Amena Brown:
Hey everybody, welcome back to this week's edition of HER with Amena Brown and I hope you all are into your summer vibes.
Amena Brown:
I know this is going to be a bit of a weird summer for many of us. I know I have folks listening from all over the world. I know all of you are not here in the States. Here in the States, we are still in a pandemic. The pandemic is not over here but this is the first time that this many people have been vaccinated so there is a little bit of a relaxing as far as some places that you can go if you are fully vaccinated and not have to wear your mask or only have to wear your mask in certain areas. So it's going to be a good summer y'all, but it might be a weird one where I definitely feel like I am having some social adjustments to make. I think I'm going to have to do a whole episode about pandemic re-entry but it is summer here. It is already blazing hot and humid at the time of this recording. So I look forward to sharing more with you all about what it has been like doing re-entry here in the States during the pandemic.
Amena Brown:
I am doing the episode that we're doing today because I recently did a Behind the Poetry on my poem Letter to My Hair and I believe it's in that episode that I made mention of having done a Behind the Poetry on Dear TV Sitcoms and my assistant and I were talking because my assistant is always the one making the show notes so amazing. Also shameless plug for the show notes for this podcast. Shameless plug, if you're listening and you're like, "Oh shoot. I didn't catch what book they said," or, "I can't remember what artist they brought up." That is where the show notes come in. You can go to amenabrown.com/herwithamena and all the show notes are there and there are little extras there from the conversation so that you don't have to remember all the things I might be talking to you all about or talking to guests about, and so when my assistant was working on the show notes for that episode, she was like, "Hey, I went back and looked through all the episodes and you don't have a Behind the Poetry episode on Dear TV Sitcoms," and I was like [gasps].
Amena Brown:
I figured out that I had done a Behind the Poetry on Dear TV Sitcoms because my friend Celita had a podcast called I'm Simply Artistic which you can still listen to and her podcast was very much centered on the voices of poets and she would have each poet pick a poem of theirs that had something to do with recovery or some element of recovery that played a big role in Celita's podcast and so I actually talked with her about Dear TV Sitcoms on her podcast and for the first time outside of talking to my family and friends actually shared the behind the scenes behind the scenes of what inspired me to write Dear TV Sitcoms. So it only feels right to actually come here, on my own podcast, and tell you all a little bit of the Behind the Poetry on Dear TV Sitcoms.
Amena Brown:
The recording that you're about to hear of this poem is from my last spoken word album, Amena Brown Live, and I think you've heard me talking about Amena Brown Live because I think one or two of the other poems that I've talked through on here was from this album and I think I talked to you all about how I was releasing that album in November of 2016, bless my heart, that's a terrible time. Just don't release albums or books around election time in general, but that particular election as we know now was a terrible time to release an album. But if you haven't heard Amena Brown Live, I don't often say this because I don't normally like to listen to my own voice over and over again, and I still haven't listened back through Amena Brown Live but I am so proud of it. It is the most me that I ever was in a spoken word album so if you haven't checked it out I hope you do wherever you like to stream your music. So let's take a listen to Dear TV Sitcoms from my last spoken word album, Amena Brown Live.
Amena Brown:
Dear TV Sitcoms, I am mad at you. You raised me wrong. Restricted me to your 22-minute plot, your seven and a half commercial breaks, your 45 second catchy theme songs, you made being an adult look so easy. Easy like getting dressed for work in the morning and coming right back after the commercial break because it turns out sitcoms don't have time for an eight hour workday. Easy, like working as a journalist and being able to afford to live alone, in New York, with a closet full of Manolo Blahniks. Easy, like raising five kids while you work as an attorney and your husband works as a doctor and you are somehow always home when the kids get home from school and you could afford to host celebrities and take amazing vacations. You made me believe that grown women are randomly wearing sexy panties every night. Like in real life our bras ain't raggedy. Like in real life we don't all keep a drawer of reliable granny panties.
Amena Brown:
You made love look so simple. Simple like two perfect strangers who met at the office. In the first season they're just friends but an episode or two later they are married with children. Like in real life, some of us don't find ourselves living single long after our attempts to create a modern family have turned up empty. That sometimes when girl meets world, these are the years where you wonder if you gon' find love before your girlfriends become the golden girls, you made me want to get aboard the love boat. You made me believe that marriage was all pillow talk and matching pajama sets. You had me all in my feelings. All Lucy and Desi, and Jim and Pam, and Kevin and Winnie, and Dwayne and Whitley, and Synclaire and Overton, and James and Florida, all like I'm in Natalie's with my boo like it's the last two minutes of New York Undercover, and I still hope to hear my husband say, "Sweetheart, this is how I met your mother."
