Cecilia Alali practices and blocks a performance on Friday, Feb. 16. “I was making the blocking really emotional and evocative on purpose due to the nature of the poems that have a riving force of anger and grief behind them,” she said. (Photos by Connor Marchant)
My heartbeat jumped into my throat as I watched the clock tick away the time I thought I had. My arms and legs, used to stretching, thumping and creating pictures audiences can hold onto, sat rigid as my pulse rang in my ear.
There’s nothing that can shake a speech and debate competitor more than hearing how close a tournament is.
“OK, everyone,” Ganer Newman, my coach and the director of WKU Forensics, said. “Less than four weeks before the IFA competition.”
IFA, or the International Forensics Association’s world championship, took place in Ireland this year, and only a select few students made the cut. I was one of them and woefully unprepared to add a new event to the three I would already take to the competition.
Hearing that there was no longer a cushion of time sent chills down my spine as I sat during the first team meeting of the spring semester. Somehow, I needed to research, craft and perform a 10-minute poetry interpretation in five weeks.
I had to hop into the mental lab. Immediately.
Oklahoma City junior Cecilia Alali’s written notes and transcripts show her work after hours of practice in the forensics building on College Heights Boulevard on Friday, Feb. 16.
RESEARCH
Advertisement
Speech and debate, also known as forensics, is an extracurricular activity that’s more than just arguing about politics. It’s research-based, tells a story and is deeply personal.
According to the WKU Forensics’ website, WKU is “unquestionably the most dominant collegiate speech and debate organization over the last quarter century.”
The team has won 51 national championships since 1996 and is the only team to ever win three national championships at three separate tournaments in the same season, and has done it nine times.
However, the general consensus across campus seems to be that no one knows nor cares about the nuances of the activity. Often, many think it’s just an aimless arguing platform.
Well-meaning, but ultimately, reductive comment. Speech is not debate and vice versa.
Jade Ismail, a freshman from Lafayette, Louisiana, is my partner in the duo interpretation event. Duo requires two partners to memorize and perform a 10-minute piece either written or selected as a script, and Ismail is almost too passionate about combating the lack of notoriety the team gets.
“I feel like no one really knows about speech, which is actually really annoying,” she said. “We are digging deeper and putting words to phenomena in ways people couldn’t even fathom.”
Ismail and I created our duo last semester before the first tournament. Our script pulls from both of our experiences.
We portray a Ghanaian mother and her transgender daughter butting heads over Catholicism. Jade and I use the characters’ journey to argue Catholic colonizers incorrectly weaponized the religion to strip Africans of their gender fluidity. With my African heritage and Jade’s identity as a transgender woman, the performance was personal and took a month to weave together because of it.
“Our Duo is just so beautiful because we put our whole hearts and souls into it,” she said.
We spent all of August, September and early October creating and adding blocking, which is any purposeful movement that is striking. One of our favorite moments of blocking is when Jade and I create a monster-like character by moving our heads in different directions while speaking the same line. The audience’s “oohs” of amazement are our stamp of approval.
Cecilia Alali practices her forensics performance that discusses ancestral hardships on Friday, Feb. 16. “I also think of it as speaking and performing for those who can’t do what I can do,” she said. “Some people don’t have the chance to cathartically express the anger of losing ancestral homelands, so I have the opportunity to harness and channel their anger.”
A realization dawned on me. It’s customary for speech students to compete in five, six or — like I was — seven events in one season. So, I had to replicate that with a completely different topic in the span of one month, give or take. Self-sabotage or passion for speech? I’m not sure I know either.
First, competitors must select a topic they would like to perform – a beast within itself.
Speech pieces all stem from one thing: a drive to speak on something tugging at you. I had just gotten off the phone with my aunt in Kenya, listening to her complaints about what felt like a never-ending drought. She recounted how plentiful the plains were as a child and how frustrated she was that the soft grass and swaying flowers were gone.
I had sighed in discomfort, knowing that I wanted to visit my ancestral home and see it full of greenery and animals, as it was recounted in stories from my grandmother. What flourished and blossomed years ago was no longer a possibility after the effects of climate change continued to ravage the equator.
