Nairobians Applaud Staceyann Chin’s Performance
After borrowing an audience member’s chair, Staceyann Chin made a man crouch while she reenacted an awkward moment when she was nine years old. This New York Times published poet performed for a full house at the Southern Sun Mayfair Hotel on January 30th. “I look down at the hole, there are giant roaches,” she said, dramatizing the time she hid in a latrine to peek at her first dirty magazine. “I carefully examine my cocoa bread,” she shared, comparing the images of nude women to her own anatomy. She studied herself, declaring the cocoa bread “looks like mouths keeping a big secret.” The audience gasped when she chuckled about exploring her sexuality in the latrine which had an unpleasant ending: “My foot slips and I fall in!” Chin recalled having to pick off the legs of cockroaches from her own, and saying to herself back then: “I’m never going to look at my cocoa bread ever again.”
The Nairobi art collective, The NEST, hosted Staceyann Chin in Nairobi where she held a writer’s workshop which culminated in a performance on Thursday night. She mixes her performance with comedic as well as tragic anecdotes.
In her poem, “Blood”, Chin reveals she was the result of a wealthy Chinese man and a poor Jamaican woman. Though her mother said she was raped, her father denies ever having sex with Chin’s mother. After her birth her mother dropped Chin at her great-aunt’s house she promised to return in a week. She never came back.
Chin’s story continues throughout her youth in Jamaica, as she recalled moments when she was groped by her cousin who would whisper “Tell me you don’t like it.” After she screams for help her aunt told her “you are not a princess,” and threatens to beat her the next time she cries. Later that night when she awoke to her cousin on top of her, she drove a pencil into his hand.
The event turned into an open forum after the readings in which the Kenyan author, Binyavanga Wainaina, participated. He publicly came out recently following a slew of anti-homosexual laws in Africa, particularly in Nigeria. Among the witty responses he had for questions posed about his admission of being a gay man, Binyavanga quipped: “It was Jan, [I] was bored. It’s a big question, no big answer.”
Stacyann Chin later engaged fans through a book signing for her memoir, The Other Side of Paradise. Her greatest strength as a performer is consciously shifting her tempo, volume, and tone of her poetry. She’s aware of the audience cringing or laughing or leaning forward with a hand resting on their chin. From stories recounting the alienation she felt when immigrating to New York to her response to a misogynistic tweet—“today, you remain as a very good reason why abortions should remain legal!”—she pivots her small stories to illuminate universal truths and troubles.
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By Colin Smith.
Photo Source: The Nest
