“When he asks you to ‘shake what your momma gave ya,’ say: Hell yeah, boo! Put on some Drake and I’ll shake that intergenerational trauma I inherited but will never fully understand! I’ll drop that thing low like my own personal aspirations I put aside to prioritize those of the men in my life!”
Second-year criminology student Namitha Rathinappillai performed her poem “politically correct responses to cat calls” at the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word (CFSW) earlier this month.
Rathinappillai was one of four spoken word poets from Ottawa that attended the event. She came as a new member of the Ottawa spoken word group Urban Legends.
Rathinappillai performed two poems at the festival—one serious and one comical.
“I think it was cool to also have poems that were light-hearted,” Rathinappillai said, recalling how she was warned how serious some of the poem could be. “It wasn’t all trauma, trauma, trauma.”
Eighteen poetry groups from across the country competed in Guelph, Ont. to be the best spoken word group in Canada. The winner was a poetry group from Toronto. Urban Legends, representing Ottawa, placed ninth.
The annual festival began in Ottawa as a means of giving Canada a nation-wide spoken word competition.
It’s not easy being selected to go—Rathinappillai had to consistently score well in competitive poetry slams to be selected.
Panos Argyropoulos is a director of Urban Legends and one of the four poets representing Ottawa.
“Namitha was an incredible poet even before we were on a team together,”Argyropoulos said.
“When I start something, I very much dive into it headfirst,” Rathinappillai said. “I was just like, ‘yup, this is a thing—I’m going to every slam,’ and it was very much addicting.”
Rathinappillai placed second in the Urban Legends spoken word finals. From there, the group ran a crowdfunding campaign to cover some of the costs of getting to the festival.
“My goal going into CFSW was, ‘I want to have my poems memorized, I want to have that connection with the audience, I want to make eye contact.’ That was my goal for the year.”
Her first poem went well, but by the time she had to perform “politically correct responses to cat calls,” she had lost her voice.
“About an hour before my performance I kind of lost it. I was freaking out . . . I started messing up as I was practicing at home,” Rathinappillai said.
Argyropoulos and her teammates encouraged her to push through.
“I barely had a voice,” she said. “Because it’s a funny poem, people laugh after I say a line, but because I didn’t have a voice, I had to wait until they stopped laughing because I wouldn’t be able to perform over them.”
Rathinappillai plans to keep doing poetry slams to try again next year. To her, it’s the audience reactions that makes spoken word so compelling.
“It’s really cool when after a slam when audience members come up to you. These couple girls . . . came up to me and said ‘oh, we saw you perform last time and it encouraged me to want to perform, to see this woman of colour performing and absolutely killing it,’” Rathinappillai said. “The fact that it could inspire someone else to step outside their comfort zone, to be like ‘hey, I’ve got something to say, I’ve got this very unique perspective, let me share it!’ is very cool.”
Rathinappillai released her poetry chapbook Dirty Laundry with battleaxe press on Nov. 24.
Photo by Tim Austen