Brushing it off, I isolated myself in my apartment, as I often do, to ponder what ideas “tugged” at me. My process begins with a browse through my journal. I ask what sticks out to me that I can connect to a larger societal phenomenon, and begin researching articles putting eloquent words and statistics to my jumbled thoughts in a diary entry.
Going off what had scattered across my journal entries, I knew I wanted a topic focused on my identity as a second-generation Kenyan-Nigerian American, but after winning a championship the previous year, I compared every idea to the one prior, and nothing jumped out at me for my seventh event.
Thus began what many speech students do: the researching phase. Newman, my coach, stresses the importance of digging deep inward to result in good research.
“It’s taking a deep dive into what you care about most and finding the literature that puts the feeling into words,” Newman said.
Search after search landed me on research from Atmos, a magazine that is an “exploration of climate and culture,” according to its website. The article was titled: “Eco-Grief Around the World.”
Atmos credits environmentalist Aldo Leopold with using the term in 1940 to describe the emotional pain of environmental loss, putting a term to what millions of indigenous people around the world experience.
According to Ashlee Cunsolo, a climate change researcher at Memorial University, for communities whose cultures are tied to the land, eco-grief can involve “mourning the end of a way of life — of saying goodbye to traditions that have been passed on for generations.”
I sat up in the recluse of my apartment. That was exactly how I felt. Research: done.
Cecilia Alali writes notes on the transcript of her performance against a mirror on Wednesday, Feb. 21. Alali uses a mirror to see herself perform while practicing. “When I perform, I become the part of myself that is almost hidden,” she said. “Instead of being afraid of what others think, if they disagree with me, if they don’t like what I’m doing — it doesn’t matter.”
CRAFT
Once competitors decide on a topic they feel compelled to perform, the crafting process begins to form a manuscript that is memorized. The script, needing to fit within 10 minutes, forms around what scripts can be woven.
I did know that I wanted my thesis to cover how colonialism exacerbated the climate crisis and left cultures tied to the land without physical connections to their ancestors. Truly a mouthful.
My task was to take that complicated idea, and through performative choices and acting, make it something comprehensible and emotional to watch.
Last year, I was the national champion in poetry at the National Forensics Association championship tournament, which made the process that much harder. How do I tell my story without letting impostor syndrome get in the way of my success? And even deeper, how do I differentiate from last year?
Snap out of it, I told myself. It was time to create.
I attended session after session with my coaches. Tweaking, rewriting, rewording and soft blocking. Asking questions led to more changes that made me fearful as the deadline inched closer.
With the International Championship around the corner, it felt like my indecisiveness in choosing the final poem was a wall I had built myself.
Cecilia Alali practices and blocks a performance on Friday, Feb. 16. “I was making the blocking really emotional and evocative on purpose due to the nature of the poems that have a riving force of anger and grief behind them,” she said.
One week left sent a shiver down my spine. My other events were completed, confident and quite frankly, championship material. This one event was my weakness.
Interpretation Coach Sean Diaz would tell me after my final session to stop worrying about last year. I needed to live in the now.
“I keep hearing a lot about last year, Cece,” he said. “Relax. Just tell the story that’s most authentic to you.”
Punch to the gut. And kick-start into action.
For competitors who base their entire careers on communication, I am a testament that sometimes, it just takes some words of encouragement to get back on track.
The poetry interpretation included four poems that worked together to tell the story of lands lost. “Under African Skies” by Sam Illingworth and “Return to Being” by Nnimmo Bassey together express the anger of losing a land gifted to you by your ancestors, using vivid language like “Burst the funeral drums” and “An array of idiotic aphrodisiacs for limp brains.”
“The Nkunga” is a poem that embodies the seven-headed dragon Nkunga, who guards the lake near my extended family in Kenya. In losing the lake due to climate change, fears rise over whether the stories were ever sacred in the first place.
“Catching Fire Part 2” is a satirical poem that details an African girl’s experience seeing her white counterparts grieve over “lands they stewarded.” As she lashes out at them for their ignorance, it mirrors the audience.
I stood in the WKU Forensics office’s room with a mirror on the wall as I looked down at the printed piece of paper reading “slithering across the Savannah.”
