Saul Williams Knows What the Moment Requires

I grew up in a house that was built by Stanford White, who built the original Madison Square Garden. He built the Arch in Washington Square Park. Built a lot of the penthouses on Fifth Avenue. And he was murdered in 1906 at Madison Square Garden. I grew up in a house that he finished building that year and died before he got to live in it. And there was a brief moment where it was believed that Newburgh and that area on the Hudson would become what the Hamptons became. And then Long Island happened and they opened up the freeways and the whole nine, and so all those people who had built homes [in the Hudson Valley] but never really lived there abandoned them and went to Long Island. So I grew up in one of those abandoned homes that had like 28 rooms and nine fireplaces that my parents bought for $30,000, and it was freezing.

No, they were from Brooklyn. My mom’s from East New York. My dad’s from Brownsville. We were here in the city every week and a lot of times after school. And then on Saturdays, I would come by myself to take acting classes on Bank Street at HB Studios.

My dad worked with Dr. Wyatt T. Walker, who was the pastor for Canaan Baptist Church and who was also co-chair of SCLC with Dr. King. My mom was organizing other school teachers and what have you. The cover of the book has a famous picture of my mother getting arrested at a protest in 1963 in Brooklyn for Black construction workers. No Black construction workers were being hired in New York at that time.

No, we definitely were not the hippy household. They were on some other shit. No, my dad was a pastor. And my mom taught at the elementary school that a lot of kids went through. There was a certain kind of respect for my parents. I’m a preacher’s kid.

My parents were not strict. My dad went to music and art school. He trained to be an opera singer. My mom was very into theatre. They were not restrictive in their relationship to religion. We went to Broadway shows regularly. We went to concerts regularly. Very different from the preacher I play in Sinners.

When I started rapping and breakdancing, they were like, "You can't do that in the sanctuary.” And I was like, “What if I rap about Jesus?” And they said, “Well, you can do that!”

Well, I rebelled at Morehouse starting the first week when I grew locs. My first day of college was my last day of ever combing my hair. [laughs]. Morehouse practiced this kind of elitism. They would say stuff like, “At Morehouse we hold a crown over your head and challenge you to grow into it,” ya know? There was a kind of “seat at the table” mentality that was prevalent there. What I mean by that: They were very focused on raising businessmen who could go work on Wall Street and they would celebrate them if they got a job at Goldman Sachs and all that type of stuff.

I was a dancer. I was a party promoter. Me and my peeps, we had locs; we were on some other shit. And [the deans] would hold matches to our head and be like, “Morehouse men do not wear hair like this.”

If you watch the images from the ‘90s, the guys with dreads and the baggy clothes doing flips and shit, that was me. That was us.

Morehouse accepted me as a drama major, but they didn't have a Drama department, so I took 100% of my drama classes at Spelman. I was really a Spelman student. And that was the strongest aspect of my political education.

Spelman is all women. Morehouse is all men. So when we got to Spelman's campus, they were like, “These women came to school to be in an all-women's environment...so the men in this class, you'll sit in the back of the class. We may call on you to respond to prompts from the front of the class and we may not.”

We had strong womenist and feminist perspectives in every subject from playwriting to movement. It was all through the gaze of Black womanhood.

One of my professors was a professor named Dr. Pearl Cleage. I remember her coming into class one day, saying, “Hold up, hold up! You know, walking here, I saw a girl energy blasting a song. If I’m not mistaken, the song said, ‘Bitches ain't shit, but hoes and tricks.’ Would somebody want to tell me what that is and why am I seeing a woman blasting a song that says this?” And the whole class became about us as burgeoning artists and the responsibility we have to not be coerced into the dangers of letting music or whatever serve as an arm of state propaganda, as an arm of patriarchy. Spelman's campus was the most radical thing I experienced in terms of my education.

