Bryonn Bain (recently in town for the M1 Fringe Festival) made the news when he was wrongfully imprisoned by the New York police in 2003. The Harvard law grad, prison activist, hip hop artist and poet pulls no punches as he talks to us about race, politics and art.

I was the coolest poor black nerd turned
scholar-athlete in New York! I skipped two grades before college so I was a 16-year-old college sophomore. I was the first class president to be elected all four years in a row at Columbia University—the same Ivy League campus where Barack [Obama] graduated a decade before me.

My dad got his college degree from Brooklyn
College three days before I got mine from Columbia University.
I played soccer as a kid since my pops was a coach, but I was always chubbier than my brother, K, who used to call me “Fat Frog” to piss me off. I’d chase him around the apartment until either he locked himself in the bathroom or pulled a steak knife on me.

Even as a kid, I just wanted to change
the world.

I was in hip hop and R&B bands from the
time I was a kid and we started performing in prisons when I was 15. We only had 30 minutes of hip hop on TV by 1990: Yo MTV Raps. Every day I didn’t have to stay late at school, I used to race home and record that show. I still have boxes of Betamax tapes at my mom’s house.  Folks said hip hop music and culture was just a fad. We knew better. I didn’t know how, but I knew that would be part of my calling. 

My greatest fear is living a life without
meaning, the thought that my time here between womb and tomb might be in vain.

How can you fight wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan, murder millions of innocent people in the name of freedom and democracy, and imprison more of your population than any other country in the world? It’s straight hypocrisy.

Some folks think every black man in baggy
pants is a criminal. Subliminal media messages won’t tell you the contrary. They tell you not to come near me. They tell you to fear me whenever you stare me in the eye but things are not what they seem. Things fall apart when pulled apart by what? Seams.

The worst advice I’ve ever received?
You can’t…

Existence should not be shackled by anyone’s
words or definitions. Definitions are for definers, not for the defined. Definitions definitely ain’t divine. You can’t define anything divine in any definition you can find. What you can find is a long line of definers who have definitely lost their minds. Been trying to define my black behind since before the beginning of time.

Resilience is one of black
folks’ most inspiring gifts to the world. We have survived the unfathomable. We have taken everything the most powerful empire in human history could throw at us—nearly 400 years of inhumane torture, chattel slavery, Jim Crow segregation, unparalleled incarceration, widespread inequity and injustice—and we are still standing.

My idea of hell is a nation
with no imagination.

The role of the artist in
society is to not only provide a mirror to show us who we are, but also to give us a vision of what we might be.—Interview by Lisa-Ann Lee