POEM BY: Neri Deo
ARTIST STATEMENT: I wrote this poem for an assignment for AFR1321: Black Theater. I feel strongly for poetry.
In a cell no wider than a question,
I found a dictionary and a mirror.
Like Malcolm X tracing each word,
I copied language ’til it copied me back.
Each definition a small uprising
against the story written for my name,
my address,
my skin.
They taught us early
what we were worth—
highways that chopped up our districts,
textbooks that erased our mothers,
jokes that made our bodies a category.
Race was a margin note.
But reading rearranged the hierarchy.
I saw how history bent itself
to protect power, flatter the victor.
I learned identity is a construction site.
Brick by brick,
sentence by sentence.
The more I read,
the less I accepted.
The less I accepted,
the more I became.
But even now,
I feel the unwritten lines—
histories I haven’t touched,
names I haven’t said,
truths still waiting in the margins.
Learning did not end
in that narrow room.
It followed me out,
into streets still divided,
voices still unheard.
So I keep reading—
not just books,
but faces, systems, silences—
until the language of this world
can no longer pretend
I do not exist.
