Teen selected as National Student Poet writes about immigrant family and identity
The late poet Adrienne Rich wrote about a spring-fed standing pipe on a hill road near her California home, where locals come to collect cold water into jugs.
A “particularly delicious and good” tap water, Rich says, “tastes of this place, sharp with memories.”
On the other hand, she observes, bottled water from the store “reminds me of nothing.”
“To have no love for the taste of the water you drink is a loss of vitality.”
These observations are from “What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics” (1993), a meditation on the dangers of forgetting: Without shared knowledge, a community succumbs to “a leak in history,” Rich warns.
“The poorer we become, the less we remember what we had.”
For Rich, wealth is rooted in community: shared recipes, poems, songs, games, stories, knowledge of the land and love of particular language all become identity.
Rich calls this knowledge passed down generation to generation a “Sensual vitality ... essential to the struggle for life.”
Juliet Lubwama agrees. The 17-year-old poet writes about family and the struggle to find identity. Essential to her practice is an exploration of what it means to be an American and to be the child of immigrants.
She scrutinizes her American and African heritages by telling and collecting stories.
Lubwama, who has two younger siblings, has twice visited family in Africa. Her parents immigrated from Uganda before she was born, and she grew up in Downingtown, Pennsylvania.
“There are so many stories of resilience and struggle and bravery in my community that I still haven't heard. I want to pass on stories about the livelihoods of people of color in the United States.”
As a member of the 2017 class of National Student Poets representing the northeast, Juliet Lubwama has a broad platform. She has had a busy year sharing her poetry and teaching.
Last week, for National Poetry Month, she read and taught in Vermont schools. This week she will read and teach poetry workshops at Dover High School and the Dover Public Library.
The Downingtown Stem Academy senior, who aspires to be a neurologist, believes that poems build bridges of empathy between cultures, beliefs and people.
Her poems address and seek to stem what Adrienne Rich calls “a leak in history.”
She has worked on community service projects such as workshops with communities of color and immigrants in Philadelphia. At a workshop with volunteers at Chester County Hospital, she introduced haiku writing as a form of healing and reconciliation.
She suggested the short poems be displayed around the hospital, to make a nurse, doctor or patient smile:
here, in this place of
healing, hearts reemerging.
bodies find themselves.
Passionate about mental illness advocacy, the young poet will attend the University of Pennsylvania this fall to begin studies in the fields of medicine and health science.
Lubwama got the news of her selection as a 2017 National Student Poet last summer. The designation is the highest honor available to youth poets presenting original work. The program is jointly administered by the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and the nonprofit Alliance for Young Artists & Writers, which administers the Scholastic Awards.
Looking for a place to submit her poems, Juliet Lubwama found the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards and submitted two poems. She ended up winning two national medals.
Then, along with four other high school poets, Lubwama was appointed as a national youth ambassador for poetry. A pinning ceremony took place at the Library of Congress.
Lubwama says she has been most moved this year by the reaction to a poem she wrote for the March for Our Lives rally in West Chester:
There, in the corner,
spectacles smashed in mercy. As if it were better
not to see what was already a tragedy. The trees
becoming barrels, the sun, a silent mouth.
— excerpt, “Seventeen: A Eulogy”
“It reminded me of how deep a connection poetry can make, uniting people behind a common cause. I was able to channel my own frustrations, which other people in the audience could relate to.”
One of Lubwama’s favorite poems is "The Gift" by Li-Young Lee. “It revolves around a tender moment between father and son, and how the son passes that ‘gift’ on to the world,” she explains.
She believes anyone at any stage of their life can learn from Lee’s poem. I believe poetry readers and our community, present and future, will learn much from this fierce and gifted young poet.
JoAnn Balingit is a writer, editor and educator who served as Delaware’s poet laureate from 2008 to 2015. To celebrate National Poetry Month she highlights local poets and weekly events in “On Poetry.” For more on JoAnn’s upcoming events and classes visit http://joannbalingit.org.
