Dennis Brutus wrote, acted on, was imprisoned then exiled for his opposition to the South African apartheid regime. And he continues to act and write in the international sphere in movements for global economic justice. I’ll read one epigrammatically terse poem—not typical of his work but expressing a certain point:
An old black woman,
suffering,
tells me I have given her
“new images”
—a father bereaved
by radical heroism
finds consolation
in my verse.
then I know
these are those I write for
and my verse works.
My verse works. In two senses: as participant in political struggle, and at the personal, visceral level where it’s received and its witness acknowledged. These are two responses to the question of poetry and commitment, which I take as complementary, not in opposition.
What’s at stake here is the recognition of poetry as what James Scully calls “social practice.” He distinguishes between “protest poetry” and “dissident poetry”: Protest poetry is “conceptually shallow,” “reactive,” predictable in its means, too often a hand-wringing from the sidelines.
Dissident poetry, however [he writes] does not respect boundaries between private and public, self and other. In breaking boundaries, it breaks silences, speaking for, or at best, with, the silenced; opening poetry up, putting it into the middle of life. . . . It is a poetry that talks back, that would act as part of the world, not simply as a mirror of it.
4
I’m both a poet and one of the “everybodies” of my country. I live, in poetry and daily experience, with manipulated fear, ignorance, cultural confusion, and social antagonism huddling together on the fault line of an empire. In my lifetime I’ve seen the breakdown of rights and citizenship where ordinary “everybodies,” poets or not, have left politics to a political class bent on shoveling the elemental resources, the public commons of the entire world, into private control. Where democracy has been left to the raiding of “acknowledged” legislators, the highest bidders. In short, to a criminal element.
Ordinary, comfortable Americans have looked aside when our fraternally-twinned parties—Democrat and Republican—have backed dictatorships against popular movements abroad; as their covert agencies, through torture and assassination, through supplied weapons and military training, have propped up repressive parties and regimes in the name of anticommunism and our “national interests.” Why did we think fascistic methods, the subversion of civil and human rights, would be contained somewhere else? Because as a nation, we’ve clung to a self-righteous false innocence, eyes shut to our own scenario, our body politic’s internal bleeding.
But internal bleeding is no sudden symptom. That uncannily prescient African American writer James Baldwin asked his country, a quarter century ago: “If you don’t know my father, how can you know the people in the streets of Tehran?”
This year, a report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics finds that 1 out of every 136 residents of the United States is behind bars: many in jails, unconvicted. That the percentage of black men in prison or jail is almost 12 to 1 over white male prisoners. That the states with the highest rates of incarceration and execution are those with the poorest populations.
We often hear that—by contrast with, say, Nigeria or Egypt, China or the former Soviet Union—the West doesn’t imprison dissident writers. But when a nation’s criminal justice system imprisons so many—often on tawdry evidence and botched due process—to be tortured in maximum security units or on death row, overwhelmingly because of color and class, it is in effect—and intention—silencing potential and actual writers, intellectuals, artists, journalists: a whole intelligentsia. The internationally known case of Mumia Abu-Jamal is emblematic but hardly unique. The methods of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo have long been practiced in the prisons and policing of the United States.
What has all this to do with poetry? Would we have come here, from so many directions, to such a conference if “all this” had nothing to do with poetry? (We can also imagine others who might be here if not for the collision of politics with literature.) In the words of Brecht’s Galileo, addressed to scientists in a newly commercial age, but equally challenging for artists: What are we working for?
But—let’s never discount it—within every official, statistical, designated nation, there breathes another nation: of unappointed, unappeased, unacknowledged clusters of people who daily, with fierce imagination and tenacity, confront cruelties, exclusions, and indignities, signaling through those barriers—which are often literal cages—in poetry, music, street theater, murals, videos, Web sites—and through many forms of direct activism.
And this keeps happening: I began making notes for this talk last March, on a day of cold wind, flattened white light overhanging the coast where I live. Raining for almost a month. A numbing sense of dead-end, endless winter, endless war.
In the last week of March, a punitive and cynical anti-immigrant bill is introduced in Congress and passed by the House of Representatives. As most of you know, essential sectors of the Western economies depend on the low-wage labor and social vulnerability of economic refugees—especially, in the United States, from south of the border. That bill would make it a felony not just to employ, but to give medical aid, even food or water, to an “illegal” immigrant. Between the United States and Mexico, a walled, armed border would turn back those economic refugees. The hypocrisy and flagrant racism of that bill arouses a vast population. Community leaders put out the word, call the Spanish-language radio stations to announce protest gatherings. Suddenly—though such events are never really sudden—a massive series of oppositional marches pours into the streets of Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Detroit, Atlanta, Denver, Houston, and other large and smaller cities and towns—the largest demonstrations in the history of many of those cities. Not only people from Mexico and Central America, but immigrant groups from Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, the Philippines, from Arab-American communities: families, students, activists, unions, clergy, many at risk of firing or deportation, opposing that bill. Millions of people. A working-class movement different from earlier movements. A new articulation of dignity and solidarity. And a new politicized generation growing in part out of those marches—in, for example, a coalition of young Latinos and African Americans.
