What Can Poetry Do In a Time of Catastrophe?
Por: Safia Elhillo
In a recent interview, the Palestinian-American poet Fady Joudah says, “I often think that the responsibility of the poet is to strive to become the memory that people may possess in the future about what it means to be human: an ever-changing constant.”
It is the enduring question in this line of work. What is the function of poetry in the face of horrors such as these? In the face of wars, conflicts, colonization, climate collapse, and the other elements of chaos plaguing our world? The short answer is that I don’t entirely know, but I won’t use that as an excuse to let myself off the hook. We are all familiar at this point with the idea that all movements have different roles that need filling, and require everyone to contribute their specific skill set. With that in mind, I return often to this Toni Morrison quote for instruction: "This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal."
I don’t want to have an inflated sense of my role as a poet during this time of catastrophe, nor do I want to absolve myself of responsibility during this time of catastrophe. So I’m tending where I can. I am thinking about what it means to “do language,” in a moment when we have witnessed the term “human animals” wielded in an official capacity to justify ethnic cleansing, when we we witnessed respected US news outlets use the passive voice to harrowing effect—describing the murdered as people who simply “have died,” as if that is just the natural order of things. When we have witnessed long stretches of silence about the war in my home country of Sudan, silence that is not the absence of language but a language of its own. And when the war in Sudan is mentioned, it is often referred to as “the forgotten war.” As if I or any of my people could forget. But our memory is not the one being centered by this language.
So what are the possibilities of shifting the center? If this is the language that is populating the historical record about this moment, then is there not some responsibility as well to crowd out that language with our own? I have often experienced the act of writing poetry to be one of paying absolute attention, a commitment to radical presence, a refusal to dissociate, to go numb.
I am also thinking, these days, about how one of the functions of poetry is to defamiliarize. Some of the work of a poem is looking at something in slant or upside down or backwards or through a crack in the wall. We are living through deep aberrations in nature and having them gradually become normalized. Genocide in Palestine, war in Sudan, climate catastrophe, the undead afterlives of slavery in Congo, the UAE, and in American prisons. The work of making poetry is important and helpful in reminding myself that none of this is normal.
In the first couple of weeks of the war in Sudan, I felt so useless. I live in California, literally on the opposite side of the planet, and I could not, for the life of me, come up with a task that felt proportionate to the scale of horror my people, my family, were experiencing. Almost like a sort of penance, I made it so that anytime I encountered a video or image of the horrors — I had to watch it. The act of witnessing was my contribution. And then the strange, cognitive thing that started to happen is, after a while, nothing bothered me on a physical level. At first I would be sick to my stomach at the sight of blood and destruction, and it would be jarring, then weeks later it had completely ceased to bother me. These images of brutality became a part of the morning routine of checking my phone, just like making a cup of tea. One can get used to anything, which I think is to our great detriment in moments where deep empathy is called for. That is what returned me to the page, to reading poetry. It feels like a great corruption is being done to my spirit, to my psyche, to my body, that I am able to look at atrocities like this and have my brain begin to process them as normal, business as usual, the natural order of things. I had to estrange myself from this new normalcy, to look at it from the outside to remember how unacceptable it is. One of the only ways I know to keep things strange is poetry.
As a reader of poetry, I remain jarred, surprised, startled into feeling, when my same eye can read a headline now crowded with the dead and feel primarily a detached sort of horror that doesn’t entirely register in my body. I read the headline about Refat Alareer’s daughter, murdered by the IDF along with her husband and newborn baby, the daughter to whom the poet Refaat, also murdered by the IDF, addressed his poem If I Must Die, and it isn’t until I reread the poem that my nervous system kicks into action, that the tears come, because of the tenderness of the word “you” in that poem, because I remember now that it was a father saying to his child, “you must live,” that intimate and familiar “you,” full of love, full of looking, and now both the “I” and the “you” in the poem have been killed. Something about the “you” startles my sludgy, overcast brain back into technicolor, and I remember the fact of flesh and blood, of each and every one of the dead being a “you,” and it does something that numbers haven’t been able to achieve in me for some time now—it crowds the facts with the fact of individuals, flesh and blood individuals, fully formed, irreplaceable. I am startled back into the reality of it, the aberration of it. Nothing is normal.
