Slam Poetry, a way to know the other. #MATLUPB

How difficult it is to show oneself, to expose oneself to an audience, and this leads me to remember the occasions in which Dr. Mora told us about the big picture of the teacher, the image we must show of ourselves before parents, students, others teachers, and the rest of society. But in this case, it was not about us as teachers, it was first of all about us as people, about who we really are, what bases our ideas, our character, and our feelings. Doing a slam poetry was perhaps the first step we had to take to be teachers, because we had to expose ourselves to others, some of us did it, others did not want to, perhaps because of insecurity, fear, embarrassment.

Slam poetry is the most poetic, creative and beautiful way to meet the person next to you. In this case as students, we are sharing much of our time together, and we still do not know who is sitting next to me, what is going on in their minds and how they are feeling at that moment. And seeing the slam poetry of my classmates, made me realize that I am surrounded by very sensitive people, who admire beauty, sadness, that I am surrounded by people who also like me, have internal struggles. This creates empathy between all of us.

At the beginning I did not know what to talk about in my slam poetry, if about politics, the environment, education, war, you know, about social problems, but what better than talking about yourself, what you know best, the field in you are more expert, although I lie, many know everything, but nothing of themselves, which is paradoxical. In any case, I had three options for my slam poetry, one was about what I am, another about love, and the last about the disease of depression, it was difficult for me to choose, because I liked the three subjects, but in the end I decided to go for the subject of what I am, to show others what I thought about defining myself in the world, to show others a little about who this person is that they see every day.

After deciding the subject, I had to struggle now to find the inspiration to write, something that is not easy at all, and less in a different language, which is not your mother tongue, because as Emil Cioran said “change language for a writer, it’s like writing a love letter with a dictionary”. Then I had to fight with recording my voice, try to pronounce well, something that I am not good, and have no idea of all the times I had to repeat my audio, so that it would be as perfect as possible.

I can only say that slam poetry is an excellent tool in teaching, because it includes multimodality, and it allows you to express yourself in the way you want, in a very interactive and dynamic way. Through this, you not only learn to know others, but you also learn from yourself.