studies major. I was actually an ethnic studies major. And so I went to a predominantly white institution, and the city girl, island girl that I am, it was a big culture shock in a lot of ways. I was very uncomfortable for the whole four years I was there until I found a sense of community with other students of color, like the beautiful students of color in this room right now. And I found poetry through that too. In college, I used to sit in the back of the class with other students of color and listen as my white peers theorized the hell out of the oppression that we were born from. Buzzwords like institutionalized oppression, class warfare was sugar on their tongues. Sweet and comfortable. Words from a language my community didn't even know existed because we were too busy living the realities of them. You see, it's one thing to major in ethnic studies, y'all. It is a whole other thing to be the reason for its existence. You see, for the white students in my major, ethnic studies was like a free study abroad program that didn't require that they bring their baggage with them. A privilege that is easy for them to close in their textbook at the end of class. You see, my life is beginning to feel a lot like a free ethnic studies lecture with no tenure. Is this what they meant by public education? But study my racial profile till it exhausts you. Study how black has been made to feel like the green light for stop and frisk. Study how brown has been made to feel like the much needed check stop at any given border. Ask me what it's like to have my skin be made to feel like a nuclear missile. We all know it's coming and he still won't know what it's like to sit in the back of class and be studied because of how tragic your history is. As if we've only been brought in to be dissected. As if frogs, rats, and people of color can only be understood when you cut them open. You see, when ethnic study, ethnic studies, it is not school anymore. It is a lesson in survival. I'm so tired of playing teacher with my oppression. If I'm not doing it on a stage, I'm doing it from the margins of a classroom. I'm doing it from the margins in my notebook. Always on the margins of something. Never the core. Never ask to be anything more than what makes it easy to feel sorry for it. You see, it's easy to avoid confronting the things that make us feel uncomfortable. The things that make us feel guilty. Who chooses to walk through the war zone if you were told that you don't have to? If you grew up believing that there isn't one. If what you don't know won't kill you. Race is the rent I pay for this skin. So to believe that racism doesn't exist anymore, especially in my own major, is when I feel the foreclosure of this home taking my knees from right under me. You can't claim that racism doesn't exist if you never know what it means to survive it. If you keep looking at the war zone like a teaching moment, you're not ready to learn the lesson from. A comfort zone you're not willing to sacrifice. You see, it's easy to avoid confronting the things that make us feel uncomfortable. The things that make us feel guilty. But comfort is what kills us in the long run, y'all. Comfort is sitting down when you should be on your feet. Comfort is staying quiet when you should be speaking up. Comfort is speaking too much when you should be listening. Comfort is building borders for safety, but not bridges for healing. Comfort is celebrating diversity, but never discussing it as if a black president was enough, as if a heritage month is enough, as if ethnic studies is enough, as if this poem is enough. Comfort is sitting in the front of the class forgetting that we're all sitting right behind you, wanting to remind you that the war zone still exists, wanting to tell you that this isn't comfortable for any of us. I think there's a difference between feeling uncomfortable about talking about racism and actually experiencing racism and experiencing these really big systemic issues that Dr. King died fighting for, that Dr. King became too radical for our society to the point where white supremacy killed him. And I named that intentionally because we tend to whitewash and tend to rosy color his legacy in ways where all he wanted was us to get along. That's not all he was about. Anyone in this room feel what I'm talking about? There was way more to his legacy than that, right? And so I'm just honored and blessed to be given one of the many platforms that you all get to experience this week of speakers in programming in honor of Dr. King's legacy. Something I wanted to clarify by my bio. I performed at the White House during the Obama administration. I feel like for whatever that's worth too. But I'm just saying that I think I need to clarify that even more. Anyone ever heard of something called PTSD? So I didn't know what PTSD was until I got to college. I knew I experienced it once I learned the language of it. I grew up in a housing project in San Francisco and I moved around a lot. I didn't know what post-traumatic stress disorder was until I studied it, which is pretty wild, right? So another poem came out of that new knowledge. So I'm learning a lot about this thing called post-traumatic stress disorder. This wartime disease, this combat fatigue diagnosis. And I read something somewhere that I thought was worth sharing with you all, fact. Urban youth are twice as likely to get post-traumatic stress disorder than soldiers who are coming home from war. So tell me, what is the difference between homicide in the streets and bloodshed on the battlefields of Iraq? A battalion of young soldiers who meant to sign up for the football team and not the military. They're all wearing black RIP hoodies like the triangular folding of this country's flag, a gift to the mother of the fallen. The only difference there is between a tank and a police car is the speed in which innocent civilians can run when profiled. So the new Jordans who are wearing double as a fashion statement and combat boots. Purple hearts that my students wear every time they are wounded at war on their own streets. The way police sirens sound too much like oncoming missiles whistling in the distance. The way siren lights don't mean to look like flash grenades. The way the night doesn't mean to camouflage their skin into enemy soldier. AK-47 is just another way to identify the apartment number of the boy who just wants to make it to the bus stop tomorrow morning. This is all making so much sense right now. Why continue to confuse my mother's hugs for a straight jacket every time she touches me? The way my high school students are beginning to look a lot like the aftermath of a promise broken at the knees, lined up for duty, sitting in desks, waiting for what will come first, death or the school bell. It all