By attending to the immediate, a poem can paradoxically make it seem strange and distant, through juxtaposition, or the context we see it in, or the newness of the angle. The presence of something ordinary can emphasize the horror of a scene. The scarecrow from Fady Joudah’s poem, that everyday sentinel of the field, becomes strange, comes alive with horror, in the face of invasion--”You will drop your sugarcane-stick-beating of plastic bucket,/Stop shouting at birds and run.” Its basic actions, standing in a field, become markers of trauma in light of displacement--”And you will keep your cool./Standing with eyes shut tight like you’ve got soap in them./Arms stretched wide like you’re catching rain.” A poem can also reframe the normal as horrifying, like in “When the World as We Knew It Ended” by Joy Harjo, which invites us to consider whether the greater violence of 9/11 was the attack itself, or the colonization that allowed the towers to be built in the first place--
We were dreaming on an occupied island at the farthest edge
of a trembling nation when it went down.
Two towers rose up from the east island of commerce and touched
the sky. Men walked on the moon. Oil was sucked dry
by two brothers. Then it went down.
By defamiliarizing our historical narrative about these events, Harjo draws our attention to the terrorism Indigenous people have been experiencing since settlers first arrived, and to their resilience--
But then there were the seeds to plant and the babies
who needed milk and comforting, and someone
picked up a guitar or ukulele from the rubble
and began to sing about the light flutter
the kick beneath the skin of the earth
we felt there, beneath us
I haven’t written that much poetry in the two years since war broke out in Sudan, which I’m kind of using to mark a before and after time. But I do find myself notably moving away from figurative language. One of my earliest tools as a poet was the metaphor and the simile. And I feel that I have, at least for now, abruptly lost interest. Claire Schwartz has an essay reviewing Solmaz Sharif’s Customs and talking about the role of the simile and how “like” is not “is,” and it opens up into this larger conversation about the failures of the project of empathy when it comes to literature. I am trying to do the futile work of calling for help, calling for attention for my people, for a war that is often referred to in mainstream media as the “forgotten war.” My initial impulse is simile, is metaphor, to be like, “you should care about this, because it is like this other thing that you care about.” And that is really heartbreaking, thankless labor. It is not interesting to me on a personal, political or craft level anymore to talk about what it’s “like” instead of just talking about what it “is,” because it is not my job to get a reader who doesn’t already care to care. It is not my job or my people’s job to humanize ourselves to someone who does not already hold our humanity as a core belief.
I’m not advocating for abolishing the metaphor or abolishing the simile. Hopefully in gentler times, I will find my way back to those dearly beloved tools. But I don’t feel I have the luxury in this moment of trying to think about what it’s “like,” because there is such a dearth of language about what it “is,” and my responsibility is to the language of what it is right now. Right now, we’re in triage.
It’s clear to me that poetry is not revolutionary in and of itself. Poetry does not liberate the oppressed, does not heal the land, clothe the cold, or feed the hungry. And yet, it is all I have, and I keep being drawn back to it. I keep asking myself what poetry can say to war, to catastrophe, to death and destruction. And all I can say is that it helps us bear witness. In “Tibaq/Antithesis,” (translated by Mona Anis) Mahmoud Darwish speaks in the voice of his late friend Edward Said and says
The poem could host
loss, a thread of light shining
at the heart of a guitar … For
the aesthetic is but the presence of the real
in form/ … Invent a hope for speech,
invent a direction, a mirage to extend hope.
And sing, for the aesthetic is freedom/
For me, in this time of catastrophe for my people and so many millions of others, I find myself returning to poetry because it allows me to bear witness, to grieve in the open with and for my community. Poetry is a type of witnessing that doesn’t make horror normal, it doesn’t desensitize me to either the violence or the beauty that unfolds in the world. By placing them beside each other, it reveals the fullness of experience and helps me to see, clear eyed, where we are and what needs to be done to heal and repair and bring real revolutions.
The poet Vanessa Angelica Villareal writes: “I only love the brave poets. I only respect the brave writers. I turn my back to the rest of you. In the audience, on a stage, everywhere. I will ask you where you were. Why you didn’t sign. I will turn my back. You had nothing to say, so you have nothing worth saying.”
Every day, I strive to answer this call, to remember the stakes.
Safia Elhillo born at December 16, 1990 is a Sudanese-American poet known for her written and spoken poetry. Elhillo received a BA degree from the Gallatin School at New York University and an MFA in poetry from The New School. Elhillo has performed all around the world. She has won acclaim for her work and has been the recipient of several prestigious poetry awards. Elhillo has shared the stage with notable poets such as Sonia Sanchez and has taught at Split This Rock[2] and Tin House Summer Workshop. Currently, she is a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Took from Wikipedia
