Transcript

The Subtle Art of the Spoken Word | Omar Farah | TEDxUAlberta

[Music] so yeah my name is omar farah if you want to say it properly I'm nada Farah and if you want to spell it properly you throw a symbol in front of it and I smile it's my second time up here on this little red dot and I'm not any more comfortable than I was the first time I'm an engineer in training and a poet on Tuesdays so and I've been spending a lot of my time trying to find a weird balance between these two worlds trying to write the perfect poem that balances numerology was poetry I almost got and on my quest to find this perfect little poem I stumbled upon this beautifully deep and philosophical read Douglas Adams Hitchhiker's Guide to the galaxy see there's a couple nerds in the room we've also read this book before so in this book there's one particular passage that I want to point out where they break down the meaning of life the answer to life the universe and everything 42 for those of you who have seen it they're an unnecessary amount of 42 related jokes that kept coming for the next 10 years and I had a little bit of time on my hands so I decided to dive into it right and I found a couple of cool coincidences like for example how Queen Victoria and her husband Prince Albert died at age 42 coincidence possible true coincidence that they had exactly 42 grandchildren and of their 42 grandchildren Edward the eighth abdicated at age 42 coincidence possibly furthermore we all found out as a people on page 42 that you're a wizard Harry is it a coincidence that the Doctor Who episode titled 42 lasts exactly 42 minutes that three of the greatest albums of all time a cdc's back in black Pink Floyd's the Dark Side of the Moon and Michael Jackson's Thriller all lasts exactly 42 minutes coincidence maybe who knows how fast is the Titanic going before it crashed into that iceberg 42 kilometers per hour how old do I like my women I'm totally joking until he doesn't tell me but for real though so I decided to look into it could these things all be coincidences yeah I think so but this theory of like 42 isn't too far off and I decided to dive a little bit deeper into it and I found the true meaning of life is eighty to eighty two point one four to be exact it's the average number of years before that line goes flat that line you don't want to cross without your affairs intact you know your hugs your kisses and your money all stacked it may seem like you have time but this poem has it mapped I'll show you how 82 is already under wraps you see I tried to write more than nods and make the most out of every breast and I don't sleep because sleep is the cousin of yeah you know the rest but we're a fragile life-form so from that 82 years we spend about a third by your bed because you know you depend 27 long years I've spent resting your head leaving you 55 years to live to the fullest extent now feel free to fight me on this go hard and persist but for the first 10 years you don't really exist so you have to assume that you're going to school finished going from K to 12 which gives three years to miss Cunningham and 42 for yourself meal prep cooking and eating as such takes about three years of your life and I hope that's your full enough 4.3 years you're stuck sitting in a pencil going to and from work just travel ain't that simple now money is a bread and we all got to eat so you work non-stop ages 20 to 65 at 40 hours a week some of you older folks in the audience are looking bleak what I persisted because at least you know you got that vacation to Hawaii maybe you went to Denmark but it cost you ten point three years working from dusk until dark its 2019 and my research has got enough you spend 32 hours a month looking at a phone or a desktop that's 3.2 years he chose to swipe right and then crop you see the meaning of life is that eventually it stops now while you were busy adding and subtracting trying to do the mathematics I'm sure we all know at least one person that passed without planning you see eventually we are buried I may be turned into some ashes and I have planned for my tomorrow and this poem is my casket you see in my old home the only certain solace was in the and faith in the afterlife and that there's a baby coming old household with ten rules held together by string no time to really fantasize about life's pretty things the only whispers in the wind I heard well phrases that I know hear bad news in the room followed by holy saying hey taco allele on mahakal she fail Omaha Co good Garrow we tried to avoid it because of ill we don't want to have more ill of Boyan huddle Madeo but what of the tongues that are dry the people in bad deal with no tears left to cry hearing way boy yo in the operating room with no sedative to sedate while she got a baby in the womb hopefully this one last cuz the other two are in a tomb buried in the land not of the free but not enslaved our home away from home where you could run and still be brave where freedom came in the form of a bullet or maybe it was a plane ticket where it's an accomplishment if 82 is your