Mel Cooke, Freelance Writer
Poet Choice delivered part of his performance to the memory of Nardia Mitchell at Seh Sup'm held at Weekenz last Sunday. - Colin Hamilton
Save for the intermittent traffic on Constant Spring Road, there was silence when poet Choice read to the memory of Nardia Mitchell at Weekenz on Sunday night.
Mitchell died on Wednesday, July 16, when she was allegedly hurled from the third storey of Block G, Oaklands Apartments.
The 'Choice' words were not of the impersonal kind as, performing on the 'Canadian Invasion' edition of the weekly 'Sey Sup'm' event, he began by asking if anyone had ever been about to call someone and did not and the person ended up dying.
The call
He said that is what had happened to him with Nardia on the day that she died. "If I had called, the phone call may have been the one to stop the last blow," he said, referring to allegations that she was beaten prior to the final, fatal fall.
"When I got the news, I wrote a poem," Choice said, asking for a moment of silence in Nardia Mitchell's memory before he started it. In fact, earlier he said that he was supposed to read a poem with her.
He got it, a recorded female voice singing the refrain "swing low, sweet chariot" before he started with a quote from Khalil Gibran, meditating "what is it to die, but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun?"
"As the river runs so does life, never ending, always recycling," he said, during the long poem, concluding "heaven is no longer missing an angel".
Applause
The silence was broken by applause.
"There is this perception that if a man gives a woman money, some men were saying she tek man money an' tek man fe fool, she fi getin her head," Choice said. "If you think you own a woman because you gave her money
you still have the slave master mentality," he continued. And he read White Shadows, Black Faces, a much faster-paced poem than the previous one, and broader in scope as it addressed the treatment of black women by black men in general.
It ended "black man, do you hear her?/will you save her?"
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