Amena Brown:
You had all the answers to drugs and date rape and bullying and domestic violence. You told me just say no, no means no. The more you know, don't talk to strangers. You even tried to help my abandonment issues because when you said after these messages, you actually came right back.
Amena Brown:
But we don't all get to escape the hood of West Philadelphia. We don't all have a rich Uncle Phil or a rich Aunt Viv and for the record my loyalties always lie with the first Aunt Viv. Some of us watched our hood lives turn into good times. Couldn't imagine ourselves a college blur, a college girl till we saw ourselves in a different world and we liked Family Ties but we needed Family Matters to remind us how much Black families matter, that families like the Parkers and the Jeffersons and the Sanfords really do exist. While all these years later we still need real life hashtags to explain why Everybody Loves Raymond, but Everybody Hates Chris. You can't fix the world's problems in 22 minutes. Maybe that was never your goal.
Amena Brown:
Maybe all you want to do is reflect life back to us, that no matter how much we scroll or stream or binge watch our news feeds or use our thumbs more than our mouths to say what we really mean, we're all just hoping to find a norm. Hoping to walk into our favorite spot and hear them say our name like they did Norm. Maybe you did raise me right. You wrote the credits so I could get back to my real life. Create my own theme song. Find my own plot baby. All you wanted for any of us was to do the best we can with our own God-given time slot because (Singing) sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name and they're always glad you came. You wanna be where you can see. Our troubles are all the same. You wanna be where everybody knows your name.
Amena Brown:
Okay. Still still still, I just love that poem. I just love it and I feel really emotional just thinking about having done that at Eddie's Attic here in Atlanta and just being in front of a crowd, y'all. I haven't performed in front of a crowd in-person since the first week or so of March in 2020 so I don't know how the rest of my schedule is going to go so far. I have not been booked for any like truly in-person events. I have mostly been asked to do more of like livestreams or pre-recorded streams where you may go and record in-person but you're not in front of an audience so just hearing everyone's voices and applause and all that, I don't know what I'm going to do the first time I actually perform in front of an audience but be emotional and possibly freaked out.
Amena Brown:
So let's talk about Dear TV Sitcoms. Whenever we're doing a Behind the Poetry episode I'd like to start with what made me write the poem and this is a really interesting story to me and it was interesting to talk with Celita about it on her podcast because even in thinking about all the episodes I've done here that were Behind the Poetry episodes, it's not often that I write a poem and the inspiration for the poem doesn't actually show up in the piece itself and so I cannot remember the exact year that I wrote this poem but I feel like I'm vaguely remembering that the house where I live now, I don't think that my husband and I had lived in this house very long at the time so we had probably only been married probably less than five years. Couldn't have been more than five years at the time I'm writing this. I think I mentioned this in my 40AF episode. There's parts of this story that I feel comfortable to share with you all. There's parts of it that I'm just still in process and have not gotten ready to share publicly so I'm giving you like a little bit of a glimpse and you may be like, "Where's the rest of the story?" and it just ain't in here. It ain't in here because I'm just not ready to talk about all of that.
Amena Brown:
But I can tell you that we were at a point in our marriage where we were like, "Okay." We moved into this house, like it's time. We were going to go ahead and try to extend our family and I'm using that phrasing purposefully because for us having been a married couple now without children and as I've told you all having worked in very conservative and white Christian spaces, there can be a lot of other pressures put upon you because you're a couple without children. So I like to use phrases like we wanted to extend our family or add to our family because as the two of us, we are a family right. Even if you're listening to this and you don't have a spouse or you don't have a partner, if you are in your own household, you're a family and whoever else may become part of your chosen family. But our families don't begin when we decide to have children and I think that is an important note to make so hopefully there is somebody listening out there that's like, "Thank you," because it's something I always wanted to hear someone say.
Amena Brown:
So we were at the point where we were like, "We would love to add a child to our family," and so we had begun trying to get pregnant and around this time I had realized that for very sundry reasons that I may or may not discuss with you all later, we discovered that that was not going to be an easy journey for us and I immediately felt duped. I was like, "Why am I so mad about feeling duped about this, and why do I feel duped? What do I feel was the information that was given to me about this and where did it come from?"