I closed my black book, which held my manuscript. I tilted my head and jerked my right shoulder forward, following slowly with my left one. I shifted my legs lethargically across the floor and made a facial expression displaying exhaustion as I slid across the carpet floor.
Here, I created a picture of a snake-like creature inching toward the audience. They should fear me, I thought.
Using a traditional Nigerian Igbo dance I learned from my father, I slithered and posed. Each word, each breath of the poems, was filled with anger reflecting the inner storm my aunt’s rant evoked.
Before I knew it, I had run through the entire piece. Craft: done.
Cecilia Alali practices and blocks a performance at the forensics building on Friday, Feb. 16.
PERFORMANCE
Diaz slyly asked during our last session if I wanted to attend a virtual tournament to test out what I had. Because the international championship was less than two weeks away, it couldn’t hurt to simulate the tournament experience early, he said.
I agreed, reluctantly.
Speech and debate tournaments are where all the preemptive work culminates. After months of work (in my case, weeks), tournaments are where competitors showcase their skills in front of judges to receive a ranking, and hopefully, advance to the next elimination round. The end goal is to advance to the final round and win.
The night before, I practiced over and over again, sweat beads forming on my forehead as I slithered repeatedly. My heartbeat leaped from both the cardio of it all and the nerves for the next day.
Once I was handed the key to a room in Kelly Thompson Hall, I set up my computer, put my black book on the side of the computer, and started to warm up.
At in-person tournaments, a team will yell chants to warm up their voices and get excited for the competition. My favorite warmup WKU Forensics does is “Do-Re-Mi” from the Sound of Music.
After a quick warmup, I took a deep breath. Remember what Coach Diaz told you: Relax, and tell my authentic story.
I logged onto Yaatly, a virtual tournament website. After setting up my camera, I clicked on my first round. The judge did a roll call, then gave me the floor as the first speaker. I turned on my camera, took two steps back and a deep breath.
“Can everyone see and hear me OK?” I asked.
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After a nod, I pressed “start” on my timer and began to slither to my heart’s content.
The nerves disappeared as I extended, contracted, hit my book, stomped and shed tears. The performance was natural, authentic and, surprisingly, within 10 minutes.
As I held my last moment, dropped and turned off my camera, a wave of relief covered me as I began jumping around the KTH classroom. Just a few more run-throughs and I would be ready to debut the poetry in-person in Dublin.
My first practice performance: done. Finally.
Altogether, speech is not for the weak. Research, craft and performance are deep; evoking emotion out of an audience is a special and rare trade I get to participate in and is ultimately always worth the stress.
At the final meeting before heading to the world championship, the 20 students that made the cut sat excited and triumphantly ready.
There was no longer a cushion of weeks, and that sent chills down my spine in anticipation.
From the Magazine: Crafted Cadence
My heartbeat jumped into my throat as I watched the clock tick away the time I thought I had. My arms and legs, used to stretching, thumping and creating pictures audiences can hold onto, sat rigid as my pulse rang in my ear.
There’s nothing that can shake a speech and debate competitor more than hearing how close a tournament is.
“OK, everyone,” Ganer Newman, my coach and the director of WKU Forensics, said. “Less than four weeks before the IFA competition.”
IFA, or the International Forensics Association’s world championship, took place in Ireland this year, and only a select few students made the cut. I was one of them and woefully unprepared to add a new event to the three I would already take to the competition.
Hearing that there was no longer a cushion of time sent chills down my spine as I sat during the first team meeting of the spring semester. Somehow, I needed to research, craft and perform a 10-minute poetry interpretation in five weeks.
I had to hop into the mental lab. Immediately.
RESEARCH
Advertisement
Speech and debate, also known as forensics, is an extracurricular activity that’s more than just arguing about politics. It’s research-based, tells a story and is deeply personal.
According to the WKU Forensics’ website, WKU is “unquestionably the most dominant collegiate speech and debate organization over the last quarter century.”
The team has won 51 national championships since 1996 and is the only team to ever win three national championships at three separate tournaments in the same season, and has done it nine times.
However, the general consensus across campus seems to be that no one knows nor cares about the nuances of the activity. Often, many think it’s just an aimless arguing platform.