comes down to simple arithmetic if you ask me, watch. When you watch one 13-year-old witness as three of his friends get their brains blown away on the corner where the avenues meet the flats in a span of one month. How much will it cost before we stop wondering why he does not give a shit about school? When is his teacher going to stop sending him to the principal and start sending him to the counselor? Why did we fire the counselor, y'all? What happened to the art classes and PE in the health center? Because trauma is an STD. It is a socially transmitted disease meaning my trauma is your trauma. Her trauma was always mine. And that's what it means to be in a community. The only difference there is between a soldier with PTSD and one of my students with it is that the soldier gets to leave the battlefield, which they should, but my kids go home to it. So if they never really exit the trauma and cycle through the cacophony like the broken record of a drive-by shooting that never really ends, then they don't really have post-traumatic anything. None of them are living long enough to tell their own stories. And for those who do, they'll grow up hallucinating themselves into thinking that every human touch that comes into contact with their skin is actually a lieutenant colonel dressed in camouflage with a boot to their neck and a semi-automatic pointing to the backs of their heads resisting the urge to pull. Check, check. Can y'all hear me back there? Y'all still with me, family? Hi, my name is Theresa. So, I want to appreciate Edwina for appreciating the land that we're on because we both come from the same Samoan Islands, which is also a product of being an occupied territory. And so I want folks to sit with, what does that mean to have to reconcile with doing this work, going to school, living your life on land that does not belong to us. We both come from communities where we did not choose to come here. We were sold here. We were bought and sold here in ways that are so atrocious that we also still have to reconcile with. And I named these all intentionally because these are things that, again, Dr. King's legacy illuminated so much in the ways that he has critiqued the U.S. empire, imperialism, capitalism, poverty and whatnot. And so thank you so much for grounding us in that. Family, it is not lost on me that we are living, barely surviving and experiencing quite literally some of the greatest crisis of our lives. In the same breath, we are also experiencing the expiration date on what limited time we have on this earth to come together before the entire existence is wiped out by climate change. You all heard of climate change? I say this not as hyperbole. I say this first simply as a daughter of the Pacific Islands. As someone who was born in diaspora of my Samoan community, traversing realities between what it means to have been born and raised in a state like California where we go entire years being deathly dehydrated from the constant droughts we experience to belonging to a people from the Samoan Islands whose islands are predicted to be underwater before I can even explain to my children where we come from. The point in me bringing this up first is to ground us further in the immediacy of this moment. Of the limited timeline we have to grapple with all that is staring us in the eyes. All of the devastation, the death, the heinous acts of violence in all its vile forms, the evil driving us to every war and the money that funds our weapons for them. The guns in our schools and the guns in our sanctuaries, the hopelessness in our communities and the intergenerational trauma in our families, the pain in our children and the pain in ourselves. All of these and more stir our spirits to the point of sleeplessness and hopelessness begging the question what will it taking take y'all? What will it take for justice to be truly achieved? What will it take for us to heal in either of these even possible in a time like this? Questions around the possibility of healing is exactly what brought me not only to poetry but it also brought me to the pursuit of a masters in marriage family therapy. Because I realized that as therapeutic as poetry can be it is not the same as therapy. But one paid more and came with employment that guaranteed health insurance. I'm just keeping it real. At the time and with my deep love for studying the intricacies of all things trauma related I thought it was absolutely necessary for me to get a degree and studying it more in depth, followed by obtaining the training necessary to practice therapy with clients and tackle real life issues with them that were bringing them to points of mental distress in the form of depression, anxiety but most of all unprocessed and unhealed trauma. Has anyone in this room ever experienced any of those three things? Depression, anxiety or trauma? Yeah. Same. What happened in my beginning years as a therapist though did indeed teach me more about trauma. It taught me just how much healing I needed from my own trauma alongside working with clients who came with trauma of their own. Unlike the injustices that Dr. King spent his life and died fighting against where the power dynamics of those injustices placed marginalized people in the crossfires of them trauma is a different kind of injustice altogether family in terms of who it targets trauma has no power dynamic or political agenda it doesn't discriminate the way racism and sexism and transphobia do meaning when trauma wants to mess with you no matter who you are what your socio-economic background is if you're a citizen or not no matter any of that trauma will mess with you. It will quite literally change not only the function of your brain and physiological makeup it can alter both altogether. We are not the same people we were prior to experiencing a traumatic event imagine what that must mean for those of us who experience compacted and complex traumatic events over and over and over again those of us who've inherited the historical and intergenerational trauma of our communities along with our own personal struggles and have now adapted to carrying it with us to work to class in our romantic relationships in our friendships and in our self-worth. What makes trauma feel like the grave injustice that it is is in our response to trauma and the access we have to resources and coping mechanisms to respond to it but when you come from communities like the ones I grew up in where mental health resources were scarce and seeking help for your personal battles with depression and anxiety wasn't anything your community did you're left to reconcile with things that you once used to turn to your entire village for but what does it mean if your village has historically never been equipped to handle and support the kind of suffering