Words Help Paint a Picture of Freedom for Young Poets

San Jose Mercury News
Saturday, April 21, 2001

By L.A. Chung

We have to do what’s right, walk in the light
stop all the fights, watch our days get bright.
My people, we have to realize, recognize, and visualize
that it’s too many people institutionalized–
and our family cries for our lost lives…
– Daniel Agemotu

At the Log Cabin Ranch, nestled in the pastoral reaches of La Honda, the afternoon sun glances off the deer grazing in the meadow and you can hear the coyotes howl at night. Redwoods, oaks, manzanita and spring wildflowers line the roadsides leading from Highway 84, which at times seem light years away from the rest of the Bay Area. Inside, however, the labors of young men preparing for today’s poetry slam summon hard words like “revolution” and “prison” and, in gentler moments, sweet interludes of youthful love. Daniel Agemotu, 18, is up in front of the group of five now, reading his words, his own words, written in moments of clarity and emotion. He’s titled it “Finding a Better Way” and it addresses the “Mexicans, Samoans and blacks” incarcerated like himself.

There’s too many brothers in the institution
We gotta strive for a revolution.
But first we have to find the solution.

His judges at San Francisco’s youth detention center weigh in. It’s too fast, some think. Change the pacing, try delivering it the way your pastor father might in a sermon on Sunday, suggests Kim Nelson, the poetry teacher who is trying to prepare him for today’s competition.

A member of the class nicknamed “Nichie” jumps up and whispers advice in his ear. Agemotu goes again.

We have to find a better solution
to our hurt and restitution.
Stay out of this corrupt institution.

Nichie leaps up. “Now, you can dig that!” he cheers, hugging Agemotu triumphantly. Since the winter, they’ve been working and everyone is developing a style. Andrew Ele writes deep, dense, convoluted poems that need your undivided attention. They write, like Agemotu, about incarceration and triumphing over it. They write about injustice. They write about their families. They write about love and longing, and laughter carried on a breeze. The spelling is not always right, the grammar can be improved; there have been gaps in their educations. But it’s poetry, after all. Poetry that is meant to be performed. Heard. Felt.

Tough competition

There’s a lot riding on today’s competition, which pits the ranch’s guys against others at five places around the city. If a competitor does well, he could represent San Francisco at the big slam in Washington, D.C., next month. Everyone knows about the resident from the ranch who won two years ago and went on to compete on a team with professional slam poets in Washington. Poets like Nikki Giovanni will compete this year. Local poet Russell Gonzaga will be one of the judges. Marcus Gallegos is trying to figure out which of his poems to perform. Maybe “415 Eyes.”

My thoughts are not yours, not hers, not his and definitely
not theirs.
So no one seems to care
About the cry that echoes
through my home, my ghetto,
My city, and definitely not here.

Gallegos lights up in competitions, his confidence buoyant in front of an audience. He says he sits up in his bed in the wee hours of the night so he can think, sometimes write. He’s getting out in three weeks.What he wants to do is travel the world, see how other cultures live. His first try might be getting on a Greyhound bus and seeing the country.

God, how I miss that feeling of sitting on top of Bernal
Heights overlooking the
Mission
And in a distance downtown
sparkling, surrounded by
two beautiful bridges.

Like so many schools that dot the suburban landscape, the ranch is an unremarkable collection of cinder block and wood structures built sometime in the ’60s; you’d think you were looking at a little school in Marin or Los Gatos or Hillsborough. But of course, you’re not.

Losing Freedom

There may be after-class horticultural sessions, poetry and screenplay-writing enrichment classes held by groups like the Writers Corps, but after meals, each resident submits to a pat-down before leaving the cafeteria. Guests in the classroom are cautioned not to leave car keys in their jackets when they casually hang them on a chair. Teachers and counselors carry two-way radios, because a head count is demanded at any given moment and everyone’s whereabouts must be accounted for. Besides, you can call for help quickly with a radio.

Agemotu is here for an assault, his mother, Maggie, says. He beat another teen on a bus two years ago – on his first day of probation from another fight in the Mission district. He’d built a reputation for causing trouble in the many schools he attended – or being blamed for trouble, even if it wasn’t his fault.

It’s like that a lot. One thing’s your fault, another thing isn’t. Split-second decisions and choices are made – bad choices. We’re not talking poor, misunderstood children here – there are reasons they are in jail, drug dealing and theft and assaults. But you can see how even kids from good families end up in trouble because the streets of Bayview-Hunters Point or Visitacion Valley aren’t like those in Los Altos or Piedmont. People mess with you. You make dozens of choices every day.Agemotu’s mother knows. She left Hawaii reluctantly but in service to God when her husband, Maselusi Perofeta, was given his own congregation in the Good Samaritan Church of Jesus Christ in the Bayview District in 1994. But being the pastor’s son, even in a strict, heavily disciplined household of eight, was no immunity.

“I used to be angry,” Daniel Agemotu said. “I’ve calmed down a lot since I got here – I can’t be going wild later on, I’ll end up dead.”

The writing has helped him focus. He wrote a letter to his father, actually his stepfather, telling him he realized how he had been trying to help him all these years. He captured it in a poem that he performed at the last poetry slam.

“I can appreciate what he was trying to say,” said Perofeta, who winces at rough language. “I was hard on him, but what I was trying to do was build a relationship.”

At heart, these are still boys. They are boys-turning-into-men. Not in that innocent sense, but in that phase that all boys must pass through, where they see only a glimmer of what they need to learn to be a man. A glimmer of how hard it might be. A glimmer of the promise the future holds. A glimmer of fear that it is all on them now.

When he gets out in August, Daniel Agemotu says, he wants to pursue his dream to play football, and make music on the side, learn to be a producer. He’s setting his mind on goals. He’s through with being locked up.

On the Outside

Poetry is no magic bullet. The resident who went on to Washington for the big competition graduated from the ranch. But he has re-offended and landed back in jail. He writes when he’s incarcerated. He is original. Authentic. But outside, he yields to other influences.”I wish we had some kind of bridge program outside,” said Nelson. “I wish we could get a judge to sentence them to a writing program.”