Global Intifada

Fatema invited me to Cafe Mawanaj on Saturday night for "Hip Hop, Spoken Word, and Poetry from the Global Intifada." It sounded cool, and it was in a cafe, and I like cafes, and I like spoken word, and I like Fatema, so I went. I put on some respectable clothes and a reasonable amount of jewelry and drove from my chichi neighborhood in Northwest Northwest DC to downtown T street and started looking for the Cafe. As I drove, the neighborhood quickly evolved from chichi to, well, sketchy. I reached the cafe, drove a few blocks looking for parking, parked, and promptly removed all my jewelry. I only had to walk half a block to the cafe, which was long enough to get compliments from two groups of men wearing eau de hashish.

No worries, though: the cafe (think: not Starbucks) was hopping (far beyond the 84 person limit posted on the wall) and the poetry and spoken word performances were truly impressive. A lot focused on Palestine, but in the context of the global intifada, or, "the various ways that people are being oppressed around the world and why that's bad." Sounds depressing, and it was, but it was also thought-provoking and unifying with a we-can-make-a-difference vibe. I felt slightly revolutionary, like I should be wearing hemp, or dreadlocks, or both. (I am, after all, part of the institution, and I work in downtown DC, and I wear herringbone suits, and I go to private schools, and I'm a military brat...hardly a typical revolutionary.)

And, oddly, I ran into a girl I studied with in Beirut in 2003 who lives in North Carolina. What are the odds that we'd meet at an obscure cafe in ghetto DC? Wild.

The Welfare Poets' skills were particularly impressive. And look for Slingshot Hip Hop, a forthcoming documentary about Palestinian rappers, male and female, who use their art to challenge Israeli occupation in a nonviolent way, and also check out Ramallah Underground and some examples of Palestinian hip hop CDs.