Amena Brown:
I realized that part of that information came from TV sitcoms, and there is this typical scenario that happens in a sitcom when the female character either has a pregnancy scare or possibly finds out that she's actually pregnant. First of all, it's always some character who is utterly unaware of her period, and I have some friends who are like this. I have some friends who ... They just don't keep track of their periods. I have some friends who have conditions and other things going on that make their periods irregular. So even if they were tracking their periods, they just don't know when their period is going to come. But this character that's in this average sitcom gets pregnant plot, this character is always sort of scatterbrained in some way, that she just lost track of the days and has no idea where her period is at any given time. Which is totally not like me. I always know. I always know at least when my period should be. I can't tell you I always know where it is, I just know where it should be.
Amena Brown:
Okay, so she's unaware of where her period is and typically the episode begins with some sort of catalyst of something that makes her realize what day it is, and she's sitting in a meeting or she's finishing up a project or someone says, "No, that was last Thursday," or whatever, and she goes to her physical calendar. It's typically some sort of bindered up situation or maybe ... She's got the desk calendar, the one that's like real big, sitting flat on the desk, and she starts flipping through these pages, counting, making X's, whatever, and realizes inside herself, "Oh, my period's late."
Amena Brown:
Somehow, she turns to her best friend that she also works with and I just want to take a little pause right here and just say out of all the jobs I ever worked, I mean I worked with some people that I liked, but I never worked with someone that was my best friend. I never worked a job where I felt comfortable with the people that I worked with knowing these types of personal details. So a lot of times while this is happening, when she's going, "Oh no, I haven't seen my period. My period's late," her work best friend is there in her cubicle, typically in her office, right? Because that's another thing. When you're watching offices or workplaces, it's always the central characters that actually have an office to go to with a door. Where they can what? Have privacy, which in most of the jobs I worked, you didn't have. If you wanted privacy you need to do that in your car or on your way to work, you need to drive away from work and go park somewhere else and make your little phone calls. Because all you got is a cubicle for yourself and that's it.
Amena Brown:
She's sitting with her best friend that she also works with and her best friend says, "Oh my gosh. We have to go right now and buy a pregnancy test." They don't have to check in with anybody. They also don't have to delineate how long they're going to be gone. They just leave and we don't know where they're at. They leave, they go to wherever the place is where they gather with their friends. You know how all the sitcoms kind of have that if it's based on a group of friends, so they go there. They eat coffee. They drink lunch. Whatever. Yeah, I said it. They do all those things. They happen to go to some drug store that happens to be right there near their job, pick up this pregnancy test and where do they go to take the pregnancy test? A public bathroom. Why? When would you ever do that in a public bathroom but anyway they do, take said test. Somehow they also do this in a public room where they remain alone and no one really comes in the bathroom while they're in there and boom boom, boom, little central character finds out that she's pregnant.
Amena Brown:
She comes home, like Whitley in A Different World. Makes her husband a plate of baby carrots, baby corn, baby back ribs to announce that she's pregnant. Like that was sort of me doing the hodgepodge of all the different plots like this that I had seen in TV sitcoms and I realize I am so mad, I am so mad at like this life that I felt like I was sold as far as what I thought my life was going to be like, and in my real life I'm there realizing, "Oh no. Sitcoms had this all wrong. Nobody likes their co-workers that much. Nobody shares that much of their business with their co-workers," and I realized quickly, and unfortunately for me in a lot of ways that fertility for everyone will not be that easy or that simple.
Amena Brown:
So next question is what is the real life story behind writing the poem? Okay, so I have this realization, I'm super pissed about where I feel like TV sitcoms got it all wrong, but I realize at that point of where I am and my emotional journey about all this, I'm like, "I'm not really ready to bring that factor into a poem," and also, even though this moment is a thing that a lot of people experience, because a lot of people experience this area of their life not being easy for various reasons but I realized, "Okay, maybe I do have the beginning of an idea that doesn't have to be connected to pregnancy or fertility or anything like that," and I started to think about are there other things that TV sitcoms got wrong about what it was going to be like to be an adult in real life?
