Alok Vaid-Menon has always liked to surprise people with poetry. As a high school student in College Station, they printed out poems and distributed them through classrooms and hallways. In college, they would jump up on cafeteria tables to deliver a poem to a chance crowd. “I’ve always just believed in the power of poetry to interrupt the ways that we’re speaking and to try to create something beautiful and poignant,” Alok says.
Alok is a Texas-born, New York-based writer and mixed-media and performance artist who uses their work to explore race and gender. They were a participating artist in In Plain Sight, a skywriting project opposing immigrant detention that took place above more than 80 locations in the U.S. over July 3 and July 4. At each site, many home to detention centers and immigration courts, planes spelled out messages like “Care Not Cages” and “La Frontera Nos Cruzo.” The intention was to remind residents of the detention centers in their backyards, where immigrants routinely face inhumane conditions. In Conroe, Alok stood on the road to the Montgomery Processing Center as their message—“God Brown America”—floated above the city on July 4.
Alok spoke to the Observer about poetry, growing up in College Station, and the plight of immigrants held in detention.
