Poetry,the political moment,and the poet as witness

Abstract

In this autoethnographic reflection on my experiments with poetry as form and its value as method, I propose that poetry is perhaps well suited to address and be faithful to the political moment: the moment when the taken for granted no longer holds. Poetry seems able to escape the linearity often found in narrative writing and to replace any search for certainty with openness or ambiguity. As method it can reveal what may be hidden. Looking at both political poetry and the poetry of witness, I explore representation and point of view while insisting on the impossibility of individuality. Examples of my own writing are included to show how these questions arise in my first attempts to write the tears of the world into poems.

I

When Meena Alexander was asked ‘What use is poetry?’ she responded, ‘We have poetry / So we do not die of history’, adding ‘I had no idea what I meant’ (Alexander, 2010). These lines appeal to me because history can seem a heartless pursuit of a linear narrative, of certainty, but also because I don’t think we can ever know quite what we mean, and poetry plays on that.

I have always read poetry and I have used lines from poets like Gillian Clarke, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Primo Levi, Toni Morrison and Wisława Szymborska as epigraphs. But I came to writing poetry by a prosaic path. Having experimented with autobiography or autoethnography, prompted by writers such as Naeem Inayatullah and Himadeep Muppidi (Edkins et al., 2021), I was thinking about fiction writing or biography as a next move, a way of leaving certain academic forms of argument and abstraction, with their search for ‘knowledge’ and an escape from uncertainty, even further behind.

In the end, though, two things happened. My time became fragmented by circumstance, which conspired against the sustained focus fiction or biography seemed to demand. I thought, probably mistakenly, that poems might be easier to work on under the constraints I faced. I had also become impatient with one of the apparent requirements of much narrative fiction – as taught to novices in creative writing courses at least – for a plot line that moves in certain ways, a requirement it perhaps shares with some notions of history.

Poetry also, it seemed to me, could better express the political moment – the moment when worlds are destabilised and the taken for granted no longer holds. When we are obliged to face the ungroundedness and fragility of being.

In this short contribution, an autoethnographic reflection on my experiments with poetry as form and its value as method, I share five of my own poems. Two have been published, two have been sent out several times, and the other has yet to be submitted.

II

The first poem I present here arose in response to a prompt from Damian Gorman at one of his writers’ workshops in Aberystwyth in 2019. Damian is a poet and playwright who writes largely on commission and whose work is inspired in part by his Northern Irish heritage and in part by his experience working with writers in other areas of conflict in the world (Gorman, 2020). He is a brilliant encourager and facilitator of other writers.

In this particular workshop session, he asked us to write on ‘thaw’. The poem that emerged from this prompt explores the end of the Cold War as a time of transformation and unpredictability: the impact of history on those cast as observers when certainties become fluid and then, perhaps inevitably, solidify once more. When it appeared in Planet in Autumn 2019 to mark the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, it became my first published poem (Edkins, 2019a).

As it turned out

No one expected it.

We were preparing for something different.

We’d been planning escape routes

and rendezvous points,

in case families were scattered.

Pouring over maps of targets

and circles of destruction,

in search of places remote enough.

Keeping a weather eye on the news,

and forecasts of endless winter,

in case tensions began to worsen.

We’d been campaigning, marching, encircling,

tracking convoys, breaching barriers, dancing on silos,

tying ribbons to fences we camped around.

It was a cold time, a time of quiet dread.

A time to hold each other close, for warmth.

No one expected it

when something different happened.

We watched as people gathered

in distant squares on cold winter’s nights,

and crowds grew larger from day to day.

Holding our breath as people thronged

at checkpoints demanding to cross,

and wondering, when guards let them pass.

Looking on as the tanks didn’t arrive

in those places this time, even when

revolutions spread and dictators fell.

We celebrated, climbing on walls, raising new flags,

revelling in lands once beyond reach,

saving chunks of concrete to bring home.

It was a hopeful time, a time of fresh beginnings.

A time to imagine what might be to come.

No one knew what would happen,

but we believed, then, that it would be different.

For a time it was, but in the end, as it turned out,

new walls were built, and the cold returned.

Although this poem is not very different from prose, when it is read aloud – or at least when I read it aloud – the rhythm and variation of pace initiated in the first half and reflected in the second perhaps allows something unsaid to emerge. The final stanza probably shouldn’t be there: I need to learn to trust my reader more.

III

The next poem is based on a story I told in the preface to one of my ‘academic’ books (Edkins, 2011, p. vii). Its reflections are prompted by the contents of a folder I came across in the UN Archives in New York (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration [UNRRA], 1945–1947).

