Taken from my paper:

For my final project, I decided to touch on the BLM movement and my personal experiences around it. I was around 10 or 11 when Trayvon Martin died. He wasn’t quite a person to me yet. Mike Brown, Tamir Rice...after a while I got desensitized. I was too young to realize just how awful these deaths were. I was young and for as long as I could remember my parents consoled me by telling me that these events would never happen to me. I was respectful, I always kept myself busy, and I was kind. I’m sure they had the best intentions but this comfort also brought competition and an intense desire to stay on the right side of society, because if I did I could avoid racist attacks. I didn’t see these deaths for what they were. I saw them as unfortunate accidents, potentially avoidable. This self-righteousness camouflaged an intense fear I had.

Fast forward to last year. I’m an adult now. A young adult who, on paper, is nearly flawless. I code-switch beautifully, never raising my voice in anger or disapproval. I have interned at Arts organizations and my name is common among people in those spaces. Because of the intense cruelty, I dealt with in Arts spaces I’ve used my voice to help make spaces safe for everyone. I do my best to make everyone around me feel safe. I’m enrolled at a great school, my dream school no less. I live in a fancy dorm building in Seattle.

From the start, my freshman year was riddled with racial unrest, micro-aggressions, bullying and trauma. Suddenly these deaths don’t seem so far away. Suddenly I’m walking the streets of Seattle and having police officers stare at me menacingly as I walk past them. Suddenly I’m in my dorm across from the police station and I can hear them talking (rather graphically) about what they’d do to peaceful protesters, some of whom I know. I’m seeing election decisions and so many people want to hear my voice yet no one seems to hear my cries for help. As I do in these situations, I turn to art.

The spoken word that you hear was pre-written by me very late last year. I wanted to capture the feeling of realizing that no matter what you do, who you work to impress, those who don’t want to will never see your humanity. I knew I wanted to use this poem for my project, and as I was continuously reading it the word “bittersweet” popped into my head.

All of the singing is improvised in some way. The chorus-like breaks in the poems were thought of on the spot, as well as the placement. I really wanted to capture that sense of loss and uncertainty that I’ve been feeling since last summer. I decided to use repetition to describe that feeling of going around in circles until you slowly realize new things about yourself. I also knew that the subject matter spoken about was very rough, and I wanted to give myself and the listener space to process and take a break from the spoken content. Towards the middle, I used just the word “bittersweet” to highlight the points in the poem that I wanted to intensify. I chose that word because of its multi-faceted meaning. The “bitter” is the death and pain and the constant state of fear I’m forced to live in. The “sweet” is the sense of pride I found in my strength and resilience and self-discovery.

The last several sung lines are from the spoken word piece. I thought that they would switch up the back and forth and audibly capture the “aha” moment I had when I realized that if I was going to be treated unfairly regardless I might as well be myself, and embrace the parts of my culture that felt right to me. This was a heavily emotional piece, so the last three lines were a way of comforting myself, and I wanted to capture that vulnerability. I wanted to show that although I’m an artist creating an artistic social commentary, I’m also a person. When black artists speak about trauma we can’t just applaud and leave. We have to hold space for them and realize the extreme energetic burden it is to turn trauma into art.