Amena Brown:
So I started tinkering with it as you all, having heard the poem with a lot of sort of these ideas of how to do word play with the titles of some of these sitcoms. I mean I definitely started out just making a list of a lot of the sitcoms that I loved. I mean I loved Perfect Strangers growing up, that was one of my favorites to watch. I was a late watcher to Sex in the City. I didn't actually watch it when it was originally on television but after I got married I went back and watched the whole thing. That's a whole other purity culture thing to talk to you all about later but I never felt comfortable watching it before I got married but probably because I wasn't having sex I guess. I don't know, I was ... And the city, bless my heart.
Amena Brown:
Anyways, so I was late watching that but I did watch it which was a very interesting sort of cultural phenomenon kind of thing to have watched. So I was thinking about what were the sitcoms that I watched as a child and how they influenced what I thought as an adult and then what were the sitcoms that I could just sort of trace my upbringing and say, "Oh yeah, I remember watching that when I was a kid. I remember watching that when I was in junior high. I remember I watched that in high school, in college," and so on, and then trying to think of a few of the more current sitcoms at the time of the writing.
Amena Brown:
So when I started going through all that, I was probably about a third of the way finished with the piece and at that time on our local poetry scene here in Atlanta. Of course we have wonderful open mics but at that time one of the things we were really wanting to add to the poetry scene is a place to workshop. So I love this and I'm actually thinking about seeing if some friends of mine that are poets will kind of come back together to do this. There's a lot of different types of writing workshops you can do but if I were to overgeneralize, there's sort of the type of writing workshop that you can do that you're starting with nothing. You come to the workshop with just an empty piece of paper, your empty journal, or whatever, and the person facilitating helps you begin a new idea. But one of my favorite types of writing workshops to do is where you take a poem that hasn't been finished, you've started the idea, maybe you're stuck, maybe you're trying to figure out which direction you want to go, and you get a chance to share that with other poets and have them help you workshop some ways to go forward.
Amena Brown:
So I think we were doing this maybe as a once a month thing and I remember the night that I shared what was the beginning of Dear TV Sitcoms, we were actually hosting it at our house and so I shared the beginning of it and got a lot of positive feedback, everybody felt like I was off to a good start, but where I was getting stuck is what's the point of all this? Once I sort of name drop and plot drop all of these different TV shows that people are familiar with, what is the point of that? Am I writing this poem just to be nostalgic so we could have like a, "Yeah, I remember back when the TV shows used to be like blah blah blah." Or, "Do I have some other point of something that I'm trying to say? If I'm mad at TV sitcoms, why am I mad? Then if I'm mad, how do I make a turn in some way in the piece?" So I really can't remember all the details of our conversation that night honestly but I remember one of the questions that one of the poets asked was about are all of the things that TV sitcoms put out there, especially in that 80s into the mid 90s era, were all of those things bad? Or were there some good things?
Amena Brown:
So I think there were a lot of ideas kind of swirling around. I mean I definitely thought about ... If I look at TV sitcoms not just as here are these terrible things that I feel like you didn't tell us and you lied and these stories you put out there are not how it works in real life. But when they ask that question, having to think about what are some really great things that TV sitcoms brought me, and of course that brought me to black sitcoms and the fact that I was really, really inspired to go to Spelman because I was watching A Different World as sort of a pre-teen or a young teen age. I mean I was growing up watching Living Single and seeing all of these young, Black, upwardly mobile characters and seeing how their relationships and romances and work lives played out and there were a lot of differences at that time in various layers of ways how Black TV sitcoms were different from white TV sitcoms that really sort of existed in this kind of bubble almost.
Amena Brown:
Like there's still some sitcoms I've never really watched all the way through. Like I never watched Friends all the way through because I thought it was odd that ... It was odd to me always that here was a cast of people living in New York City of all places and they just ... All these seasons like never? Just all white people. I mean I know they had a few kind of characters that were coming in and out I guess, but I was just like, "I don't know. I don't like that."
Amena Brown:
Kind of felt similarly about Seinfeld but growing up and thinking about what were those Black sitcoms that really gave me this window into myself, into other black folks that I knew, thinking about Girlfriends and Half & Half and Moesha. I mean some of these shows, I actually had so long of a list of sitcoms I didn't even have room to list them all, but even the ones I named inside of the poem thinking about watching Sanford and Son with my grandfather and what it meant to be looking at Redd Foxx who I always thought looked a little similar to my great-grandfather watching that show and just how hilarious it was and even the different ways that economics played out in some of the Black sitcoms and the roles education played and work and how some of them were sitcoms built around discussing certain issues and topics and sort of making the episode have a stepped up version of an after school special.
