Why do you laugh when I’m myself?
Not that funny kind of laugh but the hurtful one.
Why do I go home feeling hurt every day
until pain overcomes my whole body
and tears through my brain…
again and again, until I almost believe your lies.
Narelle Thomas, a Springfield high schooler, is talking about the taunts flung by her peers: insults to her kinky hair, irregular features and uncool clothes. She’s joined by other teens who relate, in passionate cadences, experiences of verbal, sometimes physical, abuse because of their looks, weight, sexuality or just being “different.” Jibes that wound and scar, that make girls and boys—in this case, kids of color—consider suicide, when even the rainbow isn’t enough.
Bullying: What Are You Going to Do About It? is an evening of nine poetic and musical pieces, a couple of them bilingual (English and Spanish), written and performed by members of Teatro V!da, the Springfield-based writing and performance project led by poet/performer Magdalena Gomez.
This “creative response” was spurred in part by the extensively reported suicide of South Hadley High School student Phoebe Prince in January. But the performance takes its impetus even more from the death, just over a year ago, of 11-year-old Carl Walker-Hoover of Springfield, who hanged himself after being mercilessly gay-baited. Carl’s suicide provoked far less media attention and community soul-searching than Phoebe’s, possibly because he was black, not from a privileged college town and, perhaps most troubling, because of the nature of the taunts that drove him to his death.
One of the pieces in Bullying, “Confessions of a Gay Basher,” imagines a homophobic attack from the point of view of a passive onlooker: “He was gonna kill that kid. Gonna—ha. He did kill that kid. We all did. I did.”
It’s the work of Yolanda Scavron, a student at Holyoke Community College and one of the co-directors of the performance, with Central High student Eilish Thompson. “Bullying is one of the very common ways people try to get power over other people,” Eilish says. “This show is about empowering yourself, it’s about figuring yourself out and not trying to get power by bullying other people.”
A dialogue performed by Eilish and Yolanda, “On Apologizing,” considers another damaging power dynamic, when parents belittle their children because of their own failures and frustrations. “There are so many different forms of bullying,” Eilish says. Another piece, “A Bully Pesticide,” reinforces the show’s overall message of outrage and empowerment:
You were allowed to sneer with nostrils running
with gossip
and create scars which would be reminders of your days.
But I have conquered and have fought through
your gripping, malevolent ways.
Bullying: What Are You Going to Do About It?: May 22, 6 p.m., Faith United Church, 52 Sumner Ave., Springfield, $2, www.teatrovida.com for info.