Well-meaning, but ultimately, reductive comment. Speech is not debate and vice versa.
Jade Ismail, a freshman from Lafayette, Louisiana, is my partner in the duo interpretation event. Duo requires two partners to memorize and perform a 10-minute piece either written or selected as a script, and Ismail is almost too passionate about combating the lack of notoriety the team gets.
“I feel like no one really knows about speech, which is actually really annoying,” she said. “We are digging deeper and putting words to phenomena in ways people couldn’t even fathom.”
Ismail and I created our duo last semester before the first tournament. Our script pulls from both of our experiences.
We portray a Ghanaian mother and her transgender daughter butting heads over Catholicism. Jade and I use the characters’ journey to argue Catholic colonizers incorrectly weaponized the religion to strip Africans of their gender fluidity. With my African heritage and Jade’s identity as a transgender woman, the performance was personal and took a month to weave together because of it.
“Our Duo is just so beautiful because we put our whole hearts and souls into it,” she said.
We spent all of August, September and early October creating and adding blocking, which is any purposeful movement that is striking. One of our favorite moments of blocking is when Jade and I create a monster-like character by moving our heads in different directions while speaking the same line. The audience’s “oohs” of amazement are our stamp of approval.
A realization dawned on me. It’s customary for speech students to compete in five, six or — like I was — seven events in one season. So, I had to replicate that with a completely different topic in the span of one month, give or take. Self-sabotage or passion for speech? I’m not sure I know either.
First, competitors must select a topic they would like to perform – a beast within itself.
Speech pieces all stem from one thing: a drive to speak on something tugging at you. I had just gotten off the phone with my aunt in Kenya, listening to her complaints about what felt like a never-ending drought. She recounted how plentiful the plains were as a child and how frustrated she was that the soft grass and swaying flowers were gone.
I had sighed in discomfort, knowing that I wanted to visit my ancestral home and see it full of greenery and animals, as it was recounted in stories from my grandmother. What flourished and blossomed years ago was no longer a possibility after the effects of climate change continued to ravage the equator.
Brushing it off, I isolated myself in my apartment, as I often do, to ponder what ideas “tugged” at me. My process begins with a browse through my journal. I ask what sticks out to me that I can connect to a larger societal phenomenon, and begin researching articles putting eloquent words and statistics to my jumbled thoughts in a diary entry.
Going off what had scattered across my journal entries, I knew I wanted a topic focused on my identity as a second-generation Kenyan-Nigerian American, but after winning a championship the previous year, I compared every idea to the one prior, and nothing jumped out at me for my seventh event.
Thus began what many speech students do: the researching phase. Newman, my coach, stresses the importance of digging deep inward to result in good research.
“It’s taking a deep dive into what you care about most and finding the literature that puts the feeling into words,” Newman said.
Search after search landed me on research from Atmos, a magazine that is an “exploration of climate and culture,” according to its website. The article was titled: “Eco-Grief Around the World.”
Atmos credits environmentalist Aldo Leopold with using the term in 1940 to describe the emotional pain of environmental loss, putting a term to what millions of indigenous people around the world experience.
According to Ashlee Cunsolo, a climate change researcher at Memorial University, for communities whose cultures are tied to the land, eco-grief can involve “mourning the end of a way of life — of saying goodbye to traditions that have been passed on for generations.”
I sat up in the recluse of my apartment. That was exactly how I felt. Research: done.
CRAFT
Once competitors decide on a topic they feel compelled to perform, the crafting process begins to form a manuscript that is memorized. The script, needing to fit within 10 minutes, forms around what scripts can be woven.
I did know that I wanted my thesis to cover how colonialism exacerbated the climate crisis and left cultures tied to the land without physical connections to their ancestors. Truly a mouthful.
My task was to take that complicated idea, and through performative choices and acting, make it something comprehensible and emotional to watch.
Last year, I was the national champion in poetry at the National Forensics Association championship tournament, which made the process that much harder. How do I tell my story without letting impostor syndrome get in the way of my success? And even deeper, how do I differentiate from last year?
Snap out of it, I told myself. It was time to create.
I attended session after session with my coaches. Tweaking, rewriting, rewording and soft blocking. Asking questions led to more changes that made me fearful as the deadline inched closer.
