“If you cannot be honest with the writing, if writing about it wasn’t difficult and hard and almost even painful, if it came too easy then the poem isn’t completed.” -- Pages Matam
No one could have captured the essence of what it means to write the self more honestly. Pages Matam is a spoken word artist and poet for whom poetry is inherently personal—inherently political. His poetry is social justice.
Pages Matam, a Cameroonian performer based in Washington, D.C., is D.O.P.E.—that is, Director of Poetry Events at Busboys and Poets and Callaloo Fellow. He is the champion of the 2014 National Poetry Slam, and his collections of poems, The Heart of a Comet (Write Bloody, 2014) won Beltway Poetry Quarterly's best new book of 2014.
As students of Dora Malech’s Social Justice and Poetry class at Johns Hopkins University, we (Rejjia Camphor —Baltimore City College Senior and Ayesha Shibli—JHU Junior) conducted an interview with Pages over email and in person.
After initially conducting an interview with him over email, we officially met Pages at the 2016 Split This Rock Festival to ask a few follow up questions about the root of his poetry. As the story goes, it only takes one great episode of Power Rangers Time Force (PRTF) to make a man a poet. Before, Pages thought that poetry was something only old white men did, but after Episode 35 of PRTF, he became aware of poetry as the ultimate gamechanger with the girls. He wrote his first poem to a girl he had a crush on in middle school. After that, his teacher encouraged him to keep writing, in which he did, mostly to himself.
When asked at what point in his life poetry became political, Pages cited his ninth grade high school experience of a National Black History Month assembly. A junior classmate of his named Aalyia Carter performed a slam poem called “Give Me Back My Black Man.” Pages amazed, wondered: “What is this?!! It’s like hip hop but with no beat. This is awesome!!” He immediately got involved, joining Lyrikal Storm, the slam team his classmate was apart of and got advice from a close teacher of his named Mr. Adams.
Poetry to Matam became social justice by being under the influence of Adams and using his experience to write. He thought about his homeland and how there wasn’t a lot of African writers and poets. He saw the need for them, the need for telling stories in a unique way, so he did. His personal became political, he would write for others, and for himself. In questioning why his language must be italicized for clarity—why his narrative was not represented, Pages has made his poetry a platform for social activism, sexual assault awareness and immigration.
Pages Matam will be hosting a poetry workshop on April 24, 2016 in the park. On April 26, 2016, he will be competing in the Beltway Grand Slam Final in Brooklyn. Also, be on the lookout for his next book, coming soon in 2017.
Our meeting concluded with a final piece of advice from Pages: do not force writing. Poems have to be difficult to write—so difficult that you don’t know how to write it anymore. The key to it is time. Every poem has its own time. It can take weeks, months, even years before you can finish a poem. But the most important thing is that you be as honest as possible. Don’t be afraid. Don’t worry about writing the best poem, just write the poem.
Below is the transcript of the initial email interview.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
What do you think God’s greatest creation is?
I don’t know. May be Human Beings?
Where does your poetry come from, in other words what is the root of your poetry?
My poetry is rooted in my daily exploration of myself and the world as they relate to each other. Navigating spaces of identity, masculinity, race, and love in its various layers.
Please tell me, Mr. Pages, what is it about anime that makes everyone so goddamn crazy in a good way?
It is another fantasy world. An escape. A place where your imagination can run wild with characters that you can connect with because they seem like the kind of extraordinary person you already feel you are or feel you can become. In other words, it is just hella fun.
What is your greatest fear and how does it guide or hinder how you live your life?
My greatest fear is to die alone. It doesn’t hinder me from living my life at all, but pushes me to live life to the fullest and cherish the ones I do have around me.
What are your favorite things to do?
Read. Write. Play video games. Work with young people. Cook for the people I love. Travel.
What is one thing about you that nobody knows?
Now if I told you then you would know, lol, okay I can tell you that I am OCD and also have a very large collection of funky socks.
I noticed that your selected poetry on your website speaks to very specific yet shared experiences (that is, experiences others have faced). How do you approach writing the personal, and in what ways (if at all) do you distance yourself from the subject as you write?
If you cannot be honest with the writing, if writing about it wasn’t difficult and hard and almost even painful, if it came too easy then the poem isn’t completed. The personal is the political, and I approach writing from a very unapologetic space.
I read in one of your interviews, with “okayafrica,” that you curse in English when you are the angriest—as part of a question on the intersection of language and identity. In your spoken word performances you have the opportunity to perform an accent, but how else do you convey this part of your identity?
