Bitaniya Giday, 17, is the new Seattle Youth Poet Laureate for 2020-21, Seattle Arts & Lectures has announced.
The young poet activist already is familiar to KNKX listeners after recently sharing her thoughts about police brutality and racism for our youth voices project, Take the Mic.
Bitaniya, who attends Newport High School in Bellevue, said she’s honored to receive this recognition for her poetry and hopes to use her platform to advance the cause of racial justice.
“Right now I’m doing a lot of thinking about what it means to be a Black woman occupying the space as the Seattle Youth Poet Laureate – what it means as an artist to bring healing to the community but also to represent liberation, to represent resistance,” she said.
Bitaniya immigrated to the U.S. from Ethiopia when she was about four years old. She explores themes of womanhood and Blackness in her writing and has also used her poetry to draw attention to police killings such as that of Charleena Lyles in 2017.
She shared her poem, “No Lives Matter,” with KNKX.
No Lives Matter :
After Kofi dadzie
it makes sense
if we can protest over dead black boys
you should be able to protest your right to kill them
call it a middle ground
because we know the feeling of being used by this country
then tossed aside, like a confederacy flag
your right
southern soil is trenched with your peoples blood
you feel this extinction coming too
blues die at the same rate as blacks to the same hands
so how about we call it instead no lives matter
and when Charleena Lyles dead
Body drifts unto the shores
of Seattle again
every white women in exchange birthes
an empty uterus
carved out by bullet holes
the news forgot to say her name
so their memories follow suit
every breaking coverage
split evenly,
because we are all equally unequal now
each of them receive a eulogy that reads
the same
call it, participation trophy
Seattle says this body
is arched with the same
privilege as theirs
so this time I pull their hair
say their skin reminds me
of rotten mayonnaise
spit back cracker before their tongues role a hard r
And this time they will believe me
and when todd(s) lies before lamplights
rib caged on the street corners calling out to
his mother
the same way tarek died
we will call it white on white crime
step across his body after
branding him gang affiliated
as prosecutors force a plea
to us this will be music
can you hear it
you want to participate so bad
in a culture
cornrows’d and codeswitch’d
to the bump of a 21 savage song
talks the ghetto talk
as clocks tick tock
a life away
but the blood of martyrs run deep
so we will hunt you a Trayvon
gun down a Sterling
gift you a Fernando
And we will await for which
One of you will sacrifice
Your body to the movement
will see which loose vernacular
mouths will
hashtag a protest
build you your
new youth jails
quota bodies
till it's filled to the brims
with tainted futures
the same way ours are
it's easy right
pretending
like each fiber of muscle
in your body is not slicked with
this privilege to walk
when
pushed against conformity
so when we both are tired
of the rage
And lay our bodies on the
Street corners
Gasping “I can’t breathe.”
our souls will stay marching
for the boys we can not leave behind
but y’all will wake up and realize
not a single milky body is laid out
still not a single street sign is named after the dead
you will realize you march to the sound of your own
feet berating the ground
and there ignorance blooms
before a liberation could grow
before porcelain resistances crack open to reveal
absolutely
nothing