With the International Championship around the corner, it felt like my indecisiveness in choosing the final poem was a wall I had built myself.
One week left sent a shiver down my spine. My other events were completed, confident and quite frankly, championship material. This one event was my weakness.
Interpretation Coach Sean Diaz would tell me after my final session to stop worrying about last year. I needed to live in the now.
“I keep hearing a lot about last year, Cece,” he said. “Relax. Just tell the story that’s most authentic to you.”
Punch to the gut. And kick-start into action.
For competitors who base their entire careers on communication, I am a testament that sometimes, it just takes some words of encouragement to get back on track.
The poetry interpretation included four poems that worked together to tell the story of lands lost. “Under African Skies” by Sam Illingworth and “Return to Being” by Nnimmo Bassey together express the anger of losing a land gifted to you by your ancestors, using vivid language like “Burst the funeral drums” and “An array of idiotic aphrodisiacs for limp brains.”
“The Nkunga” is a poem that embodies the seven-headed dragon Nkunga, who guards the lake near my extended family in Kenya. In losing the lake due to climate change, fears rise over whether the stories were ever sacred in the first place.
“Catching Fire Part 2” is a satirical poem that details an African girl’s experience seeing her white counterparts grieve over “lands they stewarded.” As she lashes out at them for their ignorance, it mirrors the audience.
I stood in the WKU Forensics office’s room with a mirror on the wall as I looked down at the printed piece of paper reading “slithering across the Savannah.”
I closed my black book, which held my manuscript. I tilted my head and jerked my right shoulder forward, following slowly with my left one. I shifted my legs lethargically across the floor and made a facial expression displaying exhaustion as I slid across the carpet floor.
Here, I created a picture of a snake-like creature inching toward the audience. They should fear me, I thought.
Using a traditional Nigerian Igbo dance I learned from my father, I slithered and posed. Each word, each breath of the poems, was filled with anger reflecting the inner storm my aunt’s rant evoked.
Before I knew it, I had run through the entire piece. Craft: done.
PERFORMANCE
Diaz slyly asked during our last session if I wanted to attend a virtual tournament to test out what I had. Because the international championship was less than two weeks away, it couldn’t hurt to simulate the tournament experience early, he said.
I agreed, reluctantly.
Speech and debate tournaments are where all the preemptive work culminates. After months of work (in my case, weeks), tournaments are where competitors showcase their skills in front of judges to receive a ranking, and hopefully, advance to the next elimination round. The end goal is to advance to the final round and win.
The night before, I practiced over and over again, sweat beads forming on my forehead as I slithered repeatedly. My heartbeat leaped from both the cardio of it all and the nerves for the next day.
Once I was handed the key to a room in Kelly Thompson Hall, I set up my computer, put my black book on the side of the computer, and started to warm up.
At in-person tournaments, a team will yell chants to warm up their voices and get excited for the competition. My favorite warmup WKU Forensics does is “Do-Re-Mi” from the Sound of Music.
After a quick warmup, I took a deep breath. Remember what Coach Diaz told you: Relax, and tell my authentic story.
I logged onto Yaatly, a virtual tournament website. After setting up my camera, I clicked on my first round. The judge did a roll call, then gave me the floor as the first speaker. I turned on my camera, took two steps back and a deep breath.
“Can everyone see and hear me OK?” I asked.
Advertisement
After a nod, I pressed “start” on my timer and began to slither to my heart’s content.
The nerves disappeared as I extended, contracted, hit my book, stomped and shed tears. The performance was natural, authentic and, surprisingly, within 10 minutes.
As I held my last moment, dropped and turned off my camera, a wave of relief covered me as I began jumping around the KTH classroom. Just a few more run-throughs and I would be ready to debut the poetry in-person in Dublin.
My first practice performance: done. Finally.
Altogether, speech is not for the weak. Research, craft and performance are deep; evoking emotion out of an audience is a special and rare trade I get to participate in and is ultimately always worth the stress.
At the final meeting before heading to the world championship, the 20 students that made the cut sat excited and triumphantly ready.
There was no longer a cushion of weeks, and that sent chills down my spine in anticipation.
It was time, and I was ready.