Humour is used to lift up spirits but it can also be healing and deep. The power of words, both written and spoken, is well understood by comedians, such as Kevin Scow. “I always tried to be funny. It took me a while to make people laugh in my own nuanced way”, he shares.
“By the time I am on stage, Kevin the comedian takes over”, he mentions, but his act is also infused with stories from his personal life. One of his jokes even goes like this: “I keep saying I have multiple mental health diagnoses. My meds are keeping me relatively sane. So in other words, I used to be a lot more interesting“.
“It’s kind of my humoring style, to show the humanness of my experience”, he explains. Kevin Scow is also a poet, and when he goes on stage it is in the hopes of shedding light on the conditions of others, especially the most marginalized.
With his own experience, he understands how those who are on the margins of society are “really looking for connection, to be valued, to find a way of contributing to their community, and how a lot of them [are] not finding it”, because of their financial situation or their mental health, for example.
“Without this faith, without its shining examples of overcoming overwhelming obstacles, without the strengths of our community, without our unity of purpose, how can anyone stay strong?”
He himself has had to deal with both challenges in the past. In the late eighties, he had his first diagnosis for schizophrenia. In the late 2010s, he dealt with homelessness, after going through an episode of mania. These circumstances made him feel vulnerable, he recounts.
After becoming homeless, he went to mental health facilities , then stayed with a friend and finally found a home. But his empathy for people in the streets grew, especially for those of the Downtown Eastside (DTES) in Vancouver, a disadvantaged neighbourhood. “ I just felt a deeper connection to people in the DTES than I ever did before […] it felt like that could be me.”
Over time, he has had help from different professionals, as well as his late father, who made efforts to help get his son in the best care possible. Scow has learned to live with his conditions, whether it be bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. “I keep moving forward, growing, healing, flailing, getting stronger”, he asserts.
Getting to know a new community
Community has also had a tremendous impact on Kevin Scow, as a person and as an artist, whether it’s the people he got to know in the DTES or the Kwikwasut’inuxw Haxwa’mis First Nation he belongs to.
“Being a descendant of First Nations affects my whole being. We were a people dismissed, looked down upon, thought of as less than human”, he explains. “Even if I wasn’t directly targeted, intergenerational trauma is insidious, indiscriminate, and buried under infinite layers”. He believes that unlike physical injuries, “spiritual wounds are so much deeper and less easy to diagnose”.
“My current healing expression is poetry and comedy”, Scow shares. For him, expression is a life line, but so is the Baha’i faith, because the two keep him grounded, he says.
He was introduced to the faith by a few friends in a religious studies class, in 1988. “They brought me to firesides and it just was a wonderful community. “He says that he truly investigated the faith in 2000, and became Baha’i immediately after going to a talk by the author and historian Moojan Momen that same year.
At some point, his feeling of belonging to the Baha’i community was mixed with a feeling of inadequacy. “I came into this community and expected everybody to be perfect and expected them to see how flawed I was”, he admits.
But he later realized how each member is striving for excellence, without it meaning they were flawless. Reminiscing on what he came to believe at that time, he adds: ”we are still learning how to be a Baha’i community and none of us has the whole blueprint for it“.
“When I finally figured that part out, I started to gain confidence in my understanding of all these readings and writings that I have been deepening in, I started having opinions about things, and I started wanting to contribute in different ways”.
One of his ways of contributing is with words. “I always used poetry to communicate, I would always be writing and sharing,” highlights Scow. Now he considers words to be powerful tools to “creating a better world.”
It’s with this aim that he does his art. “I just want to connect with [people] in a way that helps to build connections between [them], that yields understanding and to maybe inspire people to investigate the faith.”
“Without this faith, without its shining examples of overcoming overwhelming obstacles, without the strengths of our community, without our unity of purpose, how can anyone stay strong?”
He adds: “this is why I chose to be a Baha’i. To love humanity, try to serve it, and help the transformation of our world into something so full of promise, the possibilities are beyond our comprehension.”
View one of Kevin Scow’s poetry performances on YouTube.