In the stories I tell, but most importantly by just being on stage. Just me owning and having pride in who I am and where I come from and existing in a space is enough to convey that identity. I don’t have to say that I am from Cameroon explicitly in my work to validate that identity.
In that same interview you mentioned the “sort of angst or grief” you sometimes feel about being unable to write in a native tongue—as this is something I personally contend with I really appreciated your description of your struggle. How have you worked through this, and do you have any favorite poems in a different language?
I do have some poems of mine I love in different languages, and pieces by other poets like Safia Elhillo, Yusek Komunyakaa, Warsan Shire, and others. I’ve worked through this angst by pushing through the writing.
You probably get this question a lot, but how did you get the name Pages? In what ways do you feel that making your own name has shaped your identity as an artist?
The name Pages came out of high school after being in my after school poetry club. I used to write long epic 5 or more pages poems, so they started calling me Pages. The name stuck, there was even an acronym at one point in my youth, lol, but now I own that name and I love how it carries so much of my identity not just as an artist, but as a person moving through a lot of spaces where people that look, talk, and operate in the way that I do, have been rejected. My name is a rebellion and a testimony, both weapon and shield, both shining light and shelter in the shadows.
A selection of your poetry from The Heart of a Comet contains many Biblical references alongside painful experiences. How has religion or any other spiritual source influenced your writing and in what ways do you think it is conducive to healing (if at all)?
My spiritual walk is constant negotiation of trauma and faith, and how both intrinsically shape my writing, but my daily walk through life is trusting my process, and trusting my healing to take place in a very thorough and succinct manner that is both holy and holistic.
No one could have captured the essence of what it means to write the self more honestly. Pages Matam is a spoken word artist and poet for whom poetry is inherently personal—inherently political. His poetry is social justice.
Pages Matam, a Cameroonian performer based in Washington, D.C., is D.O.P.E.—that is, Director of Poetry Events at Busboys and Poets and Callaloo Fellow. He is the champion of the 2014 National Poetry Slam, and his collections of poems, The Heart of a Comet (Write Bloody, 2014) won Beltway Poetry Quarterly's best new book of 2014.
As students of Dora Malech’s Social Justice and Poetry class at Johns Hopkins University, we (Rejjia Camphor —Baltimore City College Senior and Ayesha Shibli—JHU Junior) conducted an interview with Pages over email and in person.
After initially conducting an interview with him over email, we officially met Pages at the 2016 Split This Rock Festival to ask a few follow up questions about the root of his poetry. As the story goes, it only takes one great episode of Power Rangers Time Force (PRTF) to make a man a poet. Before, Pages thought that poetry was something only old white men did, but after Episode 35 of PRTF, he became aware of poetry as the ultimate gamechanger with the girls. He wrote his first poem to a girl he had a crush on in middle school. After that, his teacher encouraged him to keep writing, in which he did, mostly to himself.
When asked at what point in his life poetry became political, Pages cited his ninth grade high school experience of a National Black History Month assembly. A junior classmate of his named Aalyia Carter performed a slam poem called “Give Me Back My Black Man.” Pages amazed, wondered: “What is this?!! It’s like hip hop but with no beat. This is awesome!!” He immediately got involved, joining Lyrikal Storm, the slam team his classmate was apart of and got advice from a close teacher of his named Mr. Adams.
Poetry to Matam became social justice by being under the influence of Adams and using his experience to write. He thought about his homeland and how there wasn’t a lot of African writers and poets. He saw the need for them, the need for telling stories in a unique way, so he did. His personal became political, he would write for others, and for himself. In questioning why his language must be italicized for clarity—why his narrative was not represented, Pages has made his poetry a platform for social activism, sexual assault awareness and immigration.
Pages Matam will be hosting a poetry workshop on April 24, 2016 in the park. On April 26, 2016, he will be competing in the Beltway Grand Slam Final in Brooklyn. Also, be on the lookout for his next book, coming soon in 2017.
Our meeting concluded with a final piece of advice from Pages: do not force writing. Poems have to be difficult to write—so difficult that you don’t know how to write it anymore. The key to it is time. Every poem has its own time. It can take weeks, months, even years before you can finish a poem. But the most important thing is that you be as honest as possible. Don’t be afraid. Don’t worry about writing the best poem, just write the poem.
Below is the transcript of the initial email interview.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
What do you think God’s greatest creation is?