that the evils of white supremacy colonization, poverty sexual assault and chronic stress have put you, your mind, your body and the entire village through last year 2018 seemed to deplete the spirits and energies of so many people around me including myself. Did anyone else have a hella hard 2018? What was that? We've known it's been pretty treacherous in both this country and worldwide but there was something in the air that was particularly sharp unavoidable that brought on its own world of suffering to so many of us last year for myself personally I found myself involuntarily admitted into a psychiatric unit due to suicide ideation coupled with intense feelings of anxiety and depression when I say trauma isn't discriminatory family what I mean is that it was father's day and I was looking my parents in the eyes telling them I didn't want to live anymore what I mean is that a few months earlier my grandpa died and then less than a month later one of my best friends from college died and I was obligated to return to a work environment that was incapable of allowing me to properly grieve these huge losses in my life what I mean is that I presented as so high functioning I'm not crying I lost my place I presented as so high functioning throughout all this grief and trauma and distress going from performance to performance to keynote to keynote a lot of check-ins were happening on behalf of my well-being only on behalf of my productivity at my workplace and in my community work and in my artist work so this day I look back on my hospitalization and the ways in which it sent a blaring alarm ringing through my entire village of support and I actually felt very little shame about the ways I needed to be truly human with them time spent in a psychiatric unit gave me time to read and reflect on how none of my community activists work or energy that I spent tending to the wellness of so many other people meant anything if I kept feeling hopeless about wanting to stick around long enough to live through its impact family when I think about this year's theme of nothing to lose preserving humanity in the face of trauma I am reminded that I survived last year because of my intense desire for a more critically connected relationship with my village of people who loved me starting with never going back to hiding what I was struggling with and how I need them in order to survive Dr. King reminded us that we cannot preserve self without being concerned about preserving other selves isolation in a world that is okay with us suffering in silence rather than remembering the healing power of the village that we come from is nowhere close to being our destiny I am reminded that I survived 2018 mostly on the strengths of sisterhood and radical collaboration with people who when I paid attention to improving the quality of our relationship with one another the quality of my entire life improved immensely as well so much so that I truly believe that is why I'm in the highest of spirits I've been in for quite some time right now the more I let them in on my healing process the stronger I got and the more able I was to be there for them and theirs and the life around not just prioritizing community organizing meetings and busy work but prioritizing the quality of those meetings and prioritizing time spent mending wounds with loved ones reconciling ruptures with people who harmed me and those I harmed myself and even being at peace with relationships that no longer serve a purpose that requires a connection as strong as before I felt so grounded in the power of possibility and redemption at the end of last year that when a mentee of mine came to me last December expressing her own feelings of suicide ideation and asking that I help check her into a psychiatric unit much like the one I had just been discharged from six months earlier I was immediately reminded that in our times of total darkness we still outstretched our arms reaching for one another with no expectation of a light in sight just the hope that before we give up someone will reach back to us we are at a point in our lives family where to large degrees it feels like our collective trauma is out pacing the mental health support that is not only available to us but available in a way that effectively meets our needs our coping mechanisms are moving us through the day by day and barely keeping us above water and if we're lucky our loved ones have enough capacity to hold us while also holding themselves in moments where I'm on the brink of becoming overwhelmed by the monstrous size of trauma and the way it leaves us all dysfunctional and perpetually in states of woundedness I'm reminded as to why Dr. King so desperately tied our global stability as a community to the eradication of poverty he says that the only thing that is new about poverty is that we now have the resources to get rid of it and yet we don't and yet most of the wealth is distributed amongst the wallets of a handful of individuals at the expense of millions of working people and families there is no deficit in human resources meaning there is no reason for poverty anymore the deficit as Dr. King warns us is in human will in Dr. King's last book entitled where do we go from here chaos or community he literally left amidst the civil rights movement to go to Jamaica rent a house with no telephone line to write this last book and it's only been available to us in the past decade in it he talks about how white America has yet to pay the full price of justice because they aren't even psychologically organized to address injustice that they only seek to make it less painful and less obvious and in their respects they'd rather retain it family now more than ever we need all of us vigilant if this is a long game which it is that we need us leading us to the end of it we need us when we win meaning we need us pacing ourselves for a lifetime spent demanding not asking not requesting but demanding the justice we deserve drinking water and giving back to this land in ways that it's given back to us for centuries if we expect to continue to do this work on this soil together we need us prioritizing our health by intrinsically tying our well-being to that of everyone around us living by the notion that when we're better our community gets better too and vice versa not all of us have the same idea of justice in mind and we must reconcile with what we do with that reality with every excruciating painful, violent and deadly day spent under the current administration where we are fighting to stop ruptures between families on Indigenous land and on our basic human rights this work is hella hard y'all but yes this work has always been the same as Dr. King's writings teach us this is not our first experience with injustice this is just the