Poet Aya de Leon visits Allen Hall
Lindsay M. Bryant
Staff Writer
Kate Dougherty
The Daily Illini
Poet Aya de Leon speaks to a crowd of students in the Allen Hall main lounge on Sunday night as part of the Guest in Residence program Unit One puts on every year. De Leon is from the San Francisco Bay area and will be staying in Allen all week. |
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In her opening lecture, renowned poet Aya de Leon performed a poem called, "Cellulite," which dealt with body image issues. The audience's attention was sparked by the call-and-response poem, and every few lines in response to her words, they would tell her to "go ahead, baby."
Aya de Leon said she had a great time when she visited the University in April for the "What's the Word" event held at Krannert last spring, and was happy to return as a guest-in-residence at Allen Hall. She said the University students asked her very earnest questions the first time she was here.
"They seemed really hungry to go deeper," she said. "They asked a lot of questions and I felt like (the event) was too short."
De Leon was raised in Berkeley, Calif., by what she called an "activist family." Her mother was a civil rights lawyer who she said tried a lot of police cases for black and Hispanic people. She attended Berkeley High School where she was a teen activist, but said she did not want to attend UC Berkeley.
"I knew I wanted to go away to school," she said.
Although she is a graduate of Harvard University, Aya de Leon said she hated her experience at the prestigious Ivy-league school.
"They were very conservative...they put little thought into programs to meet students' needs," she said. "I thought about transferring, but moved off-campus as a sophomore. I was very unhappy."
De Leon was also a part of a Boston community organization called "Free My People," where she worked in a community with a large number of recovering drug addicts. She said her experience there helped her to get in touch with her feelings because of the importance of emotional healing within the community.
"It's a different culture," she said. "It's a culture of love, coming from love for yourselves, loving black people and loving the community."
De Leon said that Laura Haber, the assistant director of Allen Hall's Unit One program and the head of the Guest-In-Residence program, asked her if she would be interested in participating in the program. The guest-in-residence program started on Sunday, with a lecture/performance by de Leon. The event was held in the Allen main lounge and attracted a large crowd on the opening night.
Christopher Thomas, sophomore in LAS, said the guest-in-residence program provides students with a chance to interact with a wide variety of people and also to open people to things that they may be interested in doing. He also said that her words are an inspiration to his own writing.
"I love hip-hop and spoken word," he said. "I can connect with what she is saying."
Kate Maurer, a graduate student in creative writing, said this event was very different from the traditional style of poetry and raises questions on how people define poetry.
"I think 'spoken word' is a more accurate title for (de Leon's) poetry," she said. "It has a popular following and is an interesting gap to explore...it is definitely a performing art."
De Leon said the young poets of today are more self-aware, and she said the most important thing they can do to get better is just to keep writing.
"I've been writing for 16 years, and when I started I was not very good," she said. "My biggest encouragement is to keep writing and when you leave college, figure out a way to keep writing. Anytime (writers) are seeking deep truth and emotion, it will heal them and others."
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