"When I say 'open,' you say 'your mind,'" Dean of Students Jamele Adams yelled to a crowd of students packed like sardines into Cholmondeley's on Friday night. "Open!" he yelled. "Your mind!" everyone yelled back. "Let's pray," Adams continued, opening up the event, a slam poetry night sponsored by Student Union's Social Justice and Diversity Committee. Adams' prayer turned into a slam poem that borrowed words from many of our community's role models, including the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Adams set a cathartic mood, yelling lines such as, "Silence is violence and screaming is proverb."

Prior to the show, the Social Justice and Diversity Committee, led by Naomi DePina '16, Dana Levin '16, Kira Levin '17 and Jennifer Almodovar (TYP '18) prepared a lineup of over a dozen performers and groups-all students-who each presented original pieces, from songs to slam poems, from comedy routines to spoken word works. The performances chronicled their personal experiences with social justice and diversity. Some of the most powerful pieces, though, were rooted in the students' yearning to change the world around them as they recounted first-hand experiences of gross injustice.

Coming off the heels of Adams' resonant opening, the student improvisation group, Crowd Control, provided a lighter dose of entertainment as they cracked the audience up with a series of crowd-sourced sketches. Samantha Gordon '14 introduced the group, and they started in on a series of jokes about sex.

Some of the highlights included individual plays on starter phrases "I make love like I sing..." and "I make love like I cook..."-but one of the funniest came from David Getz '15, who proudly said "I make love like I cry... into a Kleenex."

By the end of Crowd Control's routine, the audience had loosened up a bit, and attentively snapped their fingers, clapped and screamed for the slew of poets who performed next. Students Sequan Spigner (TYP '18), Asisa Isack '17, LaQuasia Cherry (TYP '18), Risa Dunbar '17 and Shannon Simpson '17 delivered original poems that cycled through an intense round of emotions and experiences.

Their poetry touched on diversity and cultural stereotypes and redefined terms, like what it means to be an "angry black woman," or to wear your hair "relaxed or natural." Each of these poems lasted a few minutes, and was riddled with beautiful, resonant lines, such as "my mind is talking to your mind and I cannot believe that somehow we got stuck in between." 

During a brief intermission, Osaze Akerejah '14 performed raps that he had written, and the audience became especially quiet as he was delivering lines. He was followed by Joel Burt-Miller '16 and Erica Barnett '17, who performed a song, yelling out to the audience, who quickly started yelling back, "How can color stop me from being me?" and "I'm black and I'm proud, say it loud!"

One of the most powerful poems of the night, titled "Love song to self when I forget the struggle is long and messy," was written and read by Alia Abdulahi '17. Her writing was both deeply personal and also widely culturally compelling, and lines like "holding onto another culture in a nation that hates the other," and "we are more than the shame we inherited," illustrated her grappling with assimilating her family's heritage with the largely heterogeneous cultural norms in America.
Another poem, written and read by Jessie Shinberg '17, included the line "only nothing is too little for someone who needs everything"-a thought that effectively summed up the artistic and emotional content of the night.

The event was staged to remind students that every little action and thought makes a difference in the world around us and the way that we interact with others now paves the way for the next generation.