If You Go
• Juliet Lubwama Poetry Workshop. Saturday, April 21, 1 p.m.-3:30 p.m. Dover Public Library, 35 Loockerman Plaza, Dover. (302) 736-7030, free. Call to register.
• World War I & America Writing Workshop. Saturday, April 21, 1 p.m.-3 p.m. Teens and adults: How should democratic society rally support forwar, and how should it deal with dissent at home? RamonadeFelice Long, workshop facilitator. Delaware History Museum, 505 N. Market Street, Wilmington. (302) 655-7161. deinfo@dehistory.org. Free. Reservations requested.
• Poets Corner. Poet Linda Blaskey reads favorite poets. Saturday, April 21, 4 p.m. St. Thomas Episcopal Church, 276 S. College Ave. Newark. Free-will offering.
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The Gift
By Li-Young Lee
To pull the metal splinter from my palm
my father recited a story in a low voice.
I watched his lovely face and not the blade.
Before the story ended, he’d removed
the iron sliver I thought I’d die from.
I can’t remember the tale,
but hear his voice still, a well
of dark water, a prayer.
And I recall his hands,
two measures of tenderness
he laid against my face,
the flames of discipline
he raised above my head.
Had you entered that afternoon
you would have thought you saw a man
planting something in a boy’s palm,
a silver tear, a tiny flame.
Had you followed that boy
you would have arrived here,
where I bend over my wife’s right hand.
Look how I shave her thumbnail down
so carefully she feels no pain.
Watch as I lift the splinter out.
I was seven when my father
took my hand like this,
and I did not hold that shard
between my fingers and think,
Metal that will bury me,
christen it Little Assassin,
Ore Going Deep for My Heart.
And I did not lift up my wound and cry,
Death visited here!
I did what a child does
when he’s given something to keep.
I kissed my father.
“The Gift” from Rose. Copyright ©1986 by Li-Young Lee. Reprinted with the permission of BOA Editions Ltd., www.boaeditions.org. For more on Lee, visit www.poets.org
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Fingerspelling
By Juliet Lubwama
Sand dusted hands remind her of Uganda.
Sun-kissed earth on sun-licked skin,
gravel glinting in the grooves of her palms.
Childhood is this: burying our skinny wrists into the sand,
sitting half-submerged in briny water,
starfish and seaweed tickling our toes.
Sketching messages into the soil like prophets,
for this rift may be wide, but we are wiser.
Her arthritic fingers flutter, trace a shadow of a house: shaky and uncertain.
I imagine grandmother young, her eyes crinkled like accordions,
her cheeks not yet sun-kissed, her hips a sweeping hill.
Lips that whispered Luganda as if it were honeydew,
sweet and seafoam green. I see young grandmother
standing on a veranda I have only seen in photographs and sand,
not close enough to grasp the murmurs of my budding father,
not yet stern, still waiting for my mother.
Only when two hands become four, mine on hers,
does this ravine between two realms swallow itself.
We speak through life, through consciousness,
the shapes we outline in the sand:
circles, handprints,
a heart
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Trying to Find Home
By Juliet Lubwama
my parents crossed the ocean
cracking Kant’s and Locke’s philosophies
between their teeth like walnuts. western learned
but foreign, in how they hold themselves,
like waterlogged apples dangling by the stem.
finding unexpected asylum with strangers,
the familiar lilts in their tones. carving homes
out of each other. but when a cousin questions
where I’m from, my tongue
becomes a salmon, pink and floundering.
as if an answer could be found in a lifetime.
my family tree is worn and trampled,
sieged by storms, by dictators, by slavery.
my kin arrived with textbooks swaying on their heads
and shackles round their ankles.
still, in a land we have yet to call home,
our neighbors see our cacao hands,
whether they be doused in blood or salt water.
even this can become a sanctuary.
Poems by Juliet Lubwama, courtesy of the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers/the National Student Poets Program. For more on the National Student Poets program go to www.artandwriting.org