first and quite frankly the only chance we have left to address this as the moral crisis of our time this is what happens when a system that was never designed to protect all of us operates just as it was meant to do and I truly believe now more than ever that we cannot reform fix or change a system that was never broken to begin with it must be burned to the ground and when we do it y'all when we burn that when we burn that we believe when we burn what we believe we desperately need in order to survive we are forced to reimagine an entirely new world that is beyond our comprehension one that is so wild it has the possibility to free us all some may think we are ridiculous or naive for thinking that we can reimagine a world that frees us all but I will say this family this is the closest description I have for you on what it feels like for me to write and perform a poem when I wrote my first poem at 18 years old during my first year in college in 2006 I felt the way a deep exhale feels once it leaves a body that has been keeping that singular gulp of air in for far too long I felt every secret journal I kept throughout my childhood resurfaced atop the bravery of my bent fingers tapping my laptop keys into a freedom song when I wrote my first poem I wrote my way out of my own silence and then I started writing a lot about my experience with being a first generation queer student of color on campus I started writing about my Samoan identity and the pride I have in being Samoan but also writing my way out of the fears of being a disrespectful daughter amidst the Samoan culture that is so rich and so beautiful but also has very strict rules when it comes to young people voicing their opinions and expressing themselves and I started performing these poems all around campus with every stage I performed on I felt my ancestors giving me permission to stretch the muscle of my voice around the mic when I wrote and performed my poetry I imagined being this brave for the rest of my years in college brave enough to feel as intelligent as my white classmates brave enough to fight my imposter syndrome with the reassurance that I deserve to be a student brave enough to quiet my own demons and I punk me into believing that what I had to say wouldn't matter to anyone else but myself in a society in this country and in a world where speaking up on behalf of your own truth and using your voice is punishable by persecution and death in some corners of the world I have learned in very deep ways that as frightening as it can be to speak, staying silent about things that matter to me is an alternative that I will not survive through anyways there's a reason why the biggest fear in this country y'all is public speaking the second biggest fear is death which is why the ongoing joke is that people would rather be in the casket than to give the eulogy at the funeral as a poet, arts educator and mental health advocate who has dedicated my entire life to liberating our people through helping them to utilize their voices I have learned that the opposite of speaking up about things that matter isn't silence the opposite of speaking up about things that matter is complicity it is complacency it is bystander behavior in a world that needs more people to intervene and speak up even if your voice trembles when you do it even if the professor questions your own lived experiences as if you aren't the expert in them even when you get it wrong when all you're trying to figure out is how to be a better ally even when your white privilege or male privilege or cisgender privilege or able-bodied privilege or class privilege or citizenship privilege or any other privileges you hold whispers for you to take the easy way out and ignore those who suffer the consequences of your choice to not only say nothing but do nothing either if I learned anything from my own grapplings with trauma and the things I stand to lose if I don't preserve my humanity in the face of it it is that our role in the movement work is that we truly will not make it without each other this is the village we have to keep holding the hope for everyone else that a better world is not only possible y'all we are working on it we are creating it we're calling people in and holding people accountable we're tearing down old and failed ways of power and building new ones that serve all of us we're leading conferences and teaching each other new skills through workshops we've created we're reading each other's testimonies of survival and watching it live for the entire world to witness declaring hashtag me too we are gardening and leading the charge on food justice and teaching the wealthy that climate change exists and it's only a matter of time before they realize that they can't eat their money we're rehabilitating our people instead of depending on the prison industrial complex to do it for us we're showing up at airports and delaying flights interrupting ice rates to put our bodies on the line for one another we're writing poems about it and translating them into languages our elders can understand we're thinking of choreography for it that everybody is able to get down to based on their own ability status we're strategizing it into existence even in the face of a society who tells us we should just shut up already we should just keep quiet that we're too young and too millennial to know what we're talking about a society that tells us we should stop inconveniencing people with our protests and our marches and student walkouts we should just put the camera phone down and just trust those in power what they want you to forget family is that you we are the ones in power almost every great societal movement in the history of this country was brought about by people who realized that the justice they deserved was not going to be handed to them they had to go out and take it and we have to accept the fact that we all may not be around when it comes but that we hope that our children will be and their children will be and so on that's what justice means to actively demand equity even if it's not for you even if you'll never know when it arrives even when you're the loudest person in the room and only one person tells you that they heard what you had to say it's much bigger than all of us amidst the world and who keeps trying to convince us that we will be fulfilled if we just worried about our own well-being and not each others if we just keep quiet about our pain and never reach out about our own suffering it's exactly what James Baldwin meant when he told Dr. Angela Davis days before her trial in 1970 if we know then we must fight for your life as though it were our own which it is a render impassable with our bodies the corridor to the gas chamber for if they take you in the morning they will be coming for