I wasn't sure if I was going to read this one.
I'm going to crack open some water real quick.
How are you guys doing?
Are you OK?
I'm talking so much and feeling so much.
So about 80% of the poems that I wrote and worked on
were informed, some puzzles and ballads and sonnets.
I think I have a couple of pantoums.
And the 20% that aren't are maybe the most difficult
for me.
My personal connection to this project in this state
that we're in is that so I'm thinking about,
if incarceration and if the prison system isn't
rehabilitated, then what is it?
If its claim is that it's rehabilitative but it's not,
it's not a failure.
It's succeeding in what its true aim is.
And that was a hard thing to keep finding more about--
finding out more about.
But people need to heal.
And people need to actualize their humanity, no matter what
cards they're dealt. And so I started thinking, well,
what are the ways that people do that?
If prison is not that--
it ain't that-- then what are the strategies?
And I'm Muslim.
I was raised Muslim.
And all of the men in my life and the women, who
have been touched by mass incarceration, who have spent
time being incarcerated, all of them,
this particular generation that I did interviews with,
they either converted while incarcerated--
there's a long history of that, of Black men in particular
and them metabolizing their own redemption through Islam,
right?
And that being not just a spiritual journey
but an actual moral elevation outside of being stuck,
being tethered, being trapped, right?
So I interviewed my uncles and the men
in the neighborhood I grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
They're all pretty much from New York.
And I didn't know if I was going to read this piece because it's
about my dad.
And everything I know about you deciding
who you're going to be, in spite of, if for my dad.
And everything I know about--
my dad is my religion.
I feel like that.
I'm Muslim.
But I feel like my dad's my father and my brother
and my god and my son.
And I lost my dad this summer right in the middle
of these interviews.
And I didn't know if I'd be able to read these poems today.
But I feel like I just don't really
know what these poems are for because they
don't fix anything.
But they help me see better.
And they give my dad a place in my singing.
And there's no stamp that somebody could put on him.
He will never be a prisoner only.
And I think about self.
I think about selfhood and what it
takes to retain your spirit, your soul when you're isolated
from the people you love, when you're isolated from the world,
from the sky, from birds, from water, from food.
And I think about what keeps you here.
And I think what kept my dad here is Allah.
And that makes me religious.
Not Allah doesn't make me religious.
My dad makes me religious for Allah.
And so this is for my dad, who--
if anybody does not follow Islam or know anything about it,
your deen is sort of your it's your roadmap.
It's your devotion, your practice, your tool,
your teachings.
And my dad credits everything good in his life to his deen.
So I'm going to read a quote by my dad.
And then I'm going to this poem.
And then I'm going to go sit down.
This is for my dad, Abdullah Nafis, who walks with me where I walk.
And I asked him what his life was like before Allah.
And this is a quote before I'll read the poem is what he said.
Craziness.
I was sleeping on trains.
I'd steal anything that wasn't nailed down.
And that's why I stay on my deen.
My, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my dad
won't go to the hospital to get the cyst in his hand drained.
My dad won't let them take a knife to his overlapping toes.
Instead, cuts , a crude hole in the top of his shoe
for comfort.
My dad eats one meal a day and doesn't even drink coffee.
My dad doesn't need an alarm.
He sleeps on a board on the living room floor,
so he won't fall too deep.
My dad won't take showers or [INAUDIBLE],,
only scalding baths.
Nina Simone, his only soap.
My dad has a ring of a river around the gravestone
of his pupil so blue, if he let you get close,
you'd think they were contacts.
But my dad don't touch his eyes.
He wears prescription shades high on the bridge of his nose.
The rim of his hat stays low, low, low.
All you can see is his mustache, his two-tone lips,
straight, yellow teeth, and that famous nose,
which is my nose, sniff, sniffing out a lie.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]