In a room on the third floor of the Chicago Children’s Museum, Quraysh Ali Lansana is teaching a poem to two little girls. The girls read it silently, then Lansana directs them to the front of the room and asks them to interpret the poem physically. As he reads each line the girls repeat it and act it out, miming a snowflake and a flower. Within ten minutes they’re able to perform the poem on their own.
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Words brought a new life to Lansana. When he arrived in Chicago 12 years ago he was an unemployed college dropout. Now the 35-year-old Chatham resident is an editor at the downtown office of textbook publisher Glencoe/McGraw-Hill and a board member for the Guild Complex. He founded Kuntu Drama Players, a ten-year-old black-theater group, and Nappyhead Press, which publishes poetry chapbooks. He’s traveled across the country, leading workshops in schools and prisons, and for three years he performed with the music-poetry group the Funky Wordsmyths. His most recent collection, Southside Rain, was published last year by Third World Press, and he’ll read from his work this Saturday at the National Poetry Festival at Chicago State University.
After high school Lansana enrolled at the University of Oklahoma, where he studied broadcast journalism and wrote for the school newspaper. He also became “a ska boy,” wearing black suits and pinstripe ties. “I didn’t know who Luther Vandross was until I met my wife,” he says. “During that period in the 80s when he was big, I was listening to the English Beat.” Most of his black peers were pledging fraternities and sororities, buying preppy clothes and strutting their wealth. “They were the people who would grow into buppies, I guess. And I wasn’t like that. Those people gave me more grief than many of the white folks who thought I was odd too.”
Though Ron Myles was raised in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, he found himself attracted to the discipline of Islam; the night after the rioting in Los Angeles he was reading the Koran and praying for justice when the name Quraysh Ali came to him. When he converted to Islam in 1993, the imam at his south-side mosque conferred the name upon him. Quraysh later abandoned Islam because he couldn’t reconcile it with the knowledge that some of its practitioners sold African slaves. He and his wife, Emily Hooper, took the name Lansana when they married in 1996; it means storyteller in the language of Sierra Leone’s Mende tribe. The Lansanas now practice several indigenous African religions, including Yoruba, but they also attend Trinity United Church of Christ. Quraysh still considers his previous faiths part of him: “I’m a spiritual wanderer.”