us that night this is what it will take family we exist in a time where we need each other now more than ever none of us are free until all of us are free so let's get free y'all check check check with one last poem and then I think it opens the Q&A this poem begins with a quote thank you so much Highline College family for having me with you all this week this poem begins with a quote come celebrate with me that every day something has tried to is this on? okay can y'all hear me? I'm sorry again sorry y'all come celebrate with me that every day something has tried to kill me and has failed Lucille Clifton I'm still alive because I'm not afraid of what I already know wants to kill me y'all because I'm a first generation queer, Samoan woman four chapters of a survivor story excavated from my bones the reason your oppression doesn't know what to shoot first I'm still alive because they see me out of my mother's middle in spite of knowing my gender they think that blood is the only thing a woman loses the moment she gives birth to a girl my gender never belonged to itself when it's raped America does this funny thing where it tells me I was asking for it at the same time that it tells me to stay silent the hemline of my skirt is an overactive jury that treats my body like a courtroom that treats my voice box like a closet that they say I deserve to die in on the floorboards of my sins because I fell in love with a woman made an altar of her body since no one else ever has I'm still alive because everyone deserves to be treated like they're worth a holy offering a sacred thing it is y'all to find and know God in the last place homophobia, whatever thing to look a back door into heaven after being put through hell of a faggot a dyke for a daughter the names your community calls you in a language that isn't the one that they immigrated here with I'm still alive because most days y'all I let the trauma write all of my poems because saying them out loud on the stage is the first step towards getting help because I trust a microphone on a mic stand in a room full of strangers before I'll ever trust the police this stage is both sanctuary and emergency room my people are both griots and doctors and patients with no patients left in them just stories with skin too dark for sympathy because no one ever considers our pain in American tragedy I'm still alive because I watch Oakland every fucking day pick itself up from its own concrete scrub the blood out its cracks before the new neighbors arrive on blocks that their mortgage used to own a white hipster's wet dream next to a Barton station that Oscar's daughter will never have the stomach to take I'm still alive because no one seems to see that there is no difference between Iraq and East Oakland South Side Chicago and South Central a battalion of young soldiers and the students in my poetry workshop how no one has mornings like them how they wake up in their own piss in grief to go to another friend's funeral more times than they even go to class how the biggest fear for most of my friends is to raise a black child in a justice system of a joke that will continue to say Taser when we kept saying gun that will continue to cry acquittal when we kept crying murder that will continue to sing God bless America when we kept saying God please have mercy on all of us I'm still alive because in the past few years we have lost Nelson Mandela Mary Baraka Maya Angelou Gabriel Garcia Marquez Yuri Kochiyama Grace Lee Boggs A Fanish Core Prince Aretha Franklin into Sake Shange and upon learning of all of their passings I hung my poetry a half mass we artists of the revolution know that we are on borrowed time using borrowed words we leaders turn ancestor in our life I'm still alive because whatever wants me dead y'all does not know that you cannot kill somebody who isn't afraid anymore somebody who is ready to leave this place in ancestor somebody who is ready to give birth to the generation that will bring about the liberation I was always destined to make but never meant to see hashtag okay sis so just a quick heads up I know class is ending in about four minutes so we'll take one question and then we're going to take a ten minute break for more Q&A so does anyone have a one burning question for Teresa before we take a ten minute break don't be scared now okay this section I heard a lot over here anyone have one question my question would be at the end of the day you know whenever you ever lost hope what continues to tell you to keep pushing for not just yourself but all these other cultures like when you was talking about East Oakland you know how you take the whole city and put it on your back like that before as I was coming into poetry most of my formative work was in youth empowerment and youth work and I really just truly gained so much of my energy and my life from working with young people they have a hope unlike any of us and the older we get the worse it becomes for us we become more more pessimistic less hopeful, more paranoid and things like that but kids and young people have this imagination that's just so lively when you nurture it when you give a shit, when you take care of them and nurture that with them I truly you know when I used to work in East Oakland at what was even the worst school there it's called Casemont High School there were times where there were like two shootings a month in which the school didn't do nothing and you would think that these kids would lose hope at a drop of a dime because of the trauma that they have to experience at school and then go home with but there is something really resilient about young people that feeds all of us which is why I really truly believe that justice and whatever it looks like, wherever we're going with it is going to be led by our young people I gain it from that, I gain it from being with my nephews and being with just kids just the younger people in my life really feed that for me that's how I keep going thank you for your question alright, we could take one more question before the break anyone else or you need some more thinking time or somebody else's question anyone oh Zoe, hey Zoe that tastes thank you so much for speaking my question is about your poetry and that sometimes I try to write and sometimes the words don't really come out the way that I feel because I feel so passionate a lot of the time and you know all the things that you go through that I go through too and it seems like it's really hard to get people to listen but when you put it in a poem it's really much more well received how do you talk and you know, making that message so accessible check, check, check, is this on? can y'all hear me? I'm driven thank you for that question I think doing it for this long, I've been doing it for about 13 years it's like