CAPAL (Conference on Asian Pacific American Leadership) - summer 2004

Community Action Plan
By Suraiya Jetha, 2004 State Farm Scholar

On campus, I’m a part of a writing and performance group made up of 12 students from all over the US. Through intensive workshops, each individual in our group writes a monologue, skit, or spoken word piece based on personal experience to perform at our shows. The pieces relate experiences that range from the light-hearted story of a summer night spent in search of excitement in suburban Mississippi to the emotionally charged poem relating a woman’s experience growing up in a single-parent household with a mentally handicapped sibling. The common thread through our pieces is our heritage—each member of our group, Jook Songs, is of Asian decent. Though we don’t share the same experiences as Asian Americans, each of our life stories represents pieces of our motley community brought together by a common label. Our goal as a group is to relate our lives to others, Asian American and otherwise, and to have complete strangers feel our emotions and see our individual struggles.

While the objective of our group seems focused only on art, I believe Jook Songs, and all Asian American art, is inherently political. For a community so often silent and silenced, the act of political expression through art empowers individuals and thereby the community in ways that academia and activism cannot. Artists such as Tak Toyoshima (of Secret Asian Man comics), Bao Phi (spoken word), and Karmacy (hip hop) use their art to give a personal spin to issues affecting Asian Americans. Taking the Asian American experience and movement to the personal level through art makes it more accessible and more powerful. We can educate ourselves and our communities through studying census data and the rate of poverty in Asian immigrant households, but we can also educate and empower each other through sharing personal experiences and through listening to those directly affected by such issues.

My Community Action Plan is to strengthen this expression on Yale University’s campus. Through making a connection between Jook Songs and Fade to Yellow, Yale’s Asian American Film Collective, I hope institutionalize bonds between these two groups that exist from member overlap that will be lost in the next few years. Through collaboration, these groups can provide mutual support for one another for publicity and for shared resources, and by having structure within their collaboration, the Asian American Student’s Alliance (AASA) and the Asian American Cultural Center (AACC) would be able to work better with these groups. As it is, both Jook Songs and Fade to Yellow attract non-Asian American audiences, and to make connections between AASA and the AACC will also help in bringing the Asian American community to the greater Yale population.

It is my hope that this group will form through an organic process—the collaboration will be tailored to what the groups want and need rather than pressing a union upon both. The first steps will be informal meetings, and based on discussion and the interest of members involved; next steps would include collaborative performance and inclusion of visual artists. At the very least, my goal is to encourage some dialogue and interpersonal connections between the groups so that if collective action does not happen in now, there is the possibility for it in the future.

Additionally, after presenting my CAP at a WLP session, I was approached by other students involved in APA spoken word, improv comedy, and theater. Through meeting them, I also hope to host an intercollegiate workshop in which students from the University of Texas, Mount Holyoke, and Yale University will be able to meet, share, and learn about each other’s groups and performance styles and also to build a collegiate network of APA alternative artists.