“Can somebody kill those fucking romantic lights?”
Those were Staceyann Chin’s first words at the mic. The 35-year-old Jamaican-born poet was referring to a set of floodlights that cast a soft yellow glow on her petite frame as she stood before the large crowd of students gathered at the Usdan Café on Thursday, Feb. 21. As the performance went on, it was clear that Chin preferred to blur the boundaries between performer and audience.
She rarely used the mic for her spoken word pieces, choosing instead to stride in and among the crowd while performing poems like “Crossfire.”
Though she was recovering from a throat cold, Chin’s voice rang insistently through the high-ceilinged lobby even without amplification as she spoke of her background and religious beliefs:
“Most people are surprised my father is Chinese—like there’s some preconditioned / look for the half-Chinese lesbian poet/ who used to be Catholic but now believes in dreams…Be it for Buddha or for Krishna or for Christ, / God is that place between belief and what you name it. / I believe holy is what you do/ when there is nothing between your actions and the truth.”
She managed to dominate the space with both her ferocious energy and moments of tenderness.
“Though I don’t believe two wrongs make a right, sometimes slashing his tires makes you feel better,” she said.
Born in Jamaica to a Chinese father and a black mother, Chin was raised by her maternal grandmother while her father, who never acknowledged her as his own daughter, provided the funds for her education. She studied political science at a university in Jamaica before she came out publicly as a lesbian. For that, she was violently assaulted by a group of men who attempted to rape her.
That attack was what led to her immigration to the United States in 1997, where she began her career in the New York City performance poetry scene. Within a few short years, Chin became one of the most successful and well-known slam poets in the country, performing in “Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry” on HBO. Her off-Broadway one-woman show, “Border/Clash: A Litany of Desires” in 2005 caught the attention of the New York Times and the Washington Post.
Chin last performed at Wesleyan in 2005, and she was not hesitant in showing her familiarity with the University.
“I love these dyke schools,” she said towards the end of the show. “I feel like the educational system affirms me!”
Between poems, Chin bantered with an audience that appeared half-bewildered and half-enraptured with her audacious stage personality.
“There’s no way you can look good if you’re really having a good time,” she joked, adding: “at this age, you guys don’t even know you’re not having good sex yet.”
She often switched from conversation to poetry without warning or introduction, changing her tone and demeanor with lightning -fast rapidity. Though pieces like “Haiku on the Bush Presidency” were relatively short, some of her most powerful pieces of the night were long, extended monologues that evolved fluidly from lyric tenderness to wry humor to white hot anger.
In the middle of her performance, Chin stopped to answer questions from the audience.
“I feel pretty good about what I do every day,” she said in reply to a question about her life as a performer, writer, and activist.
“You have to make decisions that cost you things,” she said, citing her own decision to turn down offers to model for certain advertisements and magazines. During the question and answer session, Chin also stated that she is currently preparing to have a baby, and plans to make a documentary film of her own pregnancy.
Not everyone was entirely comfortable with some of Chin’s irreverent comments about everything from Christianity to the stage setup.
“She’s very good at what she does,” said Ariana La Porte ’10. “But I think her ego gets in the way.”
When one student asked if she always possessed on-stage confidence, Chin answered with an unhesitating and emphatic “yes.” She did acknowledge, however, that her demeanor while performing isn’t necessarily who she is at all times.
“This creature on stage is just one part of me,” she said.
Jeri Ho ’08 appreciated Chin’s willingness to drop her stage personality to answer whatever questions people had about her personal life.
“I like that she showed a different side of her personality [during the Q&A session]” Ho said.
Her candor and humor also impressed Evan Barton ’08.
“Her story about looking at ’Penthouse’ magazine as a teenager was hilarious,” Barton said after the show. “She has something in common with teenage boys across America. Her other stories and poems—about being an immigrant, a lesbian, and a black woman in America—really reminded me that there is still a lot of work to be done.”
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