practicing any kind of craft I would never assume that because I touch a basketball I can be a basketball player same way that no one should assume that just because you write a poem there isn't a skill to it like a practice to editing and to refining what you're trying to say right, there's something really powerful that you can say and get across in a poem that isn't always as catchy as someone just saying it out loud to you right and so there's there's an economy to your words there's a how do you get to the point fast enough if you know you only got a limited amount of their attention in the span of time that you have and whatnot and so something I forced myself to do is that I don't prescribe to something called writer's block I don't actually think that's a thing I think if I feel blocked then I should be doing other things like reading or I should be doing other things like conversing with people but I don't let myself get in a habit of believing that oh because I'm blocked that's why I can't write I just forced myself to write really shitty poems until stuff comes up it really is, it's just a practice of like not every poem is going to be something I perform not every poem is going to be publishable not every poem is going to hit a stage but I got to keep writing and I think it was Octavia Butler anyone know Octavia Butler here where she talked a lot about how habit is more sustainable than inspiration like habit will get you to finish your shit like doing it habitually over and over again just moving that muscle and exercising that muscle like any muscle you exercise at a gym or what not is the only way it gets stronger right even if it means a few bad first drafts and so yep that's what I have to say it's just really just trying it out and not self editing as you're doing it just really freely getting all on the page and looking at it later puzzle piecing it later yeah you're welcome alright it's 11.52 and some of you have to transition out to your next class but before you leave we are going to take a ten minute break so those of you who are going to stick around just think of some more questions we'll have a 30 minute Q&A with Teresa I have a quick announcement for those of you who are about to walk out students color conference is coming up y'all and so if you would like an application it's an opportunity students spring quarter April 18th through the 20th applications are due this Friday so I encourage you to take an application if you don't know if you're going to go yet give it to a friend come find myself Doris or any of our staff if you have more questions and yeah thank you for those of you who are going to class so here's my question as a someone American or as a Pacific Islander how did you convince your parents to do what you're doing that for many Pacific Islanders like parents they want the best for us and so usually that means monetary wise so how did you start your career or start out this work as a Pacific Islander check check check to be honest my parents were not on board with me being so vocal and so honest about the things I spoke about in my poetry in the beginning yeah I come from a really beautiful rich culture that's also very rigid in terms of respect and young people not always being allowed to speak so freely and express themselves in those ways anyone else come from similar cultures where there's just like parameters around how you can be so yeah going to college though was really difficult because I also traversed this belief in college being really individualistic all college taught me was debate debate debate this is how you get your grade survival of the fittest and what not and so I started learning and traversing like living on this hyphen of being Samoan and being an American of coming to college with my culture but having to leave it at the door in ways where I was with my peers and I had to stand up for myself and I had to speak on my behalf and then I would go home and my parents wouldn't recognize me or would always wonder why I was changing and so not only did I carry imposter syndrome I also carried survivor's guilt in a lot of ways where I came back home and my parents weren't recognizing or weren't able to communicate with me as easily as before it got to the point where my career in poetry really took off in terms of exposure when my palms first started hitting YouTube and YouTube became what it was at the height of spoken word poetry getting onto YouTube through a medium called button poetry and so there were times in which the first few poems I had on YouTube were quite undeniable for my parents to shun away from or pretend like they weren't there and so instead of letting that be something that caused tension in the household it actually created conversations because what it did was they started surrounding themselves in our community with people who have seen my poetry through YouTube's videos and they had nothing but really affirming things to say and so my parents had to reconcile with themselves around like well what are we going to do like disown our child while the rest of the community accepts her especially about me being queer a lot of my earlier work was very much about me coming out and so that actually served as a platform for us to actually talk about it instead of do what we normally would do which is not talk about it so YouTube really helped do that having my parents take on coming to my shows eventually and now it's at a point where my mom wants to be my manager and they're really proud and they're always like how much are you getting paid but it really took a communal effort a village of sorts for them to see my daughter being queer is okay and her talking about the family doesn't mean she's bashing the family it's just that everyone is resonating with around like thank you for bringing it up because we don't tend to talk about it and so thankfully it served a productive purpose over time it really did take quite a few years though who's next anybody have questions hi Gracie oh David my question for you is what if you were to speak at the White House now what would you say and what would you share it's so interesting because I've dissociated myself with the current administration so much that I don't like giving it power I don't even say his name I just find it so hard to humanize the administration in ways where they've just constantly dehumanized our entire communities so it makes it like feel like I don't want to go to the White House if I had a chance I guess I don't know I think maybe I'd like come with a group of young people and we do a group poem or something together I think it's just so like my the school of thought I come from is that no one is disposable and if I really truly believe that that also means the president but I don't know