Lydia Lara is grinning. “Our group is not meant to conform to the status quo,” she says firmly. “We’re here to raise a little bit of hell. We’re here to piss some people off and that’s the point.”
In December 2018, Lydia, who is a senior and political science/Spanish double major with a minor in Latin American studies, launched Dat Poetry Lounge at Augustana College with the intention of bringing activism and art to the campus. The poetry/spoken word group “was created to give students of colour, marginalized students and disabled students a place to share their art,” because “art through social justice was extremely important.” While there are multiple culture groups at Augustana whom the administration has tasked with bringing activism to life, Lydia felt that there was a lack of intentional space to this mission which rendered it incorent. This idea was further driven home when pro-Trump chalkings appeared on campus in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election. Lydia witnessed the panic of many students of colour and international students and realized that they had no shared public space to express those feelings. “Existing on our campus with our stories and our histories, and then being able to come up with a group whose artists make art about what that means, what those histories mean, is really important,” she says of her motivations to start the group.
What makes Dat Poetry Lounge different from other campus art/culture groups? The distinction starts with the name. Searching for inspiration online, Lydia’s attention was caught by California group Dat Poetry, and by the idea of comfort and safety that was implied by “Lounge”. “I wasn’t trying to come up with a group, I was trying to come up with a place,” Lydia explains. “And that place, it’s not one stationary building, it’s the group itself, a place where people can kick back and talk about stuff.”
As for ‘Dat’, the slang phrase originates from the language which comes naturally to Lydia. “Sometimes in class when I’m presenting an argument, I’m literally talking like I’m talking to someone back home, like ‘It’s this, this and this, y’all are crazy!’” Lydia fires, snapping her fingers through the air. She continues with a laugh. “Like, having that presence and making people understand that academia’s not the only place to be smart - you can talk ‘improperly’ and come up with an argument, still be a bougie, ghetto person!” In solidarity with this idea, an excerpt from Dat Poetry Lounge’s mission statement reads “Our ultimate goal while doing this is to spread Da vision, Da art and Da power of words to lift up our communities.
We do it for da Culture.”
"For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives."
- Audrey Lorde
As a result, Lydia has found a home within her group. “This feels like a space where I can be me and I can talk about how I hate capitalism and how I’m a fucking womanist and when I can say that out loud to a bunch of people - I felt like I belong, right?”
Lydia feels that the exclusive nature of their group is necessary, referring to the way that certain on campus culture groups have been ‘whitewashed’ after none POCs (persons of colour) occupied all executive board positions.
“It takes away the truth of what you feel. A lot of white people tell people of colour how they should react and how they feel, and people are conditioned to not feel that way,” Lydia explains.
“I just want DPL to be a place where people can think for themselves, and just live in our truth and speak our truth.”
The surrounding communities have taken note of this approach. After an inaugural performance in the Augustana Brew, the group performed at Augustana’s Martin Luther King Jr. celebration in January 2019 and then at the Putnam Museum’s “Words and Motion” program in March 2019. Lydia called the event “revolutionary” for the way it brought together minorities and performing arts groups from all over the Quad Cities, and for the way it enabled them to challenge the public’s assumptions about people in the area.
“The poem we recited there, I’m sure we pissed some people off,” Lydia reflects now.
“But when you have people in the audience who are like, ‘that’s what I’m feeling like’ and they’re reaffirmed, it not only is present in that space, but it creates a new reality for someone else, who can be like, ‘Now I can think that because I know other people think that.’”
Lydia credits fellow executive board member Ashanti Mobley with inspiring her to get the group off the ground by convincing her that the stories they had to tell were important. “I’m not the only person who came up with this group,” Lydia says. She hopes that for this very reason, the group will continue after her time at Augustana comes to an end.
She also had an opportunity to show her appreciation for the group at that very Putnam museum event. A contact from the Quad City Chamber recognized Lydia from an interview she had had with them and wanted her to meet his boss. They went upstairs to an exclusive area, leaving her team behind. It had been a concern that when performing at events, the group was not given refreshments and when Lydia saw the view, the hors d’oeuvres and the bar in the exclusive space, she picked up her phone and told her team “you guys better come up here right now!”
“I didn’t care that I was about to meet this fancy dude, I cared about my team,” Lydia grins. She ran downstairs to escort the Dat Poetry Lounge performers back into a space of white tablecloths, crystal glasses and sporadic people of colour. “I literally brought all the people of colour into that room! I had like a whole team of people. In that moment when I entered with them, I disturbed the whole space!” Lydia exclaims. She made sure they ate and then, finally, she talked to the representative, thinking “Now I know that my people are provided for, now let me make some moves.”
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