digit because in Somalia it's 55 in Nigeria it's 54 make the most of your 82 because it is 50 in Sierra Leone the fact that we are here right now it's more than enough the real privilege you have is in the place that you were born a place that hides rose a place where you live this long into the poem so if you have that opportunity to kiss your loved ones hold them tell them goodbye kiss your mother if you still can and don't hold back and don't retreat until you calculated the square root of six thousand seven hundred and twenty-five and even then don't you retract because the meaning of life is eighty to eighty two point one four to be exact thank you stop it stop it stop it so in my time I get to go around to a lot of cool different places from sometimes it'll be like an office gathering a community gathering I get to go to prisons a little often I get to go to high schools junior High's you name it and I get to meet a lot of people after I do this you know people come up to you they have some questions and I try my best to give them the you know nice intellectual answer that they're expecting for me afterwards and this one time this little girl named Asha came up to me and I just finished talking at her school and she had a very like cute like deep but like dumb question and she asked me mr. Omar do you love poetry and then I looked at her and I gave her an unnecessarily deep answer that was kind of basically the premise of this entire talk that I'm giving you and I'm hoping one day maybe she might see this and be like this is a deja vu or I remember that I did that but I told her no I don't love poetry and then she ran to all of her friends is like he's a fraud he's a fraud but I wasn't really lying poetry to me is my means my means to an end almost if I was to for example give you mister if I give you $50,000 what would you do with it today buy a new car cool someone else that's the table as well what's something else what did you do if I gave you $50,000 you had to spend it to date go back home and do something that's a lot better of an answer than yours I'm just saying so we love the things that money can do first maybe we love the car that it can buy the purse yeah that jacket that might have been $100 a little too much that you you know would have got or maybe you take a trip back home to see your loved ones and things like that we love what the money can do it's a tools it's a means to an ends and that's how I see my poetry my writing its how I choose to inspire to bring about change to express my love to critique the world to embrace things of that nature there's a mechanism just as my voices same way how your voice is and your voice and your voice in reverse and hover out in the universe is watching this right now point being our voice your speech doesn't necessarily hold more weight than mine does someone in this room might have a louder voice than mine but that's all good we all have the equal opportunity to spread a certain message to tell a certain tale and I believe that spoken word is my form but dialogue specifically is one of the greatest powers that we all have see I come from Somalia as you might have guessed and in our culture we are known amongst other Africans a little inside thing we're known as the nation of poets meaning because back in the day whenever two tribes had a problems one another or beef before the men and women would pick up their swords each tribe would send over their best poet to the front lines they would say their peace they say they peace was like a historic like rap battle almost type of thing with SuperDuper high stakes and the winner would takes off not a drop of blood would be shed truly believing that the pen is mightier than the sword and I believe that this is something that we should try and go back to because I feel like dialogue truly is the first step to solving a lot of the world's problems that we have right now and we have more means today than we ever did to communicate with one another how do I told my grandfather there's a tool right now that exists that lets me get a thought from up here to my thumbs to across the ocean where my aunt is on a Horn of Africa in a matter of a second you think I was crazy and that same tool is what a group of students used in Egypt to overthrow an oppressive regime same thing in Tunisia same thing in Libya and the startup Springs conversation really is something that has an immense power that we have more than often forgotten because we don't have any great orators that being kind of point to nowadays that cost like two hundred thousand dollars to get Michelle Obama to come and talk for you we don't have anymore Maya Angelou's Marcos has gone Martin has gone Malcolm is gone we don't have anyone who can move a nation simply by the prowess of their speech and I'm trying to bring that back not just me but like you know a lot of people and more than that we've gone on more often than not resorting to just technology to solve our problems or we just throw money at it until it goes away there was a man by name of Jeffrey Sachs and he was cool dude