For Latinx Heritage Month and Beyond’s penultimate program, poet Denice Frohman performed her brand of witty and biting cultural narratives in spoken word Wednesday night at Jack Magee’s Pub & Grill.
The event began with four performances from members of Bowdoin’s Slam Poet Society before Frohman took the stage.
Frohman, a queer Latina woman who grew up in New York City, tackles issues of identity, race and privilege in her work.
Her first poem of the night, “Accents”, celebrates her Puerto Rican mother, who makes “play-doh out of concrete English.” Later, she spoke about two gay men she saw at a Puerto Rican Day festival who beautifully and unapologetically conquered the space around them on the dance floor.
Almost all of the poems she performed trace a personal narrative or dilemma. Even “The Hour Dylan Roof Sat in the Church”, a poem Frohman wrote as she dealt with grief in the wake of Roof’s shooting of nine African-Americans at an historically black church in Charleston, South Carolina, was in part inspired by a conversation with her hairdresser.
“You have to think about the spaces in which you operate with privilege and how you talk to people moving along the spectrum [of racist actions],” said Frohman. “How often am I who I say I am?”
For Frohman, it is this personal connection to her work that got her into performing.
“I hated writing when I was in high school,” said Frohman. “Generally speaking, I wasn’t exposed to a lot of writers of color, so when I got to college my freshman year, I was exposed to spoken word. That really exposed me to a lot of writers of color and this idea that you could sound like yourself and you didn’t have to change who you were.”
The performance drew a packed crowd to the pub, and inspired many of the audience members to begin or continue to write their own work
“It was really refreshing because she is familiar with putting her culture into her work,” said Esther Nunoo ’17, one of the night’s opening performers. “She has an accent, you hear her accent, she owns her accent and I love that. I think that’s dope, and she makes me want to work.”
“Things like this are fantastic,” said Maddie Lemal-Brown ’18, another slam poet performer. “It’s expressed in a way that you can’t do in any other place. I think it should be mandatory for every Bowdoin student to come and see amazing performers like Denice.”
The final event for Latinx Heritage Month and Beyond will take place Thursday, November 3, when Pulitzer Prize-winning author Junot Díaz speaks at Kresge auditorium.