Poetic Times
From my keynote, delivered at the 2020 Emerging Writers Festival.
Perhaps these are not / poetic / times at all – Nikki Giovanni
My poetry is drawn from my life. This is to not say that it is a biography, in the sense of that word as being factual, because I think our lives are infused with and informed by dreams, nightmares, fantasies—to say nothing of the stories we read, watch, hear—as much as the memories of what we consider reality. My writing, then, is a blend of the real and unreal. I think that makes it all the more true, and I’m telling you this now because I can’t divorce the role of art in life from my individual practice. I mean, I could, but I don’t want to make a blanket statement about what kind of artist you need to be, so I’m mostly going to talk about how and why I make art the way I do, despite everything.
For this talk, I was asked to consider an idea expressed in Nikki Giovanni’s poem, “For Saundra”, around the utility or function of poetry in a time of revolution, or which necessitates revolution, and what immediately came to mind for me was Theodore Adorno’s famous quote: “There can be no poetry after Auschwitz”. Technically, the correct translation is “writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” but it’s the former iteration that is better known. You can look at this a number of ways; one being that the horrors and cruelties of the human race are such that to undertake the pursuit of art in the face of that without addressing it substantively is deeply wrong; another being that to address these things in art replicates the horror itself and is therefore equally barbaric; a third being that art itself is a kind of gilding over of the monstrous machinery of the State and we should abandon it until such a time as it is appropriate once more. I don’t really agree with these positions, but they’re worth considering, and they are highlighted by Giovanni’s poem, so, in case some of you haven’t read that yet, here it is:
“For Saundra”.
I wanted to write
a poem
that rhymes
but revolution doesn't lend
itself to be-bopping
then my neighbor
who thinks i hate
asked - do you ever write
tree poems - i like trees
so i thought
i'll write a beautiful green tree poem
peeked from my window
to check the image
noticed that the school yard was covered
with asphalt
no green - no trees grow
in manhattan
then, well, i thought the sky
i'll do a big blue sky poem
but all the clouds have winged
low since no-Dick was elected
so i thought again
and it occurred to me
maybe i shouldn't write
at all
but clean my gun
and check my kerosene supply
perhaps these are not poetic
times
at all
Needless to say, I love this poem. I think the false binary of nature poem vs political poem is exposed really well here—which has subsequently been deconstructed and subverted in Tommy Pico’s work, in poems by Hanif Abdurraqib, Chen Chen, and Jericho Brown among many others—and it also highlights a tension that many poets of different communities feel around the purpose of art, and how it is received, when those communities are suffering in material ways. We feel the need to document it, to respond to it, and when we do, someone will ask, Why not a beautiful poem about nature? Even though we’re rarely commissioned for that, and if we were, no doubt someone would ask then why we were being so frivolous, don’t you know that people are dying? The truth is that it doesn’t matter what we write, the point is that we’re daring to write, to occupy a position traditionally not meant for us, and the goal of the questioner is to highlight that and to undermine our ability to continue.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. The central question is: Are we living in poetic times? That is, if you accept the premise that there is a time for poetry versus a time for action, which is the implication here. Personally, I think of poetry not only as an action, but as a vital one, and I’m characterising poetry here as a way of looking at the world, a way of seeing, and a set of tools that we use in the act of writing or reading. It’s easy to dismiss poetry as pointless if you’re comparing it to an armed insurrection, for example, or if you’re expecting it to change the world in the same drastic and immediately obvious way as a war. I think Giovanni would agree with this: there’s a reason she put this down as a poem, after all. We both know that poetry can and should ready you for the revolution, but you’re still the one who then has to enact it. It’s not poetry that has failed to change the world, which was never its purpose anyway, it is the people, it is us who failed.
I want to reflect a little bit on why poetry as a valid and necessary course of action is an uncommon position, though. I think a lot of it has to do with Western class sensibilities, whereby “hard” physical or tangible labour, coded as “masculine”, is valued endlessly over the intangible or “soft” work of art, coded as “feminine”, which we’re conditioned to view as useless. That’s very much deliberate. The former favours changing the physical world, and the latter favours changing people, changing us, which the powers that be rightly view as dangerous. And so there has been, over time, a deliberate devaluing of the work of art and the place of the artist in society, particularly in Australia, but I think more broadly in the West as well. It’s continually labelled as the province of the elite, or as self-indulgent, lazy, effete, and this is a self-fulfilling prophecy in some respects because the same people doing that labelling are also busy cutting funding to the arts, and doing their level best to ensure the only people who can access it are middle or upper class, which is already largely the case and is only getting worse.
Meanwhile, all over the world, poets languish in prison. I'm thinking of Ashraf Fayadh, a Palestinian poet living in Saudi Arabia, who was sentenced to death for writing a book of poems someone decided "advanced atheist ideas". His death sentence was commuted after sustained international pressure, to 8 years in prison, and 800 lashes. 800 times they whipped the skin from his back because of the words he chose to put to paper.
