DeKalb High School sophomore takes 6th place in poetry reading at IHSA Speech State Finals

DeKALB - 16-year-old Unique Omodayo stared directly into the camera, eyebrows furrowed in earnest as she declared the words, “I will tell you that right now, there are a million Black girls just waiting to see someone who looks just like them.”

That was her closing line taken from Ashlee Haze’s poem “For Colored Girls (The Missy Elliott Poem)” and infused into an 8-minute slam poetry program performed by Omodayo, a sophomore at DeKalb High School and a member of DHS’ Forensics Team which focuses on competitive public speech and orations. The performance earned her sixth place in the Illinois High School Association’s State Speech Finals for poetry reading, capping off a 2020-2021 season with DHS’ Forensics Team which saw her win 19 medals at 11 tournaments competing in poetry reading and dramatic interpretation, including a Regional Championship, a Sectional Championship, four other first-place finishes and four second-place finishes.

Omodayo is the team’s first state finalist in poetry since 2003, and only the third sophomore state finalist from DeKalb in the past 30 years.

“It’s surreal,” Omodayo said Friday. “I didn’t even think I could do something that good but it makes me feel so good that other people could connect with my poetry and the programs I choose. I didn’t think I’d make it farther than Regionals. The competition was great. This is thanks to my coaches. They literally spent every single day shaping me to my ability.”

Omodayo also credits her mother, Bola Omogbai, who she said cheered her on at every step.

“My mom, she really helped me a lot,” Omodayo said. “I really appreciate her because she supported me so much throughout this. She’d always watch my performances, she was really proud of me. She’s like my biggest supporter.”

The Forensics Team and poetry performance is fairly new to Omodayo, she said, though judging by her multitude of awards this season her talent wouldn’t show it. In fact, she said it was living through the chaos of 2020 -- with pandemic-fueled quarantine and long-suffered racial strife bubbling up to the forefront -- which inspired her to put words to her feelings.

“I started it actually this year because of 2020 because of all the things going on around us as we were locked in quarantine, and it made me want to get a voice especially with the Black Lives Matter movement which was something my poetry program had an insight on,” Omodayo said. “So that’s when I started like ‘Wow I’m really interested in this.’ I found out about poetry and forensics and I’m like, yes I could finally express myself without feeling ashamed and be proud that I’m a Black woman.”

Greg Solomon, one of the team’s coaches, said Omodayo rose to the occasion this year, especially as competitions were all virtual.

“Unique overcame a very difficult situation this year. She did an amazing job adjusting to the remote format,” Solomon said. “Fortunately, Unique found poems that she felt very strongly about. And when you are delivering a message you truly believe, the format can easily be overcome. Unique is an incredibly talented young lady who took feedback and continued to grow and improve all season.”

While she searched for inspiration, Omodayo said she discovered Minneapolis-based performance poetry company and publisher Button Poetry that helped shape her voice.

“I was searching for poetry, and I came across something on YouTube called Button Poetry,” she said. “I just got so interested and spent two hours watching how they express themselves. It doesn’t even have to rhyme as well. Then I saw these pieces were so powerful and expressed how I felt about me being Black. And a woman. And I was like “This is like the perfect piece for me.’”

For competition, Omodayo put together an amalgamation of three poems about the Black woman experience that spoke to her: “Angry Black Woman” by Porsha Olayiwola, “The Average Black Girl” by Ernestine Johnson and “For Colored Girls (The Missy Elliott Poem)” by Ashlee Haze. It was her submission piece for the IHSA Speech State Finals. The competitions were held virtually this year due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

It’s “a program about discovering yourself, despite what others may think you are, or think you should be,” Omodayo says, introducing her performance in her virtual entry.

“We all have expectations placed upon us,” she said. “For Black women, these can be especially dangerous, for these societal expectations are often based on biases, or even racism. Black women are not only struggling to survive these stereotypes set by white America, but the ones established in their own community as well.”

Performing the pieces isn’t just about committing words to memory. In the 8-minute long piece, Omodayo takes on many voices, emoting throughout the performance to express anger, grief, rage, hope, pride. Her words are sharp and enunciated at times, intonation and inflection weaving through the transitions of the three poems which she seems to navigate with ease.

Verses such as “‘You talk so white.’ When did me talking right equate to me talking white?” from Johnson’s ‘Average Black Girl,’ bleed into lyrics from Porsha’s “Angry Black Woman.”

“I am not angry at all,” Omodayo says as the character in the poem, holding her smile-that-doesn’t-quite-make-it-to-her-eyes for a (meant to be) uncomfortably long five seconds before moving her face to match the mood and declares, “I am pissed off.”

Does she get nervous performing these pieces? Practice makes perfect, Omodayo said.

“In one of my pieces, ‘The Average Black Girl,’ she is portrayed as she overenunciates things,” Omodayo said. “That’s something you have to work on, to portray the character, the type you want to come out. Before I go into my competition, I do get really nervous, but I calm myself down and my coach gives me pep talks like ‘You got this.’ So when I’m actually performing it, I do get adrenaline because I have so much fun.”

The team’s members, down from 40 to about 25 this year at DHS, won over 150 individual medals during the course of the year, as well as both Regional (nine teams competing) and Sectional (30 teams competing) championships, district officials said. The Regionals featured 18 speakers per event.

The students competed virtually all year, from pre-recorded performances to live competitions via Zoom. The team is coached by Greg Solomon, T. J. Fontana, Daniel’e Apperson, Deanne Hornof, Mikey Tito, and Jimmy Zucker. Additional DHS students who qualified for state include: Senior Ally Belick, Senior Jackson Heuschel and Sophomore Keyirra Morrow.

As for Omodayo, she said she’d love to continue Forensics throughout the remainder of her high school career in DeKalb, and is already thinking about how to keep it up in college.

As she says in her performance piece, “What did you expect?”