March 4, 2018Surendriya RaoI Want to Argue Like Dancing

“Earlier last month, hip hop recording artist Talib Kweli canceled a concert in Kansas City because the venue had also booked Taake, a Norwegian metal band allegedly sympathetic to white nationalist ideas. On Monday (February 26), Kweli published an impassioned essay on Medium titled “Free Speech or Die?” This led to further recent reporting by Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, and other media outlets of subsequent announcements by Taake that they were canceling their North American tour, alleging an oppressive climate of paranoia akin to McCarthyisn. As a practicing lawyer and litigator, I have been fascinated from a distance by the new speech wars exploding across American campuses and institutions, and the Federal and Supreme Courts’ invigorated interest in First Amendment issues. But as a person of Indian origin, a child of immigrants, and an American, I feel deep sorrow in witnessing the apparent disintegration of American political and civic culture and ascendancy of populism and tribalism. In this climate, it seems speech is often conflated with violence or directly leads to it. I wrote this poem as an oblique comment on the Kweli-Taake scuffle, and a general comment on the mood of our contemporary political culture. The poem is basically a lament, one translation of ‘laidanha.’ It uses the framework of Capoeira Angola, an art form that inextricably combines dance and fight, aggression and play, danger and beauty. Capoeira Angola is also intensely tied up in the politics of black freedom struggles in Brazil and the oral traditions of African slaves.”