Antoine and six of her peers
in Books of Hope were recently heard at the Somerville Central Library,
where the authors read their work for a small but enthusiastic audience
on Oct. 15. Author and publisher Jasen Sousa, a graduate student
interning with Books of Hope, also took the stage to read his poetry.

The
poems and subsequent discussion touched on racism, poverty and
violence, but the mood in the air was more warm than dismal. The young
authors clapped and cheered their own loudly and participated readily
in call-and-response poems. Most of the authors coupled their poems of
injustice and struggle with poems of pride, dreams and hope.

Books
of Hope began in 1999, and since then, its participants have published
more than 100 books. Poet and non-fiction author Laura "Soul" Brown has
directed the program since 2005. Books of Hope authors gather with
Brown and other writers on Monday nights at the Mystic Learning Center,
on the grounds of the Mystic housing projects.

This year,
Books of Hope has 13 participants (their capacity is 15) and runs from
October through June. There is no charge for the program, and
participants earn money from sales of their work.

The Mystic
projects consist of two low-income housing developments on Mystic
Avenue — the state-run Mystic River Development and federal housing
development Mystic View. According to the Mystic Learning Center's
website, 84 percent of families in the Mystic Projects are headed by
single mothers. Books of Hope author Jessica Masse describes the Mystic
Projects as "known for violence," adding that both organizations hope
to help young people overcome the hardships faced there.

The
challenges they face — poverty, racism, abuse of women, struggles in
education — are the material for many of the poems read last Thursday.
Antoine's poem, "For My People: Remix," contains most of these topics.
The poem takes the structure and themes of Margaret Walker's 1942 poem
"For My People," and adds her own perspective.

Walker's poem begins with slave "dirges" — Antoine's begins with boogie boogie.

Walker's
poem describes the menial, thankless work of her people over the years.
Antoine describes the aspirations of her generation to become people of
influence.

Walker describes her playmates growing up in
Alabama. Antoine describes hers in the Somerville housing projects "who
jump the doubles of/double-dutch singing made up rhymes, who play
with/the red rubber ball and the metal stars of jaxs," and "who swim at
the public pool, and go/to summer school just for food."

Walker
describes school, where people learned they were "black and poor and
small and different." Antoine describes school where people "learn that
a race we/look down on did more than we think."

Antoine speaks
of hardship, hunger, cold, and abandonment. She closes with a stanza
about the civil rights movement, "For my people who fought back the
court cases with lawyers that sucked and still won."

In 1942,
years before the Civil Rights Movement, Margaret Walker wrote, "Let the
martial songs be written, let the dirges disappear. Let a race of men
now rise and take control." Antoine, writing in 2009, ends, "For my
people, for our future, which will always be strong."

Many of
the poems grapple with race and racism. Of the students from Books of
Hope at the reading, eight were black, one was Latino, and one was
white. They seemed united in their passion for civil rights.

Leo
Galindo, a first-generation American whose parents are Honduran, read
"Walk On, Think On," about the Freedom Trail, slavery and civil rights.

"Race isn't that big of an issue to me," Galindo said after
the reading, "because I've always grown up in diverse neighborhoods, so
there's always been a lot of different cultures that I grew up around,
and that [was what] I was exposed to, and so I think that there's
bigger issues than race. I think there's poverty, and there's teenage
violence, and there's not a lot of opportunities for youth like myself,
you know?"

Anthony Cimea, originally from Haiti, read a poem
called "Screaming For MLK," in which he and his peers chanted: "MLK:
Your life is my dream, and your dream is my life: Incomplete."

Many
of the young authors read poems about ambition and optimism in the face
of racism and poverty. In "My Life," Zanterius Broadus states, "My life
is just like usual/Just another black man trying/to make it out of the
ghetto."

By "make it," Broadus adds, "I want to be a black
man/who makes more money than Bill Gates" and "the one that went
through the struggle/but still made it to the top."

In a poem
titled, "YBF," Keisha Jean-Louis details her own ambitions as a Young
Black Female who "walk[s] the projects of Somerville/The Mystic with
bigger dreams/Than you can imagine."

Jessica Masse's poem,
"Generation To Generation: Changing the Future's Nation," describes
life on the streets, with impressive rhyme and call and response,
ultimately asking her peers to "wake up and see what's true" to change
the world.

It's a sentiment Galindo agrees with, saying,
"Books of Hope is one of the few rare gifts that youth like myself are
given where we have the chance to express ourselves, and in doing so
have a positive influence on everyone around us."