There are some remarkable and totally unexpected things to be found in archives. These items, which somehow find their way into the files and folders of bureaucracy and thus end up preserved into the future, are fragments of feeling that lurk inside the concrete and steel of the archive: little explosions of the real disrupting and disorientating from within.

The poem focuses on the care that went into producing the records that survive 60 years later on another continent, the multiple hands that were involved, the purpose of that painstaking work amidst the chaos that surrounded those people at that time, and the tragedy of it all.

Someone’s hands

Rheda, Germany, 30 May 1945

Someone’s hands clip small squares

from each piece of clothing they wore

and pin them to cards.

Someone’s hands roll cold fingers

on ink pads and press each one

into the record.

Someone’s hands focus a lens

on each wounded face, and make prints

in black and white.

Someone’s hands type a report:

a transport from Hildesheim hit by a train

at ten past midnight, killing four.

One is identified, three are not.

Someone’s hands pull a folder

from a shelf in a New York archive,

sixty years on.

Someone’s hands turn a page

in a file describing millions adrift

in Europe’s ruins.

Someone’s hands touch fibres of cloth,

preserved in the chaos, and here, now,

because, back then

Someone’s hands went to work

in case someone should come looking

for someone they loved.

Some time after I composed this poem, I wrote another that tells the same story in a different way, with an emphasis on the purpose and nature of archival research in academia and the abstractions of history. I cannot decide which one I prefer:

Rheda, Germany

May 1945

They sit on the table in front of me:

a stack of worn buff folders, papers in typescript or handwritten

with faded green tags or rusted staples or bound with ribbon tied

in knots, lifted from the rigid box files wheeled up by clerks

from shelves deep in the New York archive.

Around me, others sit at their tables:

pencils move softly making notes as the room meditates, calm and

silent but for an occasional clearing of the throat, a turning of the page,

a scraping back of chair as someone leaves for lunch or stands

to fetch another box from the trolley.

All of us following our own curiosity:

most, academics like me, writing their next book or article

on genocide or war or disaster in Rwanda or Bosnia, Haiti or East Timor,

cross-checking material found in archives elsewhere,

traversing the globe in their search.

In folder after folder in my pile:

memoranda trace the millions on the move across a country

shamed by war, hand-drawn maps plot tracks of forced marches

with mass graves marked in red, foolscap reports describe

life in displaced persons camps.

Outside, unnoticed, daily life goes on:

traffic passes on the city street and people walk by, coffees in hand,

to workplaces and screens in other offices at the end of the block where

flags of all the countries of the world unfurl in the wind blowing

across the banks of East River.

Then in one folder an accident report:

at ten past midnight on the thirtieth of May nineteen forty-five

a transport from Hildesheim hit by a train, killing four; one was identified,

three were not: a man about thirty, a woman in her twenties,

and a boy of seven or eight.

But what stops me in my tracks is this:

filed with their fingerprints and photographs are squares of fabric

snipped from overcoat, shirt, trousers, blouse – fragments cut carefully

from clothes worn sixty years ago on another continent and here,

on the table, in front of me, now.

IV

In this next poem ‘Visitors’ (Edkins, 2019c), I document a missed encounter, the sideways clash of two worlds: an England densely populated, rich and imperial, and Wales, its largely rural, smaller, bilingual postcolony. The inhabitants of one cannot even see those of the other, while the latter see only too clearly but remain silent.

Like the previous poems, it draws on personal experience, but with a twist. Years ago, we were the visitors. Now settled here in Wales as an immigrant – or ‘in-comer’ to use the local term – I attempt to embody a voice that honours those who were our hosts back then, while acknowledging the ambiguity of a shared but differently felt ‘Welsh perspective’ (Brown, 2019, p. 5).

Visitors

We offer our slow welcome

to these strangers with their blunt ways;

we let them into our front rooms.

Croeso i Gymru

We switch tongues

from ours to theirs when they arrive,

too polite for our own good.

Chwarae teg

We watch as their eyes survey

our landscape with its soft rain,

blind to the unyielding rock.

Mae’n braf, yndydy?

The land is not for sale but they take it anyway.

They know the price but not the cost

of living here.

Cofiwch Dryweryn

As nights draw in they leave,

back to their sleek cities and the value

they taught us to count in English.

Tan y flwyddyn nesa

We go back to our old ways,

the slow pace of generations

set in geological time.

Yma o hyd.

V

This final poem is a fictionalised re-telling of another story from my research (Edkins, 2019b), this time by an imagined narrator. Once again, I attempt to speak through a different voice, a move that raises familiar questions.

