"Pages Matam" the Standard Bearer in D.C. Poetry.
This is a hard man to find. Pages was named by his friends in high school because he wrote poems that spanned many pages. He is a very busy man. Countless phone calls made and then I was finally able to corner in a time to meet. His book was being launched later this day. He has a tour coming up as well. We are in his office he is answering questions and doing three other things at the same time.
MH: Please tell me what a day in your life is like.
P: Hectic. Organizing, running around the city, teaching, informing, hosting, coordinating, being a dad. Then doing the sh*t all over again. It's a lot [LAUGHS]
P: Even weekends. I work seven days a week. I don't get days off.
MH: Is Matam your actual last name?
P: Matam yes. [PRONOUNCING IT CORRECTLY]
MH: Let me guess Central West Africa.
P: It is central Africa. It is Cameroon. Which is where I was born and raised for a good part of my life. Did some stints in Europe and other parts of Africa but for the most part born and raised in Cameroon until I moved here when I was 11 years old. In North East D.C. for a little while, then moved into Maryland. Been bouncing around Maryland ever since, even though I always worked in D.C.
MH: Okay so African parents hearing their son say he wants to be this performance artist poet. How does that go over with them?
P: Not well [LAUGHS] that did not go well at all. As you may know in a lot of African cultures or all African cultures [LAUGHS] doctor [CLAP], lawyer [CLAP], banker [CLAP]...
P: Right, or engineer. Those are your options for jobs. So yeah when I said this is where my passion is in education, in informative work it did not go well. My mom disowned me for like a year. That was fun. Other than that peachy.
It's not the traditional thing, you know.
P: They can't see the immediate, like how you gonna feed yourself. Especially when you starting thinking about the components of the patriarchal man and having to be providing and blah blah blah and the quantification of manhood. A lot of that is what is your status. Your physical stature and then your socio-political economic status. So it was tough getting that support at first but it came around.
MH: I might add that when they hear names like Achebe or others the parents are down and are like "He's great!" but when you say you want to be like that it's like "Naw". [LAUGH]
P: Right it's like those things happen and they're like anomalies. No one actually believes that is possible. They're like you are not Chinua Achebe. The mentality is that there is no security in this type of work, being an artist. Which in actuality is kinda true. A lot of your income relies on your work and if the fans support it. There is going to be a lot more struggle than there is going to be success. I don't care about that. Success to me is seeing a kid having his life saved because he wrote his first poem about healing from whatever trauma he went through. This work is about connecting with people and being an agent of healing. If that magic happens then its cool. That is in the work satisfaction. In the personal I write for me cause I need my own damn healing as well.
MH: I travel around a lot for MightHip and you are known and respected around the country in poetry circles. In fact you seem to be the top dog or at least in the top five in D.C. when people think top poets. What is that like superstar status in the poetry world?
P: To be honest I hate it. I don't like attention.
MH: You gotta be kidding.
P: It's so funny, people say "Do you see the work that you are doing?" Exactly, keyword "work". I treat it like a job. I hate attention I don't like being around people.
MH: Do you put up the youtube videos of yourself?
P: No other people do. I don't like listening to my work and seeing myself. I am extremely shy which is also why I don't know how to take compliments.
MH: So wait when I said that to you did you not know that about yourself?
P: [PAUSE] I may. Yes. I do.
P: It's not something that I harp on. I don't believe all the time because honestly there are like ten cats that are way better than me.
MH: So when you step on stage for a slam are you not trying to slay and think I want all 10's.
P: I'm past that now. When I was younger and using that to mask my own insecurities maybe. But now when I have confronted my insecurities and I am very honest about that sh*t. Now its more of a place where I am trying to connect with people. If I connect I connect if I don't I don't. Especially with slam the competition, it is extremely fickle.
MH: Yeah you can get cheated.
P: At one venue you get 10's and at another you get 5s and 6s. If you let that get to you, it's gone f#ck witchu. I had to learn that the hard way. Them scores don't matter at the end of the day. Those 6s and 5s from those random people that you are never going to see again but you have that one woman or one man that comes up to you after and was like "I needed to hear that." Like, if it wasn't for this, this would have happened. That's the best score right there!
