Slam …The school of sincerity



”Everyone can slam, it does not have there that people of the suburbs”, affirms the young French cine TV Director Pascal Tessaud.
 
Documentary “You kiffe” draws up the cross portrait several slam-poets resulting from various mediums and any age. There is “the Robert”, a man of about fifty years who goes up on scene to juggle with the words of the dictionary of the same name “ le Petit Robert”.

There is also this young actress of Rennes who explains that its texts often speak about its stories of heart. It is an art stripped of rule:” each one is free to tell what he wants, and especially, as he wants it”.

The slam is before all "a platform of expression where one shares our love for the words. One puts words on feelings”. 

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“Sick large body”, (original Grand Corps Malade ) the most famous slammer of France, explains at the beginning of documentary why this art is “the school of sincerity”. The slam-poets exposes himself without artifice, costume, and music. No barrier between the public and the scene is possible since each person present in the room is a potential slam poet. The scene belongs to all those which are not afraid to readapt the French language.

In fact, the slam was born in 1983, in Chicago, under the impulse of an American workman Marc Smith. While making take part the public, it wished to give one second life to the scenes of poetry, which it considered too much “tedious”. In France, the tradition remained Competitions of slam proceed in various places public, like the Cultural café-restaurant.

Smith has published several books about the poetry slam movement, as well as publishing two books of his own work. He tours extensively, performing his own, blue-collar, Carl Sandberg influenced poetry and hosting poetry slams. He also tours with a show titled, Sandburg to Smith-Smith to Sandburg, which combines the work of both poets with live jazz.

“What is important in the slam it is the text.”


In France, we are in a dusty company where one is crushed by the weight of the academic culture. All that is new is inevitably bad. The American culture is enough insolent in the way where the popular layers are expressed.
 

The slam is “a bridge between the popular culture and the traditional literary culture”, summarizes the ciné tv director. The discipline is invited step by step in the schools. A few teachers call even upon slam-poets for their French course.
 

The slam timidly clears a place in the closed world of the French literature, but the way will be long before finding a text of Grand Corps Malade to the French baccalaureate, facing those of the great writers. While waiting, the slam can be praised to have succeeded where most policies failed: to democratise the traditional literary culture.