P:TD in the news

Words of power sounds of promise

By Steve Morse, Globe Staff, 1/23/2004

Ayisha Knight is unstoppable, but nothing has come easy. By the time she was a teen, she had already faced a lifetime of adversity that might have paralyzed a lesser soul. She was born deaf. She was the confused daughter of a white Jewish mother and a half-black, half-Cherokee father who left them. She was raped by a family friend at age 13. And she experienced enough racism and alienation to keep her locked in a shell.

Through the arts -- poetry and photography -- she eventually found her way out. Now she reveals bold details of her journey in a CD she can't hear, one that is believed to be the first musical album structured around the verse of a deaf poet. Her friends in the Boston arts community recited her verse and added music -- mostly hip-hop beats and other contemporary textures -- to this powerful testimony. The disc was produced last year, but there was no official release, and only now are people beginning to take notice.

" Some people said I was crazy to [encourage] this, but I just trusted the people around me," Knight, 33, notes through her sign-language interpreter, Diane McKeon, in a recent interview at the Diesel Cafe in Davis Square.

Knight is a short, vibrant woman whose eyes dart behind wire-rim glasses. She answers questions so expressively through her signing that you can see the charisma that rallies everyone around her.

"I just wake up full of ideas, and I can't wait to write them down," says Knight, who lives in Cambridge. "Being deaf, I see the world through a different pair of eyes."

Her stunning CD, "Until," is also a multicultural marvel, for it features the spoken-word (and occasional singing) voices of a variety of poets of mixed descent, along with the music of Francis Phan, a Vietnamese-American who composed it in his Slingshot Studio in Cambridge. And the CD has been co-released by two new multicultural labels -- Phanai Records (run by Phan) and Empowerment Records, led by Scherazade Daruvalla King. King also directs Project: Think Different, which uses music, film, and video to promote social change.

"All the vocals were prerecorded, and then I went in and did the music on top of it," says Phan, who used synthesizers to craft and orchestrate the sounds.

"It's a huge leap of faith for Ayisha to let us do this," says Phan, who is also a computer programmer and designer of Knight's website, www.ayishaknight.com. "But she would challenge me as I did it. Someone would tell her that the vocals could be more prominent here or there, and she would ask me about it. But I was also able to be very creative with it. It was just an incredible experience."

The original idea for the CD came in a brainstorming session with two poet friends of Knight, Toni Asante Lightfoot and Oz Okoawo, together with Phan. "They asked me what I could do, and it went from there," he says. The aim was not just to make music, but to spread the tale of Knight's survival. A Manhattan native who also lived in Berkeley, Calif. (where she was raped in a basement), Knight, with the help of a deaf therapist, was able to cope with her emotional wounds and attend Galludet University, the national university of the deaf in Washington, D.C. That's where Knight first began presenting her poems in sign-language performances at a coffeehouse 10 years ago.

"Her art provides a forum for healing and transformation," King says. "And we believe we can use spoken word and hip-hop as an alternative media to reach people."

"Ayisha can't hear us, but she inspires us," says Lightfoot, the poet who did much of the dramatically phrased spoken-word work on the album. "And I've got to say that Ayisha has more lyricism and more rhythm than many people who can hear." Knight moved to Boston in 1998 and attended a South End poetry reading three years ago that Lightfoot gave at the Blackout Arts Collective in the Piano Factory. Other local poets such as Okoawo (who would put up much of the money for Knight's CD) and Nuri Chandler Smith read her poems at future meetings of the collective, and both also appear on the CD.

They and others who attended the Blackout Arts Collective meetings were likewise floored by Knight's verse. "She made a large contribution to the poetry community," says Iyeoka Ivie Okoawo, a Nigerian-born slam poet (and Oz's wife) who has a CD coming out on Phanai Records tomorrow (the label's second release). Knight performed at some of the readings, using sign language while another poet read her work and gave her visual cues. "I was blown away. She captivated me so much that I would dance to her pieces," says Wyatt Jackson, a local dancer and choreographer who has worked with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.

Knight's CD is basically divided into three chronological sections, starting when she was a confused teen on "Vocal Conundrums" and "Ebony," in which she writes, "zombies . . . want me to cling to the charred driftwood of biracial shame." That leads to later poems in which she is able to open up and share her pain.

"Until" is a percussive, hip-hoppy track with a revelation about being "not Jewish enough because my skin is black, not Cherokee enough because each generation gets divided in half/ Some see me as not straight because I share my life and love with a woman, but there are others who are quick to let me know I'm not lesbian enough because in the past I've loved a man/Not enough labels to go around/Not enough STRENGTH to say ENOUGH!!!" The last section is all about empowerment. "Royalty Revisited" talks of her "remarkable divinity" and of being able "to walk in beauty." It refers to such influences as her mother (who honed Knight's interest in photography, a passion that has led to various exhibits of her work), Harriet Tubman, Coretta Scott King, Alice Walker, and Angela Davis. "Each woman is my steppingstone," she writes.

"I'm proud of all my cultures now," says Knight, who hopes to launch a national performing tour. She envisions the album playing behind her as she performs a sign-language interpretation. An aide would cue her timing, while slides of her photos (which include studies of the homeless) are shown. She has performed this way at the Paradise Lounge and the Milky Way and has upcoming shows in New York and Ohio.

Knight also wants to make a videotape in different languages of the poems on the CD, as well as a dance production based on the music.

On another front, a video for the song "Until" has just been made by Ben Liu, a Boston University student who is a Project Think Different intern.

"I'd like to send the video to [cable stations] BET and MTV," Phan says. "I know some of the videos on those stations have budgets in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and we obviously don't have that. But we're going to see what happens."

And why not? Aiming high -- and never settling for less -- is what Ayisha Knight is all about. back to top