Dwayne Morgan’s A Life In 60 Minutes is a series of spoken word poems that emerge so organically out of his conversational storytelling about his life that it feels like one hour-long epic poem. This piece is absolutely incredible. It’s one of the best spoken word poetry performances I’ve ever seen. The first poem is performed with such an incredible rollicking speed that the line from Lin Manuel Miranda popped into my head about Alexander Hamilton, that he was writing like he was “running out of time.” I don’t think I blinked for sixty minutes.

Morgan tells us the story of growing up in Scarborough at a time when that could be a death sentence, and how his parents arrived in Toronto from Jamaica when they were 21 years old, and they experienced a massive cultural and identity shift that profoundly shaped their lives, and the life of their child. The piece explores the realities of being a Black man in Canada, of raising a Black daughter, and of growing older and caring for aging parents.

This piece takes a lot of the conversations that have been in the zeitgeist for the last ten years or so around Black Lives Matter, strong Black girls, immigrants, the particular struggles of inner city racialized neighbourhoods, the consequences of historic systemic racism that continue to reverberate today, misogyny, and misogynoir, and presents it in such a vivid, immediate, powerfully constructed way. I had never heard of “picture day,” a day when young Black boys in particular get their pictures taken in their Sunday best so their parents have a photo to give to the media in case they are killed by the police that cannot be misconstrued as insinuating that they are members of gangs or criminal organizations, because they know that the photo that is chosen will dictate how much empathy and compassion is given to their child in death. There is much to fill you with fury and heartbreak here. Read more at the link