I got drafted into an English olympiad in my final year of high school. It's like getting detention for doing something good. I had to stay for two hours after school each week whilst we studied the topic: Black poetry in Apartheid South Africa.
(I'm white, this was in So. Africa and was whilst apartheid was still in place)
It finished off with a 5 hour supervised, essay session where you got to choose 4 of 10 essay topics.
One poem by Mongane Wally Serote caught my attention and luckily it was one of the topics.
I churned out the others and finished off with this one. The poem is called: "What's in this black shit?".
Of course it was a license to be abusive and swear and vent my frustration at having to do all this 'shit' but it turned quite nicely into a comment on how it must feel for black people at the time.
Quite surprisingly, I got good marks for it. Placed somewhere in the top 100 amongst the SA schools and they suggested I look at journalism. Pah.
Peom is here if you're interested:
http://www.crosspathculture.org/path2/serote1.shtml