Amena Brown:
And some of them were more character-driven where it wasn't as much about this issue that we needed to talk about each episode but it was just focused on what happened to those characters and when they dated and when they broke up or whatever and so from that writing workshop time, I thought to myself, "Oh, I definitely want to include some conversation about that," because having watched Black TV sitcoms growing up was very impactful to me and even now seeing this wonderful resurgence here in the years since I wrote this poem that there have been so many other Black sitcoms to come out and just Black television shows in general, whether they're sitcoms or not, right?
Amena Brown:
I think also when I was trying to think about what's the point of writing about this, and I think I wanted to write about those tensions that I think a lot of us who were in Gen X and I do consider myself to be Gen X even though the years for who is millennial or not still kind of fluctuate and I think sometimes I see those years and according to those years I would be considered a millennial but for me I always culturally feel like I'm Gen X because I was raised as a latchkey kid. I was raised in that after school special era, even though I'm on social media and all those things, I didn't have an email address until I was probably ... I think maybe I had an AOL address when I was 15 and my first like for real super official email I was a college student. I didn't have my first cellphone until I was 22 years old. So there was a lot of that like went outside to play. Had Nintendo and those things but there was still a lot of that upbringing for me that was very centered around the TV screen more than it was a computer screen or a phone screen, right? Which has some similarities but brought out a difference in generation of those of us that were raised as kids in the 80s.
Amena Brown:
So I tried to swirl all those things and go back and think about how can I come back to this poem and finish it. So I think when I took all those things, then I went back and sort of the last part of the poem where you see this turn, right? That's one of the things I have loved about performing this piece is when it starts out and people hear that first line, "Dear TV Sitcoms, I'm mad at you," they're already like, "Oh yes. This is the thing I want to talk about," and all of those funny lines right there about marriage and The Love Boat and the nod to the Sex in the City and the Cosby show without saying the Cosby show, the vibes. Like dropping all of these things in there and then getting to that turning point of, "But here's where real life becomes different from what we're watching in the sitcom. Here's where there's no Uncle Phil, there's no Aunt Viv," but getting to sort of make that turn to say, "This is why Black TV sitcoms are important and Black TV sitcoms are a part of the fact that Black lives matter," and getting to talk about that and take that turn in the middle of this piece was and still is honestly one of my favorite things because when people haven't heard the poem, they don't expect it to take that turn.
Amena Brown:
That's one of the ways I love to use humor. I can't tell you all that I start out writing the poem and I know that's how it's going to turn because I just don't. But I love that because when I have a funny poem that sort of takes a serious turn in the middle, I love it because I think people become a bit more disarmed for hearing the truth and not hearing the truth in a defensive sort of posture when they've had the opportunity to laugh and remember some things that were good memories to them and so it's fun to me to open this poem with that and then people, they're like, "Oh. Hmm."
Amena Brown:
So what is the real life story behind performing this poem for the first time? Well this is interesting because this feels a little meta. My husband and I did a YouTube series on my YouTube channel many years ago called Behind the Poetry and the initial idea for this series was going to be my husband documenting me as I'm preparing to record Amena Brown Live. A part of that was I had gone through this period where I sort of had a repertoire of old poems and in those old poems, I had a lot of great ones. So for many years, I just performed those over and over.
Amena Brown:
Then I got to a point where I sort of got tired of hearing myself say those things over and over, so I wanted to start writing some new poems. So I was doing that. That's part of how Dear TV Sitcoms got written, and then after those poems got finished in the writing side and I realized, "Oh, now I have this deadline of this live recording," so it's different than studio recording because if I'm in the studio and I say a thing wrong or the recording didn't come out how we wanted, I can go back and record it as many times as I want. But going to do a live recording, the best case scenario is to hope that you get the best out of yourself that you can get that night so that you don't have a whole lot of other stuff to go back and do on the backend.
Amena Brown:
So originally the Behind the Poetry YouTube series which is still up, you'll find the links to this in the show notes, but originally it was supposed to be sort of like my Rocky moment. That's what I wanted, for those of you that are fans of the Rocky film series, whenever Rocky gets in like his training zone, and it's like that [singing], like you feel that coming. Like I was trying to do that, but for a poem.
