Dramatic readings, poetry highlight Black History month

D. Kevin Williams reads a passage by Frederick Douglass.

With soft lighting and low-key, live jazz music, the poets of “Spoken Word” entertained more than 60 people Feb. 20 during the second UNMC/NHS Black History Month event.

Master of ceremonies Vincent Alston, who portrayed Malcolm X in last year’s production of “The Meeting,” brought a three-piece band; two gifted poets, Melissa Kandido and Cantina Grant; and his long-time acting collaborator, D. Kevin Williams. Williams, who played Malcolm X’s bodyguard in “The Meeting,” read a stirring passage from “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave Written by Himself.”

The Feb. 20 presentation of the “Spoken Word,” showcased literary imagery that was delivered with passion, urban sass and sophistication. Alston opened the program with the poem, “I Rage,” a smoldering analysis of social hypocrisy and injustice in America.

A 1992 graduate of Omaha Central High School, Melissa Kandido lived in Namibia for four years.

In reading “More than a Continent,” Kandido challenged people to see Africa as more than “tigers, lions, snakes/more than exoticism, eroticism bare-breasted women/Who you can save for only 6 cents a day/More than stolen bodies for forced labor/Africa is herbal knowledge, multiple dialects, 52 countries strong.”

Kandido’s poem “American Apartheid” is an ode to the landmark 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court, which struck down separate but equal education in America. “Imagine walking into a place and being told that short people can’t come in or no single-jointed people may enter/You are now part of ‘The Other’/Imagine your school has no lab/This is a doctor who could have cured AIDS/But the school was lost to separate but equal.”

Kandido, who also performed “Sticks and Stones” and “Recognition,” lived in the southwest African nation of Namibia for four years. The 1992 graduate of Omaha Central High School is the first student to receive a bachelor of arts degree in African Diaspora Studies at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn. While in Africa, she studied the cultural manifestations of African dance. She also taught people how to develop their natural cultural dances into actual performance art and how to use various moves for physical fitness exercises.

Cantina Grant performs a reading.

Cantina Grant, a Nebraska transplant from Mississippi, brought humor and reflection to the performance with a set of black feminist renditions. “Conceited,” her first published poem, was inspired by a young black girl’s accusation that Grant was stuck up. After listing a litany of hard life experiences and tough times she has survived, Grant ends her poem by declaring to the little girl that “I’m not conceited/Just assured/Assured of the fact that I will no longer walk ashamed of my own skin/A rich chocolate brown/I’m Ms. Self Assured.”

Bass guitarist Bryant Fisher, keyboardist Todd Harrison and drummer Barry Taylor provided music for the event.