In a young poet’s writing, a nod to the future
Tova Ricardo has always had a thing for notebooks and writing in them. She’s done this ever since she was “little,” she says. Maybe second or third grade. Mostly, Tova sticks to the sort with spiral bindings. “There are some that are kind of stiff,” she says. “Those kinda irritate me. I like the spiral ones. I can throw the paper over when I’m moving through the pages.”
She says that and you can imagine her, hunched over, writing intensely. Next page. Next page. Next page. And then you might understand what it’s like to hear her read her poetry, her quick, authoritative delivery. Next line. Next line. Next line. On a recent Saturday afternoon, at a park in West Oakland, a man introduced Oakland’s youth poet laureate to an audience. She walked to the mike and jumped straight into a poem called “Shout the Truth.”
“When you think that their reign is over,/ they’re already down your throats./ The modern European empire, has forced us back onto slave ships/ but instead of sea vessels/ they’re collecting in devil vehicles of metal.”
That was just the beginning. The whole poem took her about four minutes to read. After she was done, she paused for a second to look out at the audience. Then she walked off the stage, letting the poetry float, undisturbed.
Those notebooks Tova keeps have been filled with poetry for years now, even if she’s only just started sharing it widely as Oakland’s fifth laureate. When you talk to her, she seems at ease with herself, confident. But it wasn’t always so. In some sense, poetry saved her, she says. “Poetry was the No. 1 thing that allowed me to express myself and my insecurities.”
When you’re young, sometimes there’s nothing so hard as figuring out who you are and how you fit into this world. Imagine then, Tova, now a junior at Bentley School, her tightly curled, dark brown hair, cropped close on the sides, longer on top, her bright green-blue eyes and her still-brighter smile. Imagine her with a Star of David around her neck, as she considers her blackness and her queerness, the politics of today and the way the world views her. Imagine her setting all of this to poetry. “My identity is very intersectional,” she say. “There are definitely conflicts with that and clashes, but I love it. I think that it makes me unique.”
When she’s reading onstage, she’s not thinking so much about herself. She’s thinking about younger people who might not understand what she does now: “You are who you are and that’s beautiful.”
The Bay Area has been home for Tova since the very beginning. It’s a place, she says, that brought her up, formed her. She remembers a childhood full of constant and positive words — she was beautiful, she was capable. There were books about black pride and black nationalism, and documentaries about Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and the Black Panther Party. Her mom was there to give her a sense of her Jewish identity, and her dad’s parents would talk to her about Louisiana and the South. “They wanted me to know who I was and wanted me to be aware of the world around me.”
Even with all the support, though, childhood is no easy thing. “Ever since I was little, there was always those insecurities that drove me crazy,” she says. So she would turn inward and to the page.
Plenty of journals
Tova’s mom, Adrienne Timmons, remembers Tova as an easy kid. “She was one of those, you know, old souls, we call it,” Timmons says. “Not your typical child.” She could take her out, sip tea with a friend, and Tova would sit quietly, notebook in hand.
“She’d have just stacks and stacks of journals,” Timmons says. She knew Tova was writing stories, little slips of whatever came to mind, but she didn’t ask much. “I was never too nosy,” she says. It was Tova’s outlet. Tova’s release.
Around middle school, Tova began to get a sense for poetry after she was introduced to some of the greats like Langston Hughes and Edgar Allan Poe. “It just fit me and what I’ve always believed in.” She liked the way you could play with words, fit them together in different ways. She appreciated the lightness of it all, the way she’d have to shave them down, make them ever more precise. Then there was the musicality of it all, the flow.
She began writing her own poetry, and it might have all stayed in the pages of her notebooks had it not been for a two-week workshop she took at school last spring. The teacher, Peter Hagen, walked the class through all the basics. They worked on haiku and visual poems and spoken word. Hagen became a mentor to Tova.
“I encourage them to dig in the places you get hurt,” he says. “There’s a lot of rich stuff there, and what they come back with is just amazingly honest and open.”
Something inside Tova shifted during those two weeks. “With Tova, it was a matter of turning her loose,” Hagen says. “She did all the work. She did all the digging.” All the things she held tight were suddenly out in the world. “It was a little scary because a lot of the stuff was really personal,” Tova says.
Shanga Labossiere, a friend of Tova’s, was in the class, too. He’d always encouraged her to put herself on the page. He watched her in that class and saw her grow. “With each reading of her poetry, she would just get more and more dynamic.”
Tova’s poetry deep-dives into love and religion, gender and race. When you read it on the page, you can hear her voice coming through, the spaces where she’d take a breath or where her voice might grow louder. From a poem called “Eyes”:
I hope to grow old with eyes,
ones that etch defectless dandelions
in burned out valleys.
Ones dressed in gold embellished eyelashes
to free silver chained eyelids
trapped inescapable depression.”
During the seminar, Hagen encouraged the students from Oakland to apply for the city’s laureate program. Tova didn’t expect much to come from it, but she filled out the application. Labossiere did, too. If it happened, it happened. In the meantime, she and Labossiere would see each other in the halls. “We’d call each other ‘finalist’ or ‘laureate,’” he says.
“You’re gonna win.”
“No, you’re gonna win.”
“Once she won, I finally got to rub it in her face,” Labossiere says. He chuckles a little.
The Oakland youth poet laureate program is highly selective. The winner gets a $5,000 scholarship and becomes something of a literary ambassador. The finalists are honored, too. The idea isn’t so much to hold up one student, says James Kass, the executive director of Youth Speaks, one of the groups that sponsors the program, but to show people what literature looks like in Oakland today. “We’re not asking them to be the poets of prior generations. We’re asking them to be the poet of their generation.”
But there is something special about Tova, he says, the way she “pours a true energy and passion into the world.” There’s also a nod to the future in the lines of her poetry. “I think Tova represents the great conversation around the changing demographics of the country and young people really laying claim to their own identity.”
It’s been months since Tova took on this position, revealing the deepest pieces of herself in an ongoing public confessional. Even now, it sometimes feels weird, she says. “But I’ve realized that if I want people to understand who I am, I have to share some of those things.”
Ryan Kost is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: firstname.lastname@example.org Twitter: @RyanKost
Excerpt from ‘Shout the Truth’ by Tova Ricardo:
Sometimes I wish white breaths
would speak below me in a safe space environment
Pressing their runny mouths beneath my jazzy feet
Sometimes I wish white minds would feel guilt for once.
My generalizations always boom louder than the shoots in Baltimore
but defensive rifle radicals protest against my voracious words,
shredding charms of black nationalism off my taste buds.
Present-day pelts of progression paralyze
their recurring thoughts of supremacy
while black baby back bones shatter
at the empire's grinding disposal.
I found the drowning carcass of chained,
severed hope in greater condition
beneath the depths of twilight seas
than the immoderately addressed conservative pleas
against no-chill colored kids
in america’s bus back seat.