I hope to me in one day he had the idea he said we can eradicate poverty entirely in our lifetime cool now he's not just like some bong and banging tree smoking hippie who was like saying all this good stuff he was a Harvard professor worked alongside the UN the director of the Earth Institute at Columbia just credentials out the wazoo and so when people of his stature say things like that it holds weight so what do we do when old white guy says you know I got a way to fix Africa here's a hundred twenty million dollars gonna make it happen try your best long story short didn't really work out and a lot of other people have tried very similar suits going into a country imposing themselves in a little bit of a colonial manner but we can push that to the side without really seeking the people who live there's advice their stories what are their mannerisms how do they handle themselves how can we help you don't just be like I'm here to save you all Africans and like a weird Savior manner this course is very much so necessary to solve any problem which is why when you go to any psychiatrist session the first thing that they say is the first step to solving a problem is admitting you have one let's talk about it so those of us who have a means to spread a story all means to have someone else's voice heard in this room there's someone whose voice in here can reach more people than I can and I feel that it is your duty and our duty to mankind to help the cries that are often the most silenced to be heard which is why I'm not no haven't been given this beautiful platform I would like to bring light to a tale that has already kind of passed our 24-hour news cycle I like for everyone in the room right now to imagine that you're sitting in a movie theater the lights dim the credits rolled in and you hear the intro music and it sounds something like that's the sound of the police woop that's the sound we don't need I recorded it on my iPhone 6's so they would believe what I've seen they took his power his rights and they chose to exceed you see the boundaries that they abide by only there to mislead he'll get back get back you're interfering with the scene and they kept bashing and my brother and so he had no blood left to bleed you see it doesn't matter if you are short big and tall or dealing with special needs they won't discriminate on a BD if your melanin level exceeds a threshold that they don't need so what's impossible to succeed you see your job is to give me the benefit of the doubt but after doubt he chose the benefit he figured target practice with real bodies and he started acting negligent he was coughing and he was crying and I was begging for them to stop I said I got this on camera but he said nah we'll just crop their idea of a throwback on a Thursday or us hanging from the treetops blood on the leaves but no easy to make it hip-hop you see their shots are in abundance their vices are an indulgence see I'm in an emergency asking Who am I to call without police getting involved I'm asking Who am I to call when the police are doing wrong I'm asking Who am I to call when the police are breaking the law she could Sandra bland got her mug shot while Mike Brown just got his mug shot Eric Gardner had to be choked out and they kept going until it alone stopped and I'm only naming you the obvious cuz the full list hasn't even been dropped every cop nowadays walks around with a tatted teardrop but a white boy no offense can walk into a church and think about nine black lives that mattered and they'll just walk him out by the hand like now it's a misunderstanding but you see one 1134 young black men were killed in 2015 2016 been ended but the tally still hasn't been seen with shots like these are putting numbers on the boards like magic and Kareem shots are out of my mind this has got to be the dream of sick mmm oh I don't have the RPG because their Call of Duty's not just the game that's on the screen they're hating on my pigment and hating all on my color but tanning out in the summer to get a little bit darker they'll say we look suspicious when our hands are in our pockets they'll say he was resisting so you know I had to sock him they'll say he had a license but we know for a fact but that's a question you ask a brother before you attack before the I can't breathe and then there's no going back so I say no justice no peace and no racist police but I feel them stopped most of us here deceased we love to yell out black lives matters like it's a slogan and a speech but we're branding it like a movie it's the new hype incoming attraction rated pg-13 and brought to you in closed captions the new cinematic feat starring Leonardo as the black Dante Rakesh Samuel Jackson is in it of course is the one hating on the black kids if directed by Tarantino so you know it'll be a classic and the outro music to this movie was a banger here's how it happened it was like that's the sound of the police that's a sound we don't need a whoop-whoop you too you're down on your knees yell and whoop whoop another hashtag on my feet thank you [Applause] [Music]