Youth Voices For Peace and Justice
The DC Guerilla Poetry Insurgency
By Shahid A. Buttar
January 2005
Volume 41, Number 1
The DC Guerilla Poetry Insurgency is a grassroots artists' collective
that incorporates music, rhythm, spoken word, song, and community resistance.
Comprised of poets, singers, drummers, and musicians, the group aims
to unchain Americans from dependence on the mainstream-media by pushing
political poetry off the stage and into the street.
We in the peace and justice community often surround ourselves with
like-minded people. We march in crowds numbering in the hundreds of
thousands. We attend events at which we are joined by people with
like-minded values. Everyday, we deal with other people committed
to our shared vision of a better, more peaceful, more humane world.
As a result of this internal unity, when we are confronted by the
stark reality of American politics, we often end up wondering just
who is on "the other side". It is difficult for us to reach
out to those who do not share our viewpoint since we deal with them
so infrequently. In spite of this disparity, we are waging an ongoing
battle for the hearts and minds of the people. Every day, millions
of Americans go about their business, ignoring the reality of the
worldwide carnage and destruction being created by our government.
How can this be?
The answer may lie with the fact that our fellow citizens outside
of the activist community do not find sources of progressive information
as readily available as we do. The ultimate question then becomes:
how can we reach out to and share our perspectives with these people?
How can we even find them in the first place?
The DC Guerilla Poetry Insurgency firmly believes that in the ongoing
battle for hearts and minds, artists are artillery. By presenting
political perspectives through aesthetically appealing music, we are
able to expand the range of our potential audience. By performing
in public, we reach beyond the converted, engaging even people who
may support war. One way to conceptualize our action model is as a
type of "push-marketing" for political perspectives. We're
all too familiar with 'pop-up' advertisements that constitute "push-marketing"
for commercial interests in cyberspace. The DC Guerilla Poetry Insurgency
has taken this model and applied it to reality, using the exact same
tactic: ubiquity. What makes 'pop-up' ads so annoying is precisely
why our method is so effective: we cannot be avoided. We perform on
streets with a high level of pedestrian traffic, on trains, and in
public parks. By (figuratively) getting in people's way, we force
them to hear the truth they might otherwise easily ignore.
Our actions also function as community-building events. Like any
insurgency, we're a loose network as opposed to a formal organization.
Because of this lack of structure, we coordinate only by choosing
a time and place to meet and then we make up the show as we go. The
implicit fluidity of a rotating and flexible group such as ours allows
us to encourage audience participation. We bring extra instruments
to hand out to audience members who linger, and we make a point to
ensure that each new participant has a face-to-face conversation with
one of us before moving on.
The DC Guerilla Poetry Insurgency believes that we have found a solution
to the unfortunate lack of diversity within the peace and justice
movement. All it takes to break our message out of the 'bubble' of
the activist community, we believe, is a genuinely participatory,
unintimidating, and aesthetically pleasing mode of communication such
as ours. While presenting the movement's perspective to the uninitiated,
we also bring people from diverse backgrounds together to create art.
The DC Guerilla Poetry Insurgency hosts regular "lyrical ambushes"
by the fountain in DuPont Circle on the first and third Monday night
of every month. We also perform at fundraisers for progressive organizations
and participate in mass actions. Our sister group in San Francisco,
the Collaborative Arts Insurgency, gathers outside the BART station
at 16th and Mission every Thursday night.
If you'd like to find out when we meet next, check out http://www.lists.mutualaid.org/mailman/listinfo/dcguerilla
poetry.
Please join us - we'd love to support you!