The answer is yes. We've all been washed, bro. A man dealing with chauvinistic, misogynistic programming is not like, “Oh, I did it. I'm done.” It's a constant matter of questioning and realizing the sort of acts we perpetuate nonchalantly. Because we float on a level of privilege in terms of maleness in this society.

But being aware of your impact on society or being aware of the role of capitalism does not stop or hinder your ability to appreciate nice shit. To be able to enjoy a glass of champagne or clothing from a designer you love. All of these things can exist in the same world and we can still be moving progressively. The only thing I see as not sustainable is capitalism's relationship to humanity. That’s not sustainable.

And I don’t look at that as a struggle; I look at it as a dance. And I love dance! When I think, “I’m fighting a system and this shit is bigger than me,” I'm also thinking “How can I trip it up? Like, how can I psych this motherfucker out? How can I get my dagger into its navel?”

Patriarchy and chauvinism, really, it’s a lack of style. It's a lack of appreciation for the flyest shit in humanity. So I’m turning my nose up to it like, “Really you're on that? Your feet stink. You're wearing dress shoes with sweat socks. You're a mess, bro!”

It's like when your friends realize that you don't do coke and you're like, “Why don't I ever get invited to the bathroom?” And they do it out of respect. They're like, “Why would we invite this na to the bathroom. We know this na’s not gonna partake.”

Anti-capitalist frameworks have been in my work from the beginning. At the time [anti-capitalism] was in a lot of our work. This is pre “Black excellence.” In the book, I talk about the role Richard Nixon played in co-opting “Black Power” when he ran for president in 1968. Richard Nixon, on his campaign trail, started chanting and raising the fist saying. “Black Power! Black Power! Black Power!”

Motherfuckers were like, “What?” They asked him, “Why are you chanting ‘Black Power?’ And Richard Nixon said, “Because I equate ‘Black Power’ with Black capitalism, with Black entrepreneurship.” Rockefeller and all of the well-to-do and Republican political pundits at that time called it a stroke of genius.

This was 1968. Jay-Z was born in ’69. [Laughs] On the day Fred Hampton was killed.

On the one hand, the space that I was talking about carving out, is kind've automatically carved out for artists now. That's part of the work that we did. But there's the corporate capitalist side of that. Motherfuckers thinking of themselves as a brand.

For a new generation of people to discover me through a different medium, that makes perfect sense to me. I don't feel no type of way about that.

However, there was a need to shift gears because I'm not an influencer. There's a point where it just starts to feel like rhetoric. There were things that might have seemed like rage bait, but it was actual shit that happened.

A poet is, in some sense, an alchemist, so when you talk about reading the room, we're also talking about an anticipation for what is useful. Because to me, that is the most important thing beyond what is marketable, what is catchy. What is useful? What does this moment need?

So when I first started speaking up about Palestine, I sincerely felt that this is what the moment needs, you know? And I wasn't alone. I felt very connected to everyone else who also felt this is what the moment needed. “We're not gonna let them break this algorithm. We're not gonna let them shadowban all of us. They can't shadowban all of us.” I made a lot of new friends. I also lost a lot of new friends, which
is great. Fuck them. [Laughs]

I've always been aware that people have different entry points into my work. I've done that consciously.

I also know how the system works. I was a part of a very interesting wave in the ‘90s where the underground came up. That's always the cycle: the underground coming up, being co-opted by the mainstream, and the mainstream mutating. And I refused cooptation. A lot of my friends did. The friends I grew up with are like Yasiin Bey and Erykah Badu.

My love affair is with humanity. I love people. When my first book of poetry and Slam came out, I toured over 300 universities, doing poetry readings and my work being injected into the curriculums.

The thing that excited me was the realization that the majority of us are on a similar type of page. The thing that we want for humanity is very different from the powers and political leaders or corporate leaders are aiming for. It heightened my understanding of people. People are dreamers. People can envision a world beyond what's been imposed.

It's just to say that I've connected with a lot of people and I love them. I don't think that we're fucked. I think the system is fucked.

There's life for the people beyond America.