"Life should seem a little easier with narration, shouldn't
it?"
What a great reason for blogging! It comes from a young man
named John-Claude Futrell, AKA Panama Soweto, who is emerging as the
spokesman and host for podslam.org.
Here's the context, where he
describes what a "griot" is. To me it sounds like what goes
on in the blogosphere:
A griot
is defined as a person, usually from West Africa, who keeps
the oral tradition of a culture. They are the storytellers
and
gossipers, the conspiracy theorists, and blabbermouths, the speakers
and the poets. Our spoken word artists are our griots of the
21st
century. They speak to us of their pain, their triumph, our
gains and
our losses, they function as political analysts, teachers,
psychologists and friends.
I write
for a very selfish purpose,
I want to feel as if I am not alone. So when I'm in front of
a crowd I
want to feel like I am telling a story that people can relate to, can
feel. Poetry can be therapeutic for all involved,
and life should
seem a little easier with narration, shouldn't it? We can
give
explanation when there was none before. Without our poets our lives
could be described as a sum of circumstances, with them we can tolerate
the harshness of the world that we live in.
Best First Blog Post Ever.
I believe that is the first blog post Panama ever wrote
– his previous posts have been short introductions of other
PodSlam poets. Have you ever heard a better first post than that?
Each of the PodSlam poets answered some interview questions,
including why they chose their stage name. Panama's answer:
So they call me Panama
Soweto. And I took the name Soweto as an
attribute, as a stage name for a couple of different reasons. Probably
the most important and most interesting reason to me is that I got my
degree in African American studies from Metropolitan State College in
Denver and while studying there I got to learn a lot about the township
of Soweto in South Africa and the actual trials and tribulations that
had to go with freedom from apartheid. The things that Steven Biko and
Nelson Mandela went through. And, one of the things that made apartheid
visible to the rest of the planet was the riots or the murder in Soweto
of twenty-six children. I teach, so I believe that children are the
only way that we can bring change into this world. And with that I just
thought that Soweto would be a real good attribute to use because, you
know, I am trying to change myself. Nobody's perfect.
The first
name, Panama, just kind of came from the dichotomy of what I am and
what I'm not. A lot of people growing up didn't know
whether to call me Dominican or Puerto Rican, and yada yada and this
and that, so I got a whole bunch of nicknames and I got
teased once and the name Panama came up and so I kept it.
11:31:32 AM 
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