For Better and For Worse
Current mood: contemplative

On Saturday night I was on my way home from a movie. I was riding the train and across from me sat a group of black and latino high school kids and a chaperone or teacher of some sort, who was white. They had just come from seeing a performance. The teens talked exuberantly about everything they had just seen, good and bad. The entire left side of the train smiled at their loquaciousness.

Clearly, they'd had a good time together, exposing themselves to the arts, doing something constructive on a Saturday night. I tried to piece it together, but I had no idea what they had just seen, but there was some talk of improvisational theatre and a woman plopping a big marshamellow into her mouth, much to the displeasure of some of the teens. The performance sounded colorful through their mouths.

They started playing an improvisation game that some characters in the performance must have done. They had to sing this song to a rhythm and someone had to freestyle a sentence in a fashion that requried him to rhyme with the previous line someone had just dropped. The chaperone would start the song off, say with a sentence that ends with the word cat. And this darling boy who sat next to her (he looked 16) would follow her and end his line with a slant rhyme like "pack".

He did this at least three times. And the chaperone would always stop the song laughing. She informed him each time that his ending word did not rhyme with the last sentence. She mentioned something the second time about him needing to refresh himself on his grammar. She was really nice about the whole thing. The other teens laughed along and so did the Afflicted. They laughed until the only rhymes that existed in this world were hard and perfect rhymes: cat and bat, slob and knob, flirt and hurt.

As I'm reading Gwendolyn Brooks' sonnets, which I do on occasion, I wonder: what if an influential person had shot Ms. Brooks the same message when she was a teenager, that slant rhymes were not legitamite? How would that have impacted her as a poet?

How do we speak volumes to young people with few words? For better and for worse?


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Samantha Raheem has been a member of Black on Black Rhyme since 2000.
A graduate of Florida State University, she is currently teaching, writing and performing in Brooklyn, New York.
Visit Sam on myspace at: www.myspace.com/samanthaspeaks
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