I don’t know. May be Human Beings?
Where does your poetry come from, in other words what is the root of your poetry?
My poetry is rooted in my daily exploration of myself and the world as they relate to each other. Navigating spaces of identity, masculinity, race, and love in its various layers.
Please tell me, Mr. Pages, what is it about anime that makes everyone so goddamn crazy in a good way?
It is another fantasy world. An escape. A place where your imagination can run wild with characters that you can connect with because they seem like the kind of extraordinary person you already feel you are or feel you can become. In other words, it is just hella fun.
What is your greatest fear and how does it guide or hinder how you live your life?
My greatest fear is to die alone. It doesn’t hinder me from living my life at all, but pushes me to live life to the fullest and cherish the ones I do have around me.
What are your favorite things to do?
Read. Write. Play video games. Work with young people. Cook for the people I love. Travel.
What is one thing about you that nobody knows?
Now if I told you then you would know, lol, okay I can tell you that I am OCD and also have a very large collection of funky socks.
I noticed that your selected poetry on your website speaks to very specific yet shared experiences (that is, experiences others have faced). How do you approach writing the personal, and in what ways (if at all) do you distance yourself from the subject as you write?
If you cannot be honest with the writing, if writing about it wasn’t difficult and hard and almost even painful, if it came too easy then the poem isn’t completed. The personal is the political, and I approach writing from a very unapologetic space.
I read in one of your interviews, with “okayafrica,” that you curse in English when you are the angriest—as part of a question on the intersection of language and identity. In your spoken word performances you have the opportunity to perform an accent, but how else do you convey this part of your identity?
In the stories I tell, but most importantly by just being on stage. Just me owning and having pride in who I am and where I come from and existing in a space is enough to convey that identity. I don’t have to say that I am from Cameroon explicitly in my work to validate that identity.
In that same interview you mentioned the “sort of angst or grief” you sometimes feel about being unable to write in a native tongue—as this is something I personally contend with I really appreciated your description of your struggle. How have you worked through this, and do you have any favorite poems in a different language?
I do have some poems of mine I love in different languages, and pieces by other poets like Safia Elhillo, Yusek Komunyakaa, Warsan Shire, and others. I’ve worked through this angst by pushing through the writing.
You probably get this question a lot, but how did you get the name Pages? In what ways do you feel that making your own name has shaped your identity as an artist?
The name Pages came out of high school after being in my after school poetry club. I used to write long epic 5 or more pages poems, so they started calling me Pages. The name stuck, there was even an acronym at one point in my youth, lol, but now I own that name and I love how it carries so much of my identity not just as an artist, but as a person moving through a lot of spaces where people that look, talk, and operate in the way that I do, have been rejected. My name is a rebellion and a testimony, both weapon and shield, both shining light and shelter in the shadows.
A selection of your poetry from The Heart of a Comet contains many Biblical references alongside painful experiences. How has religion or any other spiritual source influenced your writing and in what ways do you think it is conducive to healing (if at all)?
My spiritual walk is constant negotiation of trauma and faith, and how both intrinsically shape my writing, but my daily walk through life is trusting my process, and trusting my healing to take place in a very thorough and succinct manner that is both holy and holistic.
Rejjia Camphor is a senior at Baltimore City College High School. She plans to go to college and study Creative Writing and Biology with maybe a minor in architecture and business management. Rejjia has always been heavily engaged in community organizing and outreach in Baltimore. She is a writer, poet, activist and nerd. Prior to the class, Rejjia was working with Writers in Baltimore Schools as a Creative Writing Fellow and has been working with Youth As Resources as the Vice President of the organization and the Chair of Grantmaking Community.
Ayesha Shibli is a junior Writing Seminars and English major at Johns Hopkins University. Her interest in poetry and social justice have intersected in a community-based learning class offered at JHU. Prior to this class, Ayesha's engagement with Baltimore City has included teaching creative writing classes at Roland Park Elementary/Middle School. Following the events of the Baltimore Uprising, both Ayesha and her students engaged in the conversation through poetry and prose in class and out.
Ayesha Shibli is a junior Writing Seminars and English major at Johns Hopkins University. Her interest in poetry and social justice have intersected in a community-based learning class offered at JHU. Prior to this class, Ayesha's engagement with Baltimore City has included teaching creative writing classes at Roland Park Elementary/Middle School. Following the events of the Baltimore Uprising, both Ayesha and her students engaged in the conversation through poetry and prose in class and out.
