UCLA Journal of Radiation Oncology FALL 2023 - Flipbook - Page 27
UCLA RADIATION ONCOLOGY JOURNAL
PUTTING MORE
POETRY INTO POLITICS
L
anguage is a powerful tool, and when used masterfully, it can change the course of
history. What Elizabeth Browning’s work for social justice in the 19th century, James
Baldwin’s writings about the Civil Rights Movement, and Martin Luther King’s and
President Barak Obama’s speeches all have in common is their use of poetics in presenting
politics. Poetry and politics have always been intertwined. Up-and-coming poet Joshua Aiken
has joined their ranks, adroitly wielding words, agency, line breaks, and the rhythm and
musicality of poetry to present the reader with an opportunity to “understand self as witness,”
as “enmeshed in the world that is as well as the worlds that can be possible.”
A Cave Canem Fellow, Aiken studied Forced Migration Studies as a Rhodes Scholar at
University of Oxford, was a Policy Fellow for the Prison Policy Initiative, and is currently a
J.D./Ph.D. candidate at Yale, where his studies are focused in History and African-American
Studies. Raised in an Evangelical household with a pro and college football coach father,
Aiken’s sense of self was often in direct conflict with what he held to be true. Growing up,
Aiken knew of some relatives as names only reachable by phone or of those who had died
young; these relatives had been affected by or were entangled in the criminal justice system.
When he was fourteen, a cousin was killed, and when the trial began to prosecute the two
young men responsible, Aiken could not see how “disappearing” these men from their
families was a just resolution to his cousin being disappeared from his own.
This epiphany moment led to an “unraveling sense of self that had been cocooned and tucked
away,” but he knew he wanted to live from a place of kindness and truth. He followed his
brothers to Washington University in St. Louis with hesitancy, despite a scholarship, because
“getting to be a new person felt thwarted for me.” He now sees St. Louis as his “personal and
political origin,” because it was the place where he allowed himself to unlearn “the wrong
messages about Black masculinity and being a man that’s queer” in an upbringing that had no
place for queer Black men. St. Louis is where he began to move forward within his own truths
and hopes, where he chanced being ostracized by his family when he finally embraced living
openly queer during his junior year.
It was in these St. Louis years that he joined Wash U’s slam poetry team, and he began to fully
form his current ideology. He helped run poetry workshops at schools where the majority of
students in any given classroom had a sibling or parent incarcerated. He additionally helped
with workshops in the St. Louis juvenile detention center. What fueled and continues to fuel
Aiken’s commitment to making positive change is his steadfast belief that people should not
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