Amena Brown:
So when the beginning of this series, which eventually kind of converts over away from just being prep for Amena Brown Live and actually converts over to retracing my poetry steps. So it would probably be really interesting to re-watch it now but the beginning parts of that, you watch me taking you through here's how I am working my way up to this recording. Here is how I am going to take Dear TV Sitcoms out to an open mic and I think my husband was with me this night that we went. I had two or three nights that I at least had to go out and try to work the poem and read it first and then try to memorize it. I think my husband captured me stumbling and unable to remember part of the poem and that's just part of the process, how I was getting the poems memorized. As I was prepping for Amena Brown Live and I wanted to get the kinks worked out of Dear TV Sitcoms because I wanted to close the show and the album with the piece and still to this day I close a lot of my sets with Dear TV Sitcoms because it's just a perfect place to end, where you can get everybody singing together and everything, it's so wonderful.
Amena Brown:
So one of the missteps that happened, which is always interesting to me when you're taking something you've written and preparing it for stage, which is why I wanted to work the poem and I didn't want the first time I was doing it to be at the night of this recording, is sometimes you write a line and you think you're going to get a response or reaction from the audience and you don't. And then sometimes you write a line that you thought was just regular and it's totally hilarious to the crowd. Or they totally respond, right?
Amena Brown:
So one of the first times I tried to do Dear TV Sitcoms off book, I got to the line about how my loyalties always lie with the first-time Viv, and this is one of the most wonderful things about this poem. Whenever I do this poem in front of a crowd that is full of Black folks, which is what happened, that's the crowd I was working the piece in front of, and when it got to that part, they were [yells]. Like it was so much noise and applause and I was shocked because I didn't know to expect that that line was going to get that uproarious of a reaction. So I think it totally threw me off and I probably forgot my lines or something.
Amena Brown:
The Cheers song at the end, still trying to find which section of that Cheers song to use, also feeling old when I started doing Dear TV Sitcoms in front of college audiences, and of course those of you that have been performing artists or speakers in front of college crowds know that it's a weird feeling because you're getting older but the students are staying the same age all the time. So going in front of college crowds and then being like, "Yeah, yeah, I kind of recognize the last song but like where is it from?" And just being like, "Oh my god." Just feeling very, very old. Very, very old right there.
Amena Brown:
But let me say, not just feeling old, but also feeling like, "Oh no. I don't want the children to be deprived of knowing what amazing theme songs were like." I could do a whole episode talking to y'all about that but I do feel like the art of the theme song is gone. Like that era that we were in right there of the 80s into the early 90s, I mean that Golden Girls theme song was so great, the Fresh Prince theme song was so great, freaking Growing Pains, Silver Spoons, there were just so many shows that had amazing theme songs but Cheers is one of my absolute favorites so ... It has so many wonderful little pieces in it. So I spent a little bit of time trying to figure that out. Sometimes I would start singing it and the goal on stage for me is to start singing that and then at least get the audience to join in, you want to go where everybody knows your name. Like get them to join in singing with me.
Amena Brown:
So there were a couple of times, the first few times that I tried it and I thought the audience was going to sing and they didn't. So then I was just left out there like, "Ooh, I stopped singing, because I thought y'all were going to sing and you didn't." The moment I was hoping for is to start singing and then sort of back up from the mic and exit stage as the audience is singing, but I had to learn how to finesse that moment and I had to learn the way to start singing and sort of do my hands to get the audience to kind of chime in with me earlier so that everybody's comfortable singing at the top of their lungs right up until the end there.
Amena Brown:
I think another thing that I was working through just as a poet at that moment is I was sort of coming out of having done a lot of slam competition. I competed in slam for at least a couple of years, it could have been a few years. I'm like how many years was that? So I think even after deciding that I didn't necessarily want to compete in slam, I still felt the parameters of slam. I still kept that around my work so when you're performing slam poetry, slam poetry has to be in most cases, there are different variations of this, but I did team slam.
Amena Brown:
So for team slams, they had to be three minutes. The poems had to be three minutes and so a lot of my poems are somewhere between two minutes and 30 and three minutes and when I was starting to work on this poem and realizing, "Oh, this poem is kind of three and a half minutes," and trying to figure out how do I feel about that? Do I need to shorten it? Then I just thought, "You know, I don't think I'm a slam poet. I love performing spoken word. I think I'm a spoken word poet. I think I'm a great storyteller and I'd like for my poems to do that kind of work." But I'm not a great slam poet and so this poem was one of the first times that I sort of let myself get outside of those parameters and I'm really glad I did because Dear TV Sitcoms turned out to be such a wonderful stage piece to have. It is still one of my favorite pieces to perform and the last question I always ask at the end of these episodes is how do I feel about the poem now and I just ... I love it so much.