I do not have any ‘right’ to do this. But if, as Julio César Díaz Calderón (2021) expresses so well, we are not as separate as we think, if individuality itself is a fiction imposed upon us, then our ‘own’ voice is not our own in any case. As Czeslaw Milosz (1988, p. 211) puts it, in his poem ‘Ars Poetica’:

The purpose of poetry is to remind us

how difficult it is to remain just one person,

for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,

and invisible guests come in and out at will.

We do not possess ‘voice’; we are its instrument. It passes through us. Language speaks us. Like a poem we may write, it is not ‘ours’ to control.

The photograph

Pure luck it was, that I didn’t end up in jail.

I was just as guilty as he was really.

We were all out there with our phones,

out of our minds with it all.

People at windows, and us all shouting

get out, you’ve got to leave, get out.

The roar of the flames

and things falling, falling, burning as they fell.

I saw him fall. Well, he didn’t fall

he jumped. Yeah. I saw him.

People stopped in horror, screamed,

then some ran over, to help.

But there was nothing to do. He was dead.

I took a photo on my phone.

Instinctive it was. I just did it.

It was horrible. I felt sick. I walked away.

That white man was there in the morning,

us all wandering around witless

with shock, helping each other.

He asked if I had any photos,

said he was a reporter, wanted to help.

I said get lost, you’re not from here are you.

I saw him chatting up this other brother

later. He seemed to fall for it.

The next day I saw it in the news:

a man arrested for posting a photo

of the body. Putting it on Facebook.

We all did that – put things on Facebook –

all the time. He just wanted to help.

Everyone was looking for people.

That reporter set him up. Bastard.

Turned him in to the cops.

Gave him a call, led him into a trap,

then filmed the arrest for the papers.

I recognised that creep

bragging about it on Newsnight.

They jailed him for three months.

Pure luck it was, that it wasn’t me.

I found this voice one that was more or less impossible for me to embody adequately. My ear is not sufficiently attuned to the tone and cadences I’m looking for, and something was holding me back. I hope it conveys some of the anger at the scale and speed of retribution for the smallest of crimes – if crime it was – set against the overwhelming injustice that surrounded what happened.

VI

Political poetry, in the UK at least, thrives in a strong slam and performance poetry scene and the longstanding and continuing highly political writing by people who experience racism. I am thinking here for example of the work of performance poets Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan, Kae Tempest and Tony Walsh, and poets of Caribbean heritage from James Berry and Linton Kwesi Johnson to Raymond Antrobus, Jay Bernard, Roger Robinson and Marvin Thompson.

I could perhaps sum up what I think I am doing as attempting to write the tears of the world into poems, poems that speak of injustice, oppression and tragedy. It is a response to connection, a refusal of individuality, an embracing of what Wisława Szymborska calls ‘the sense of taking part’ (Szymborska, 1998, p. 63). Carmen Bugan tells us that when she is writing she feels an ‘intense solitude and yet’, she says, ‘at the same time, I know that I belong to the world in the most natural yet mysterious way’ (Bugan, 2021, p. 180). What I am talking about here is perhaps more rightly called a poetry of witness, rather than political poetry (Milosz, 1983). For Seamus Heaney (1988, p. xvi),

. . . the ‘poet as witness’ . . . represents poetry’s solidarity with the doomed, the deprived, the victimised, the under-privileged. The witness is any figure in whom the truth-telling urge and the compulsion to identify with the oppressed becomes necessarily integral with the act of writing itself.

I attempt through poetry to find another way, a deeper way if you like, or just a different way, of expressing what arises from and motivates my research. But poetry can also serve as research method. Writing our thoughts about what we are working on in poetic form can lead to fresh insights. As Jericho Brown (2020) says, speaking specifically here about poetry constrained by form,

I believe poems lead us to and tell us what we really believe. I think poems . . . tell us things about our individual and collective subconscious minds.

When I read some of my poetry at a conference recently, the annual conference organised online by Millennium: Journal of International Studies in October 2021, I ended by reading Tishani Doshi’s ‘Find the Poets’. The narrator arrives in Greece wanting to understand what’s happening there. She sets out in search of the poets: people who don’t use words like ‘economic integration’ or ‘fiscal consolidation’ or ‘the burden of adjustment’ but who, instead, hold ‘the throat of life, / till all the sunsets and lies are choked out, / till only the bones of truth remain’. ‘While you and I go on with life / remembering and forgetting,’ she says, ‘the poets remain: singing, singing’ (Doshi, 2018, pp. 80–81).