what to do with him at times in my thought process I'm like I don't know what responsibility he is but I know he's not disposable right and so and it's really hard it's really hard to feel like I know that that is the work I know that the work is actually in the personal and the work is actually being face to face with folks who have differing views than mine and what not and I'm actually finally at a place I think when I was in college I was just straight angry the whole time I had no filters I had no ways of processing my rage and my trauma but now I'm way much older and I see a responsibility to younger generations of like what kind of leader am I trying to be and what kind of leader am I trying to model for the young people who follow and look up to me and so something about that interaction with if I ever were at the White House involves a collective group of us together saying something in unison of some sort and which is really typical in poetry or in spoken word and so whether it be a poem or whether it be just a declaration that we exist or a manifesto of some sort that we exist and that we're here and what not and this is what justice looks like something around those that realm because I think I'm like not about giving people power to get reactions out of them like I just it is evident who I am and what I stand for if I just speak my truth instead of pointing at people about like things they're doing wrong but it is evident who I am and what I believe in if I just speak my truth and so I've been trying to embody that more and more especially coming into this new year so Thank you so much for being here I wanted to say I think especially over the weekend leading up to MLK Day just online there's a lot of like performative activism that goes on a lot of people post quotes on MLK Day and they kind of leave it at that so I guess my question is what does it mean to you like for me for example to be a meaningful ally check, check, check that's a good question that's something I'm always wondering myself that just because I'm a person of color doesn't mean I'm not I don't have a responsibility to be ally to so many other communities I don't belong to or that I benefit from their marginalization right and I think something that I've been taught more and more this past year is we don't get to subscribe ourselves as being allies to communities that we don't belong to they will tell us if we are allies to them we have to earn that trust and so I think that's one thing is that I've stopped saying I'm an ally to groups that I don't belong to and I work at what it takes and I have conversations and I show up I like literally I think physically showing your presence is going beyond the performative aspect of just posting I think posting is really valuable I think social media is really powerful we need to utilize it consistently and in a productive way but I'm oftentimes thinking like how can I combat the anti-blackness in my own Pacific Islander community how can I be way more than just accessible to folks who are disabled but like nurture them and being as inclusive as possible no matter of access through a door these are things that I've been checked time and time again by the homies by friends who are like this is how you can do it while also doing my own homework around it that I don't expect them to educate me the entire time around how to show up better but showing up is key the actual physical part of showing up the actual posting does help because it shows that you're thinking about something that oftentimes society may not be thinking about and how my silence or ignorance around something is implicated in not saying something about it and so I'm constantly thinking about things like that but yeah I think allyship is a matter of we don't get to decide that we are allies to groups we have to earn that trust and build that rapport Thank you for your words today what is something you told the youth that you worked with at that high school to help them get through what they were going through I remember because they did not cancel school for instance on the week there was actually a week where there was two shootings at like one on Monday and one on Thursday and they didn't cancel the school district didn't cancel school and so instead of running the writing workshop as I had intended I just impromptu bought like a bunch of food and circled up the group and we just did some kind of like group therapy which is really helpful to have a background in holding space in those ways where there's so many complex feelings of trauma and hurt and this belief that the school didn't care about them which was really hard to deny because of the actions of the school and so what came out of it was they started having ideas around what they wanted to do as next steps they started having ideas of writing letters to the school district and so kind of following their lead I was like okay let's imagine what those letters could look like and doing like a writing session around that with something we did and listening to music and just creating a safe environment as possible knowing that once they leave school anything could happen who knows what's being nurtured when they leave or who knows if anyone's paying attention to these hidden cues that they're embodying an interesting adult young people really no matter what they say they really want a space to be heard no matter how resistant they feel and a lot of times it's not going to come from us asking it's going to be just you creating it like someone throwing together some chairs and food and saying like this is what we're doing today they need structure in those ways especially ones who don't come from places where that structure is always consistent or adults have told them things in their lives and they didn't show up and so I think that's my tactic usually they don't want that decision of having to decide what to do for them so they want to know and adult cares enough to have had an agenda around okay we're doing this today and you can control the music or you can do having places where they have agency also and compromising in those ways but I usually don't know but what's actually typical with the workshops I run as residencies with youth is that I actually don't create the curriculum for a school year or for a semester until I am in the room with them where I need to sit with them and know who I'm with and every individual in the room before I can determine what being together will look like and sometimes that's on the fly sometimes it's just having writing prompts in my back pocket just in case I don't know how to respond I didn't know until I got into the room my question was pretty much that but I work at a high school they're taking finals right now so they're fine yeah I work at