At Clement’s Place, a jazz club on the campus of Rutgers-Newark, a quiet revolution is taking place. It doesn’t involve traditional protests or policy debates, but something more intimate: the arts. Through poetry, music, interpretative dance, and other performance styles, the university’s Healing Sounds of Newark initiative creates a space where students and the community can come together.
The approach to the events is simple: invite students to share their experiences through art, and let those stories spark conversations that might otherwise never happen.
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“Healing Sounds of Newark played a big role in me learning how to communicate with people from different backgrounds,” says Sehrish Taqweem, a Rutgers-Newark alumna. Taqweem participated in the 2022 Sounds of Newark event and performed a poetry piece about the power of community.
Now a special education math teacher, Taqweem says her experience was not only positive and “transformative” because of poetry performance but also because she heard and saw what others had to say as well.
“That represents racial healing when so many of our stories are turned into a form of art,” Taqweem says.
Healing Sounds of Newark is part of the Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation (TRHT) campus center, which seeks to cultivate an environment that welcomes healing and connection. Even if students are not majoring in the arts, they are encouraged to participate and express themselves.
“If we’re talking about healing, it’s got to come from more than the head. It’s got to come by knitting hearts together,” says Dr. Timothy Eatman, the inaugural Dean of the Honors Living Learning Community (HLLC) at Rutgers-Newark.
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Eatman’s been a part of the planning of Healing Sounds of Newark since it started in 2018. He says past events have tackled themes like the Newark Water Crisis, HIV awareness, and vaccine equity, reflecting the social challenges of the moment. But the underlying goal is always the same: to create a space where creative vulnerability is not just accepted, but celebrated.
“We try to challenge people to bring all of themselves to their learning,” Eatman explains.
The March 10 event will focus on Women’s History Month, with a theme to “celebrate the triumphs of advocacy and awareness.” Two students, Jaila Benson, a sophomore finance and economics major and Rihobott Mamo, a sophomore sociology major will serve as co-hosts.
Benson says attending previous Healing Sounds of Newark events and seeing local artists and fellow students perform and share their talent left a long-standing impression on her. Mamo has also seen the impact first-hand. “Through vulnerability, you can really bring people together,” she says.
Clement’s Place serving as the venue for most Healing Sounds of Newark events might certainly inspire reflection of the role of dialogue as well as the arts in racial healing and justice movements. Rutgers-Newark is home to the largest jazz research archive in the world, and is connected to the Clement A. Price Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and Modern Experience. The club and institute’s namesake, the late historian and former Rutgers-Newark professor, Dr. Clement A. Price died in 2014. The university opened Clement’s Place two years later in honor of Price’s love for thoughtful conversation and the transformative power of the arts.
Eatman says it’s always his hope that the space Healing Sounds of Newark helps students transform, too.
“We have found that the creation of space like that for students is the kind of thing that helps them round out their set of possibilities around their academic purpose as it aligns with their personal purpose,” he says.
That’s certainly been true for Taqween. In her job as a teacher she works with students who may not have the same story as her, but may share similar experiences — an experience she found to be true at Healing Sounds of Newark.
“Being able to be there as somebody who isn’t Black American, (and) having the privilege of hearing the stories that were told through those poets, I was grateful for that,” she says.
Aaliyah Amos is one of Word In Black’s four Racial Healing Youth Ambassadors. She reports on and amplifies African American student experiences with her campus Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation groups. The TRHT effort promotes inclusive and community-based healing activities and policy designs that seek to change community narratives and broaden the understanding of diverse experiences among people.