Of course, there’s the much larger political resistance heating up—let me simply mention Chiapas, Seattle, Buenos Aires, Genoa, Porto Alegre, Caracas, Mumbai, the streets of Paris and other European cities—not to mention worldwide women’s and indigenous people’s movements, which have never gone away—and the gay and lesbian liberation movements allied with, and often emerging from, these.
5
I hope never to idealize poetry—it has suffered enough from that. Poetry is not a healing lotion, an emotional massage, a kind of linguistic aromatherapy. Neither is it a blueprint, nor an instruction manual, nor a billboard. There is no universal Poetry anyway, only poetries and poetics, and the streaming, intertwining histories to which they belong. There is room, indeed necessity, for both Neruda and César Vallejo, for Pier Paolo Pasolini and Alfonsina Storni, for Audre Lorde and Aimé Césaire, for both Ezra Pound and Nelly Sachs. Poetries are no more pure and simple than human histories are pure and simple. Poetry, like silk or coffee or oil or human flesh, has had its trade routes. And there are colonized poetics and resilient poetics, transmissions across frontiers not easily traced.
Walt Whitman never separated his poetry from his vision of American democracy—a vision severely tested in a Civil War fought over the economics of slavery. Late in life he called “poetic lore . . . a conversation overheard in the dusk, from speakers far or hid, of which we get only a few broken murmurs”—the obscurity, we might think now, of democracy itself.
But also of those “dark times” in and about which Bertolt Brecht assured us there would be songs.
Poetry has been charged with “aestheticizing,” thus being complicit in, the violent realities of power, of practices like collective punishment, torture, rape, and genocide. This accusation was famously invoked in Adorno’s “after the Holocaust lyric poetry is impossible”—which Adorno later retracted and which a succession of Jewish poets have in their practice rejected. I’m thinking now not only of post–World War II poets like Paul Celan, Edmond Jabès, Nelly Sachs, Kadia Molodowsky, Muriel Rukeyser, Irena Klepfisz. I’m also thinking of contemporary poems in a recent collection from Israel that I’ve been reading in translation: With an Iron Pen: Twenty Years of Hebrew Protest Poetry, ignited by the atrocious policies and practices of Israel’s occupation of Palestine. There, poems of dissonant, harsh beauty, some thrusting images of the Occupation into the very interior of Israeli domestic life:
. . . I open the refrigerator door
and see a weeping roll,
see a piece of bleeding cheese,
a radish forced to sprout
by shocks from wires
and blows from fists.
The meat on its plate
tells of placentas
cast aside by roadblocks. . . .
—Aharon Shabtai, “The Fence,” trans. Peter Cole
—or suggesting how the poem itself endures its own knowledge:
The poem isn’t served meat and fruit
on a silver platter at night,
and by day its mouth does not long
for a golden spoon or communion wafers.
Lost, it wanders the roads of Beit Jala,
sways like a drunk through the streets of Bethlehem,
seeking you along the way in vain,
searching for your shadow’s shadow in the shrubs.
Close to the breast, the soul sits
curled up like a boy in a sleeping bag
dry as a flower bulb buried in the middle of the throat.
Then the poem feels it can’t go on any longer
wandering towards the refugee camp,
toward the fugitives’ cradle
in the Promised Land’s heavy summer
on the path to disaster
—Rami Saari, “Searching the Land,” trans. Lisa Katz
Do poems like these “work”? How do we calculate such a thing on a day when Israel is battering its way into Gaza, bombing Lebanon? Like the activist, the poet (who may be both) has to reckon with disaster, desperation, and exhaustion—these, too, are the materials.
And in such a time—when water is poisoned, when sewage flows into houses, when air becomes unbreathable from the dust of blasted schools and hospitals—poetry must gasp for breath.
But if poetry had gone mute after every genocide in history, there would be no poetry left in the world, and this conference might have a different theme: “The Death of the Poem” perhaps?
If to “aestheticize” is to glide across brutality and cruelty, treat them merely as dramatic occasions for the artist rather than structures of power to be revealed and dismantled—much hangs on the words “merely” and “rather than.” Opportunism isn’t the same as committed attention. But we can also define the “aesthetic” not as a privileged and sequestered rendering of human suffering, but as news of an awareness, a resistance, that totalizing systems want to quell: art reaching into us for what’s still passionate, still unintimidated, still unquenched.
Poetry has been written off on other counts: (1) it’s not a mass-market “product”: it doesn’t get sold on airport news-stands or in supermarket aisles; (2) the actual consumption figures for poetry can’t be quantified at the checkout counter; (3) it’s too “difficult” for the average mind; (4) it’s too elite, but the wealthy don’t bid for it at Sotheby’s. It is, in short, redundant. This might be called the free-market critique of poetry.
There’s actually an odd correlation between these ideas: poetry is either inadequate, even immoral, in the face of human suffering, or it’s unprofitable, hence useless. Either way, poets are advised to hang our heads or fold our tents. Yet in fact, throughout the world, transfusions of poetic language can and do quite literally keep bodies and souls together—and more.