Amena Brown:
For a long time, I feel like now, I mean I haven't performed in so long so who knows, but I feel like if I'm somewhere and somebody's like, "Do a poem for us," I feel like it would probably be this one because I've done this poem in front of so many varied audiences. Young, old, different cultures, different race, like all different parts of the country. Like in the city, in more rural areas, like in the Midwest, in the South, in the Northeast. I mean I have taken this poem so many places and in front of so many crowds and I love as a performer ...
Amena Brown:
I'll tell you all something that's kind of a twofold thought actually. I love as a performer having work that I can perform just about anywhere. Because I think it's cool to have work that you can do. Like I would think to myself like, "Could I take this poem if I were going to do this for a room full of elderly folks? Could I do this poem there? Yeah, I think I could. In front of a room full of college students? Yeah. High school students? Sure." I love having work like that. As a performer, it's a dope feeling to think that you've written something that so many people find themselves in it or find a piece of themselves in it or find interest in it.
Amena Brown:
I will say another lesson that I've learned though is sometimes it's also good to have poems or have work that you do that is for a specific audience, that isn't for everybody, and I think that's the lesson I had to learn. I don't think I knew that at the time that I was writing Dear TV Sitcoms but I know it now and I remember meeting this wonderful Black man poet in Chicago and we were talking about each other's work, we never met each other or heard of each other or anything, and he was telling me, he said, "I only write for Black people." He was like, "I'm not writing anything for white people." He was like, "I write for Black people." For me at the time, of course because I'm performing in white spaces all the time, it felt really weird for me to hear him say that at the time but now I totally understand now what he meant, that there are times that a writer writes and it isn't for everybody.
Amena Brown:
There are times that it is for a specific crowd or a specific group and it's okay to not take your work and make it for everyone. I think that's especially true for folks who have been marginalized, to have work that you're like, "Yo, this work, this is for the queer folks, and it's okay if it's for queer folks and if I'm not queer, it's okay for me to listen to it or watch the performance or whatever as long as I watch with the lens that it wasn't written for me, that I'm here as a guest and I don't have a say. I'm just here to get the honor of observing and I'm glad that that's a lesson I have too." So I love the both/and of that. I love having some pieces like when I did the Behind the Poetry episode on my poem Margaret, Margaret is another poem like Dear TV Sitcoms that I can take in front of almost any audience of women anywhere and do that poem and it goes, it flies every time.
Amena Brown:
I also love that in both of these poems, they are poems that are sort of in my mind written where they can apply in part to every person that's listening, but there are also parts of them that are distinctly black and distinctly Black girl or Black woman, you know? And I love having that in my work too and so I have some poems like this that I love to do in front of any audience and I have some other ones that they were written for Black women or they were written for Black folks and I love that young poet that I was talking to taught me that because I think that's good too, and I think it's good for us who are folks that consume art to remember that, that not all of the art was made for us or made for our commentary or made for us to understand or glean all these things from. That sometimes the artist is making that for somebody that isn't you and you're just getting the honor of getting to be a fly on the wall for that little bit of a moment that's allowed and to make sure as consumers that we honor that.
Amena Brown:
Thank you all so much for listening to my Behind the Poetry about Dear TV Sitcoms, one of my favorite and most fun poems to perform and I hope soon after this recording that I get a chance to get back out there and do some performances for you all. I want to do something a little different for this week's edition of Give Her a Crown. I want to give a crown to everyone listening who is going through a hard thing right now. That may also be a private thing. For all of you that may be going through something that totally went different than you expected or than you were raised to believe that it would. TV sitcoms don't have the corner market on how the stories of our lives get written. In real life sometimes, there might be happy beginnings instead of happy endings. Sometimes there are happy beginnings and shitty endings. Sometimes it just doesn't turn out how we might have hoped and that can be really, really hard.
Amena Brown:
So if you're listening, and you know what I mean, I want you to give yourself a crown. There can be a lot of beauty in the life we've got. Our lives can be wonderful, even if they don't wrap up clean like the end of a sitcom. So hey, you, give yourself a crown.
Amena Brown:
HER with Amena Brown is produced by Matt Owen for Sol Graffiti Productions as a part of the Seneca Women's Podcast Network in partnership with iHeartRadio. Thanks for listening, and don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review the podcast.