Poet’s Work Is a Weave of Grit and Lyricism

. . . If the story is not told The story will be lost If the name is not spoken The name will be forgotten . . .

--KAMAU DAA’OOD

“Watermelon, Drum and Ink”

In a traditional African culture, Kamau Daa’ood would be a griot , a storyteller, a keeper of the tribe’s history and myths who uses words, song and dance to tell his stories.

In 20th-Century America, Daa’ood is a word musician, a poet who uses artistic mediums from music to videos to tell stories about himself and other black Americans--their “African voices sharpened on concrete” in the nation’s gritty urban landscapes.

The stories are about people like Arthur, a musician friend celebrated in one poem, who “moistened his reed with tears he collected” and did not speak English, “just pig Latin and fluent saxophone and a little Spanish he learned from his neighbors” in the housing projects.

The stories are about “young minds bleeding naked in front of snot-covered TVs,” about “precision lobotomies executed at ends of ghetto blasters,” and about “a slow suicide that stretches out over a life span.”

Daa’ood, who is 39 and a Compton resident, began his writing career in the Los Angeles public schools. For more than two decades he has pursued a full-time artistic career that has produced two books of poetry and more than 400 readings, one as far away as Somalia, where in 1979 he performed at the national theater.

This year he has received a number of accolades, among them a teaching grant from the state Arts Council. Last month he was named the best poet-performer by L.A. Weekly, which said he “fuses the dialectics of jazz with the oratorical powers of gospel and cosmic social satire.”

A video that mixes one of his longer poems with music was included last month in “Songs of the City,” the “Take Five: Arts and Culture” series broadcast on public television station KCET. The poetry and music presentation was given against a video backdrop of lively city street scenes. Daa’ood hopes to produce more of his work on video and have it distributed through schools and libraries. . . . There are wonderful things written on the scar tissue of my heart and i’ve come to tell the bare butt truth . . .

Daa’ood’s poetry mixes the harsh realities of inner-city life--the “savage red streets,” the babies who grow up to “harm you”--with the joy of living and the echoes of the agrarian, tribal culture that nurtured his African ancestors.

In a love poem to his wife, for example, he writes of “purple blossoms, blown through a bamboo kiss, sailing on a rainbow river drum” to a woman “reading leaves and cowries, talking to ancestors and singing ancient songs.” The couple have five children, ranging in age from 8 to 16.

Many years ago the poet adopted the African names Kamau, which means quiet warrior, and Daa’ood, which means beloved. A native of Los Angeles, he was still in his teens when he joined the Watts Towers Writers Workshop, where older black writers such as Ojenki, K. Curtis Lyle and Quincy Troupe taught and served as role models.

Later, he worked with the Pan-African People’s Arkestra, the group of musicians who came together under the leadership of Los Angeles pianist-composer Horace Tapscott to build an orchestra that would preserve and promote the works of black composers. It was while he was with the Arkestra that Daa’ood became known as the “word musician,” creating a poetic form that he recites with music.

Daa’ood works part time on programming for the Watts Towers Arts Center and is also a full-time outreach supervisor for an AIDS education program at the Southern California Youth and Family Center in Inglewood. . . . The essence of the work is healing rebuilding a circle promoting the life force . . . uniting the scars to make something beautiful . . .

The arts, Daa’ood suggests, are a way in which black people can come to terms with the bleak lives they have often been forced to bear since being captured two centuries ago and thrown onto ships bound for American slave markets. Creativity, he suggests in one of his poems, is “a martial dance in the midst of despair.”

Tall, bearded and bespectacled, with a voice as sonorous as it is gentle, Daa’ood calls himself “a community arts activist or a grass-roots cultural worker.”

He and drummer Billy Higgins are transforming a storefront in Los Angeles’ Crenshaw District into a performance space that they hope to open within a month. Dubbed the World Stage, the space will give the Southland’s black artists a place to perform at the same time they are preserving elements of black culture, be it in jazz, poetry or dance.

“This place that I’m building here,” Daa’ood said, “I’m not just building for myself. I’m building it as a vehicle for other creative people, and for the community, a place where they can come together. There’s not a lot of outlets for creative people.” . . . This is an army of healers physician, heal thyself and radiate, and radiate, and radiate . . .

If black people are to overcome some of the destructive conditions under which they live, it is critical, Daa’ood says, that they have a sense of cultural identity. Problems afflicting blacks in America today, he said, can be traced in part to the historical fact that they were stripped of their language, their religion, their national identity, that they “don’t know where their great-great-great-grandfather came from” and that as slaves they were turned into “property.”

When your culture has “totally been annihilated and you can’t look back, you’re just stuck with the moment, no anchor, nor roots to your tree. I don’t like that word (roots). I think it’s overused today, but I think that’s why so much of my work speaks to” overcoming the loss. “That’s part of the healing that needs to take place in the . . . historical amnesia that we are faced with.”

Don’t look to Daa’ood, though, to don a dashiki, as many black American men did as they began to explore their African heritage. “That’s very superficial,” said the poet. “We’re not talking about dashikis. We’re talking about family structure, we’re talking about ways of doing things. We’re talking about the connectedness of a people, the feeling of being responsible, the extended concept of self.”