Staying Alive

By Jackie Rogers

“We are here to celebrate you. We celebrate us. We celebrate our community by sustaining ourselves through arts and hip-hop culture,” booms a man, one of many people wearing a bright green t-shirt with LIFEISLIVING.ORG across the front, at the microphone.

“We are all part of the environment. We celebrate sustaining the earth and recognize what sustains us,” he finishes and passes the microphone onto the next performer on stage. He starts rapping and beat-boxing. I sit on the warm pavement and wrap my arms around my folded knees.

Little kids run around me and mimic various parts of the diverse and active crowd; the most popular the some white, mostly black and West Harlem Dominican teenagers jumping and spinning on the concrete, practicing and parading their moves in the middle of a break dancing circle. I stand out as a loner under a tree and move over to get a better view and to integrate myself into the lively, sweating scene. The pavement is warm and the crowd swells in unison around the stage, hugging and dancing.

Here in New York and in urban areas across the country, the LIFE IS LIVING campaign is incorporating individuals and communities, mostly youth who are poor and/or of color, who are excluded from the popular green movement, dismissed as inaccessible or irrelevant.

It is catching on. The tremendous energy lifting this movement off the ground is motivating people to assert themselves and their communities as capable and conscious. The individuals and communities represented at the upper upper-west side park in Manhattan are mostly of color. We are in West Harlem, a mostly Dominican community but not far from 125th, where Malcolm X walked and the heart of strongly connected black community works and lives.

The first step of this masterfully philosophical and well-organized campaign is to be an opposite response to all the years of energy put into excluding. It is a disturbing but powerful message that brought these people together.

The people assembled, in New York and elsewhere, are organizing to prove they are alive, conscious. They have a voice, a brain, a community that is and will continue to contribute to the world.

Between swells of people, a woman catches my eye. She is at eye level, behind one of several tables, the majority providing information about local efforts for sustainability. One has a bike made of bamboo, another hundreds of small planters with tiny green shoots to take and grow in your part of the concrete jungle. She smiles at me but turns away, towards the stage. Her bright blue sarong moves as she sways to the booming beats of the performers. All but one of her long dreads are coiled under a yellow head wrap underneath a wide brimmed straw hat. A tribal mask the size of her hand hangs from her neck and she through the hours she often strokes or holds it with her wrinkled fingers as she watches, listens, and moves with the performers. A green coat covers all but one word on her t-shirt, “ACTION.”
Encouraged, I move over until I am sitting on a ledge right beside her table, swinging my feet in her direction.

“I am a queen,” a man roars into the microphone on stage thirty feet in front of her, starting the next phase of the day’s performances, slam poetry from a local group of teens and twenty-somethings. She shouts with laughter and I finally open my mouth and shout over the crowd, asking for her name.

“Janie Franklin,” she says, barely turning her head towards me, “I know that man.” She is still grinning and points to the stage. He finishes and she stops swaying to lean against the table and readjust the flyers advertising a Family Arts Festival into neat piles. They are being held down with one of the planters.

She turns to face me and her eyes hit my face and then move down to the pen I’ve been fiddling with, scribbling notes on a piece of paper I’d found blowing past, and the Frisbee I’d brought and was now using as a clipboard. She reintroduces herself as an employee of the Riverside Park Theatre and hands me one of her flyers.

“AESOP FAMILY FABLES: Reclaiming Our Cultural Memory, One Fable at a Time,” the flyers said in yellow and green bold font, “A jazzed, popped, hip-hopped, beat-boxed version of Aesop’s Fables!”

“Fifty down,” Franklin smiles and sighs, “five hundred more to go.” She is rewriting all of the popular fables, turning “prose into plays” as she puts it. Families will perform their interpretations in a competition.

I ask her what the whole day is about and she pauses for a minute and looks at my pen.

“We are here because people don’t listen, they don’t think we know…we know that we have to come together to make this world a better place…” she answers but trails off as some cheering starts behind us on the only grassy splotch of land. She touches my hand softly and I turn around to look with her encouragement.

On the grass, graffiti artists have set up huge canvasses. We watch as they splatter themselves and those around them with brilliant oranges, greens, blues, and pinks, furiously spraying aerosol cans. Judges walk around and smile and debate the art with the families and groups of friends standing or sprawled out on blankets in the grass. A little boy is break dancing in front of one and a crowd gathers around him cheering, the art acting as a backdrop for his impromptu performance. Each one of the dazzlingly bright pieces incorporates a single word, “ALIVE.”

“I am the power,” whispers the performer at the microphone, “without me there is no fight.”