Two items from recent news. One is a headline from the San Francisco Chronicle of July 17, 2005:
Writing Poetry Was the Balm
That Kept Guantanamo Prisoners
from Going Mad
The story follows of a Pakistani Muslim, Abdul Rahim Dost, arrested in Afghanistan and held without charges in the American detention camp at Guantánamo. There he wrote thousands of lines in Pashto, translated Arabic poetry into Pashto, at first scratching lines with his fingernail into Styrofoam cups. His brother and fellow inmate is quoted as saying that “poetry was our support and psychological uplift. . . . Many people have lost their minds there. I know 40 or 50 prisoners who are mad.”
These men, detained as terrorists (released after three years), turned to poetry in the depths of Guantánamo to keep themselves sane, hold onto a sense of self and culture. So, too, the Chinese immigrants to California in the early twentieth century, detained in barracks on an island in San Francisco Bay, traced their ideograms of anger and loneliness on the walls of that prison.
But poetry sometimes also finds those who weren’t looking for it.
From the Israeli newspaper Haaretz of November 7, 2004, comes an article by David Zonsheine, a former commander in the Israel Defense Force who became organizer and leader of the anti-Occupation movement within the IDF, the Courage to Refuse. Zonsheine comes by chance upon some lines from a poem of Yitzhak Laor and finds that
reading these lines a moment after a violent month of reserve duty, which was full of a sense of the righteousness of the way, was no easy thing. I remember that for one alarming moment I felt that I was looking at something I was forbidden to see. What this thing was I did not know, but on that same Friday afternoon I went out to look for every book by Yitzhak Laor that I could find in the shops.
Zonsheine continues,
The sense of mission with which I enlisted in the IDF was based . . . on . . . the painfully simple message that we shall not allow the Holocaust of the Jews to repeat itself no matter what the costs, and when the moral price became more severe, the sense of mission only increased . . . I am a freedom fighter . . . not an occupier, not cruel, certainly not immoral . . .
Something in Laor’s texts spoke to me about the place inside me that had been closed and denied until then . . .
Here I am, 28 years old, returning home from another month of reserve duty in Gaza and suddenly asking myself questions that are beginning to penetrate even the armor of the righteousness . . . in which they had dressed me years ago. And Laor’s strong words return to echo in my ears: “With such obedience? With such obedience? With such obedience?”
Ever since I refused to serve in the territories and the Ometz Lesarev (Courage to Refuse) movement was established, I have returned again and again to Laor’s texts . . .
. . . The voice is that of a poetic persona through whose life the “situation” passes and touches everything he has, grasping and refusing to let go. The child, the wife, the hours of wakefulness alone at night, memory, the very act of writing—everything is political. And from the other extreme, every terror attack, every act of occupation, every moral injustice—everything is completely personal.
. . . This is . . . a poetry that does not seek parental approval or any other approval, a poetry that liberates from the limitations of criticism of the discourse, and a poetry that . . . finds the independent place that revolts and refuses.
Did Laor’s poetry “work”? Did Zonsheine’s commitment “work”? In either sense of the word, at any given moment, how do we measure? If we say no, does that mean we give up on poetry? On resistance? With such obedience?
“Something I was forbidden to see.”
6
Critical discourse about poetry has said little about the daily conditions of our material existence, past and p
resent: how they imprint the life of the feelings, of involuntary human responses—how we glimpse a blur of smoke in the air, look at a pair of shoes in a shop window, at a woman asleep in her car or a group of men on a street corner, how we hear the whir of a helicopter or rain on the roof or music on the radio upstairs, how we meet or avoid the eyes of a neighbor or a stranger. That pressure bends our angle of vision whether we recognize it or not. A great many well-wrought, banal poems, like a great many essays on poetry and poetics, are written as if such pressures didn’t exist. But this only reveals their existence.
It’s sometimes taken that politicized emotions belong solely to the “oppressed” or “disenfranchised” or “outraged,” or to a facile liberalism. Can it still be controversial to say that an apparently disengaged poetics may also speak a political language—of self-enclosed complacency, passivity, opportunism, false neutrality—or that such poetry can simply be, in Mayakovsky’s phrase, a “cardboard horse”?
But when poetry lays its hand on our shoulder, as Yitzhak Laor’s poem did for David Zonsheine, we are, to an almost physical degree, touched and moved. The imagination’s roads open before us, giving the lie to that slammed and bolted door, that razor-wired fence, that brute dictum “There is no alternative.”
Of course, like the consciousness behind it, behind any art, a poem can be deep or shallow, visionary or glib, prescient or stuck in an already lagging trendiness. What’s pushing the grammar and syntax, the sounds, the images—is it the constriction of literalism, fundamentalism, professionalism—a stunted language? Or is it the great muscle of metaphor, drawing strength from resemblance in difference? The great muscle of the unconstricted throat?
I’d like to suggest this: If there’s a line to be drawn, it’s not so much between secularism and belief as between those for whom language has metaphoric density and those for whom it is merely formulaic—to be used for repression, manipulation, empty certitudes to ensure obedience.
Essential Essays Page 37