“I paint words and voices, rhymes and rhythm/ and every whisper, every conversation beats a drum/ in my mind/ at full blast.” But the making of art doesn’t make everything okay.
Then he finds poetry and drawing, which will be his salvation. “Some of us put up more walls/ some of us look as if/ we will break down all the walls/ Most of us become the walls.” He is sinking into hell. Once in prison, everything inside him is dying-his dreams, his life. Once convicted, he says, “There is nothing left to do now but think about God: my country’s Money/ my mother’s Allah/ My grandmother’s Jesus/ my father’s American Dream/ my uncle’s Foreign Cars/ my teacher’s College Education/ my lawyer’s Time.” Waiting for the court’s decision, Amal says, “ The jury finds, she says/ As if this is a game of hide-and-seek/ and I’m curled up under some table/ my body balled up like a fist…” The fictional character Amal, speaking of his court prosecutors, says, “Their words and what they thought/ to be their truth/ were like a scalpel/ shaping me into/ the monster/ they want me to be.” That book became the co-authored Punching the Air (Balzer & Bray 2020) the much-decorated best-selling novel-in-verse, about Amal, using some of the poetry Yusef had written while in prison along with the words of master poet, Zoboi. A few years ago, she asked Yusef to collaborate on a book. Since their first meeting, Haitian-American Ibi Zoboi had become the acclaimed author of American Street, Pride, and others. Yusef had “freed his mind” while serving a sentence for a crime he hadn’t committed, by writing poetry in prison.
Yusef Salaam was one of the five Black teenaged boys who were wrongfully convicted of murder in Central Park a decade earlier-a story documented in Ken Burns’ The Central Park Five. Ibi Zoboi met Yusef Salaam in an African literature course at Hunter College taught by Dr.
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