So that's where I am at now. A lot of these kids that I mentor are hella good right now. In about two three years they are gonna surpass all of us. I work hard at this and I look back at yesterday like it never happened.
MH: So what is the next level after this?
P: I am trying to get back to playwriting. My first piece of art was writing plays and play acting from a young age. Poetry just found me in high school and kinda took over my life. I wanna do plays and maybe go back to music. A fusion of the three. I am trying to do this travelling school thing. My biggest dream is to own my own school. A performance art school or a school that teaches everything in life through performing arts and imagination. A Charles Xavier school for gifted youngsters but the power is their imagination.
MH: Finish this sentence for me, "Beauty is..."
P: In the eye of the beholder. [LAUGHS] Beauty is an act of radical self love.
MH: So just to make sure you are not telling people to go out and masturbate a whole lot. Expand. [LAUGH]
P: Right. Right. Right. When you love yourself. When you love you. Everything about you holistically. Physical, mental, spiritual, emotional level and you have the awareness and the maturity of those aspects of your life and you know to nurture your light. Take care of your different energies and different points of your chakras. Understanding yourself within so that you can understand the world outside better and know how to interact with it. Understand how it interacts with you. That's when you find the beauty in things. That's when you find the beauty in yourself and the beauty in others. Even the beauty in the darkness. That is beauty for me, it is an act not a spontaneous thing. A diligent act. A choice.
There are people who have deemed things beautiful and not. People who say coarse hair is not pretty. Wearing certain kinds of clothes is not classy. Classy is just another word for beautiful. Everything is about aesthetic and keeping it that way. Speaking this way is not beautiful. Acting this way is not beautiful because it is not proper, it is not western. It's not European. It's not white, are a lot of the standards applied throughout this World. We have to adhere to this gendered, male-centric white European system of beauty. That's why when you find that radical self love, don't nobody can tell you nothing.
MH: Since you brought it up let me ask you something. Black beauty and the perception seems to be changing in mass media. For example the sistah, actress Lupita you know her...
MH: She is getting all this press. She is getting recognition for her beauty from white people. Are they fetish"ing" us?
P: When aren't they? [LAUGH]
MH: I don't know, I kind of think they are really acknowledging our forms now. It is not the Halle Berry beauty, this is the more African image the non light skin recognition of beauty now a days.
P: There are certain levels of genuine appreciation. I am not discounting that at all. For the most part there is still a more prevalent rate of the fetish-sizing. Especially when it comes to the black body. That's been around for thousands of years. It's still going to happen because when it comes to the white gaze it is always going to be with this envy. Always. Why is this like this? How is this like this? Instead of those types of questions coming from an empathetic active listening and understanding place. It comes more from a "dissective" place. Like, "Oh my gosh what can I do with this?" or "What can this do for me?". "How can I acquire this and make it mine?" Versus "How do I appreciate it for what it is and celebrate it?"
P: You get a lot more of the former than the latter. It's very mean, it's very cruel. That's where you get these whole aspects of racism and class and gender and all these different kinds of things that try to knock down that beauty. If I can't have it then no one else can. So what systems can I put in place to knock that down.
MH: You are very intellectual. Is that from your parents, the travelling, your contacts in school, what?
P: All of it. I am an amalgam of the many lands and territories and atmospheres and people that I have been around. I have been blessed in that way. There are kids I know here that have never been past the ten blocks that they live in. I'm talking from the suburbs to the hood.
MH: Or they go to Jamaica and don't leave the confines of the hotel.
P: Exactly. They want 1-800-Sandals Jamaica.
MH: Would you shoot the sheriff or would you shoot the deputy?
P: I don't like guns. I don't want to shoot nobody. I'd put a gun to they head and say, "we gonna sit down and talk about this." That's what we're gonna do. I might shoot you in the kneecap.
MH: Thank you for this interview.
http://www.pagesmatam.com/
Editors Note: Support by purchasing his book "Heart of a Comet"