In 2014, poet Hashem Shabani, an Ahwazi Arab citizen of Iran, was hanged by his government. His crimes: "waging war on God", and "spreading propaganda against the Islamic Republic."
In Qatar, Mohammed al-Ajami received a life imprisonment sentence for writing a poem deemed to have insulted the Emir. After five years in prison, he received a royal pardon in 2020.
Chinese poet Li Bifeng was jailed for 12 years on trumped-up charges, allegedly because he was suspected of helping another poet flee the country.
Chinese poet Zhu Yufu was jailed for 7 years for writing a poem the government said was a "subversion of state power". Think about that. The acknowledgment of the power of a poem.
Palestinian poet Dareen Tartour was placed under house arrest for three years by Israel, and then sentenced to a further 5 months in prison for posting a poem on Facebook.
Clearly, poetry has lost none of its potency in the Global South, and this is why, whenever I’m asked by Western media about the relevancy of poetry, I always say, “To whom?” Because it’s been relevant and it stays relevant, not just through hip-hop and rap, not just through the Quran, which is composed entirely of classical Arabic poetry and which dictates the lives of 1.7 billion Muslims, but also through contemporary literary verse.
It’s worth considering that the only people more concerned with language than poets themselves are politicians, and the governments they serve in. What we're doing with language, with poetry, is creating meaning with which to frame the lives we lead. Now you might think, maybe this is true of the Global South, with all the negative associations baked therein—“distant places”, “foreign authorities”, “troubled” countries—but what about the “developed world”? Putting aside for a moment the obvious reality that “developed world” is responsible for the state of the Global South, this concern for manipulating language is every bit as present here, too, though it often operates at a different level. Let's look at the Australian government, who constantly play with words, changing names, changing meaning, and not just in the obvious colonial framework of erasing Indigenous places and languages and histories.
Look at how it is official government policy to never use the word refugee or asylum seeker, only detainee or transferee. Why is that? They know the power that words can have and they want to try to control, as much as possible, how you're going to react to their agenda. There's far less of an emotional resonance with the word transferee than refugee. What does transferee even mean? What does it bring to mind? Nothing really, except the vague idea of some-thing moving. The word refuge is in refugee, you can never use it or refuse to use it, without implicitly acknowledging that you are denying someone safe haven.
Let’s go back and look at Tony Abbott's successful campaign slogan—“Stop the boats”—it's a masterclass in emotionless language and concision. It's memorable not just because it's short, but because it was repeated ad nauseam. “Stop the boats.” Not: stop the children. Not: stop the women. Not: stop the wounded. Not: stop the war. Not: stop the survivors. These are slogans which would never be allowed, even though that's exactly what stop the boats means. Boats are just wood, transport, transfer, transferee. Every word carries shades of meaning and you need to be aware of all of them to understand what is being said. Truth is not inherent in language. You make your own truth, you build your images, you make your own meaning. It's not just what you say, either, it's how you say it, it's tone and context. Think of how it’s become the norm to put “illegal” next to refugee, even though there is no such thing in any law domestic or international, which makes it illegal to seek refuge; nonetheless, that association has now been hammered into public consciousness.
All around us, every day, there are clear examples of language being twisted to hide or alter meaning and we're getting further and further away from reality because of it. We see it all the time in relation to Black people being killed in this country and abroad, the way the murder is always subsequently obscured, the way the language changes, the way the focus turns to the victim’s past, or poverty, to an imagined criminality to imply that the killing, if it wasn’t justified, well, maybe it wasn’t such a big deal. We see the opposite in the case of white murderers and pedophiles, glowing write-ups that frame their pasts as one of innocence; they were quiet kids next door or loving fathers, no one could have suspected, etc. all of which is meant to suggest this is an aberration, no, a tragedy that someone so inherently good, could have come to this end, and no one is to blame.
For me, and for many others in my community, there is a clear and persistent battle being waged in language that we actively need to fight. It is legal, officious, and journalistic language that enables communities like mine to be oppressed, detained, surveilled, imprisoned, or killed, and that enables countries to be invaded or bombed on false pretences, justified by racist rhetoric. It is in news stories and massive Hollywood blockbusters alike that my language and faith are bastardised and the devastation of my communities are made routine, the subject of popcorn entertainment where you are encouraged to cheer when the villain wearing my face is killed. And if you don’t believe me, look at the work of Edward Said and in particular Jack G. Shaheen, his book and documentary Reel Bad Arabs, which looks at over 1000 movies that cast Arabs as villainous or barbaric.
There are those on all sides of the political spectrum who say now is not the time for art or for artists. These are people for whom art has always been an accessory rather than a necessity, an aesthetic rather than a purpose. For those of us who have always been only a step away from destruction, who come from oppressed communities, we arrive at art with the intent to use it to survive, to force a reckoning, and to help our kinfolk do the same. The notion that dismantling the white supremacist framework we live under can only take place through direct action on the streets is seriously flawed.