a high school a few minutes away from here and what? like the job it's basically like re-engagement and working with students who don't like school or they better said like they've been pushed out or there's just a lot of trauma there that they don't really know how to process and it comes out a lot in I just get the feeling that it's a lot of like not having that space or just not feeling confident or like there's just a lot of lack of love whether that's like in the home or just like in the community so I guess like because I've done like community work in the community but not in a school setting and that's so different so I guess like do you have any advice for bringing that community aspect into the school because school systems are such shit yeah thank you for that and I agree I resonate a lot there's so many parameters in which you gotta cover to get the learning goals met and not and I think that's a reason why I also give it up to teachers for holding that down because I have the privilege of coming maybe once or twice a week to a classroom and being in partnership with a teacher just like twice a week and I don't have to deal with meeting all the standards by the school district and why not and I've had the privilege of working with partner teachers who gave me a lot of like free reign to shape those sessions together I think just I have to continuously remember that their autonomy is so important to them that even when it comes to creating a set of community agreements that they have the agency to create around like what the classroom rules will be and again they really love talking about themselves and so every opportunity where they can brainstorm about like big topics that mean the most of them in their age group so a lot of them are really into talking about what gossip means in their friends group and what stereotypes they face and what do teachers not understand about them and things like that and they really go in on just so much that it feels like they've been a pressure cooker the whole school day of like wanting to spill and express all these really like bigger deeper feelings and in doing a lot of just being on my toes about activities so a lot of icebreakers in the beginning a lot of games that make it that are corny but like get them moving and whatnot and get folks laughing and whatnot and then a lot of like either like partner shares and round robin things or things that include music and music videos and things that and it's interesting because and I don't know if anyone else is a teacher but the more you teach the same grade the older you get and they just stay the same age and so like I'm like teaching 9th graders every year if I'm like I'm getting older I'm like I don't know what the lingo is anymore or I haven't teach me I'm like okay so what is like let's do a workshop on like what y'all talk about or like how what your slang is and they're like what slang and I'm like oh my gosh I don't know what do you guys call it these days but you know just really like tapping into the culture and also being malleable with yourself of like this can go a lot of ways but really leaving a lot of room to be guided by what they're resonating with but just continuously remembering like they really do benefit from like expressing themselves because they probably don't get it in many other places and so expression could look like drawing it could look like free writing it could look like bringing in things to share from their lives telling a story about their home or what not showing pictures from their Instagram or like using social media as a way to be active in those ways those are just some ideas yeah so you might have already answered this but what is a as a person of white passing how how do I maneuver being an active voice what would be the best way to maneuver that as a person of white passing how is a good what is a good way to be an active voice without I guess overshadowing people that aren't as white passing do you have any advice I know you kind of answered something similar but I'll leave it to you I can't speak directly as that because that doesn't relate to exactly how I experience it but from what I've what I know in being in community with folks who are white passing but part of even my culture and whatnot a lot of active listening a lot of like listening to what folks who are not white passing and who are darker skin and whatnot their feelings and their attitudes and behaviors towards folks who do hold that privilege of being white passing is what I lean towards saying first is that there's even a lot of just the colorism within my own community that experience benefitting from the privileges of I have I didn't share it today but I have poems in which I talk about that a lot too that I grew up really ignorant to having benefited from being treated differently in my family because I'm full Samoan then my cousins who are half black half Samoan or half Mexican half Samoan and I didn't know I just thought like I thought my cousins were not lying but I didn't believe them right until until recently right and so that was a lesson in needing to listen more and like shutting up about my own hangups around like well why do they feel this way and really listening to the pain because that's what's under the frustration I'm actually hurting people I love the most because I'm not believing them and so I think my first inclination is to actively listen and from there I am confident you'll meet folks who are willing to engage and you being able to ask them directly to around what it could look like for you to be an active voice like you were saying because I think that is necessary too or not being a passive bystander in ways where you see other white passing people doing something harmful or saying something problematic and those are ways that you could step in right and say and speak up yeah that's what I'll say alright we have time for one more question any staff members want to ask I have a question outside of poetry what's your favorite ways of practicing self care weird I love to dance whether it be like a formal like class or going out with my girls and I really love the beach and so I feel really spoiled by California because we have easier access to it and there's something and it's also very cliche being from an island but there's something very healing about salt water in the ocean and so that's a go to and then cooking I live by myself and really have taken pride in not wanting to spend money and just really teaching myself how to cook but also using it as a really great form of therapy in a lot of ways and yeah being proud of what I create in a different sense outside of like on the page so cooking the beach dancing alright yep let's give it up alright thank you do you have any last words here