Yes, Theodore Adorno said, “There can be no poetry after Auschwitz,” but it was the Syrian poet, Adonis, who responded by saying “No, after Auschwitz, now the writing starts.”
Of those two visions for poetry, I gravitate toward Adonis. I come from crisis. I am the son of Muslim migrants, I grew up poor in housing commission areas, in violent households affected by drugs and crime. I have seen my family beaten and bashed by cops, I’ve known the terror of running from cops and their dogs. Instability and insecurity are my norm, I’ve always had to write my way through it, and I will continue to do so. I’m not a private school educated poet, there is no intergenerational wealth here. My mum’s situation, my brother’s and my own are all similar: we’re living on a month to month basis. None of this is theory to me, I have lived it. Which is why when people started throwing their hands up during this pandemic and saying they couldn’t do anything anymore, I was a bit baffled. My world has always been in crisis, I’m used to it, it’s only now starting to impact on the privileged in the West.
I often say poetry saved my life and this is not hyperbole. I’ve struggled with depression and anxiety for most of my days on earth, unsurprisingly, but I will never forget the mental breakdown I suffered in 2012. I literally stopped speaking. For weeks. I couldn’t look anyone in the eye and in the silence, I grew closer and closer to suicide. I won’t go into more detail about that time, except to say that I got help and I’m glad that I did, but alongside that, the most important discovery I made then was that writing out what I was thinking and feeling relieved a pressure I had previously thought of as unyielding.
I’m not in such a desperate place anymore. I’m on medication, I’m engaged to a woman I adore and who adores me in turn, but I still need poetry. It’s as essential to the functioning of my life as those pills, as that love. I can rationalise its usefulness easily enough, in the context of political action, and I hope you’ll agree that I’ve done that here, but it would be dishonest of me to say that this rationalisation is the reason I do it. It’s entirely possible that even if it was universally accepted that poetry was useless at that level, I would still write it, and still champion writing it over anything else, because I need it to survive. I need the joy it provides, I need the connection to the world, I need the focus it necessitates.
I can’t even begin to explain to you how oblivious I am on a day-to-day basis, generally speaking, and not just because I have an eye condition and serious hearing loss in my right ear, but because I find it hard to be present. I’m always trying to leave my body, and the way I do that is by inventing scenarios in my head, so I miss a lot of what’s going on around me. Poetry, as a focusing tool, allows me to see the world again, allows me to live my life again, to see through the fog, to be present and loving and tender in a way I struggle to enact in the moment, but which I’m getting better at, because of this work that I do in language.
I think this is what some people fail to understand, that there are both personal and political reasons to be a poet, and that these reasons can be aligned, to be a student and a remaker of language because you are a child of multiple languages, because you have been subject all your life to the negative authority of it and you need to undo its oppressive qualities, to find another way to live with and through it, where you are the one in control of its meaning, as much as it is ever possible to be. The world has never been poetic, if to qualify as poetic means to not require transformation, means to register an absence of suffering or the presence of a true peace, which is justice. That doesn’t mean we can’t be, though. It was Toni Morrison who said, “We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.” I think we have to give it, this language, this measuring, the full weight it deserves. It is as important as the brick that is thrown, because behind that brick, bunched in the muscles of the arm that threw it, is a tonne of language, and it is language that we will use to explain why, to describe what, and to define the harm so as to enable a healing.
To be absolutely clear, I’m not arguing in favour of the writing and reading of poetry over “direct” action—just the opposite, I think they inform and compliment each other. This is a many-headed beast we’re fighting and we all need to be doing our part in our communities, by showing up on the streets, and in language too. One thing I know about poets of colour in particular, it’s never been a question of one over the other, we have never had the privilege of being removed from society in ivory towers. They’re called ivory towers for a reason. Here’s a quote from Nikki Giovanni demonstrating that very awareness.
“There is always something to do. There are hungry people to feed, naked people to clothe, sick people to comfort and make well. And while I don’t expect you to save the world, I do think it’s not asking too much for you to love those with whom you sleep, share the happiness of those whom you call friend, engage those among you who are visionary and remove from your life those who offer you depression, despair and disrespect.”
Let me follow this impeccable advice with one last anecdote. After re-reading some of Edward Said’s essays yesterday, I told a friend, “Whenever I read Said, I want to give up. He articulated so many problems perfectly and those problems remain, so few things have changed.” Then my friend replied, “I wonder if we would have gotten as far as we have without his work, in which case, we could argue that he changed things just enough for us to be here.”
This is my final word on the point of poetry, in this or any time: I was made possible by the language of those who came before me, and I believe it is an endeavour worthy of my life, to spend my time crafting language making possible the queers, the Muslims, the Arabs of tomorrow.