I am thinking of how we need poetry
To express ourselves
Practicing feminism
By bearing witness to genocide
To echo the words of Sarah Ihmoud
To get our no’s out.
To express, to press out, to speak one’s mind.
The sense evolution “perhaps via the intermediary sense of how clay under pressure takes a certain form.”
When I imagine that clay, I imagine not only how we give shape to something, but how we under pressure to take a certain form.
Maybe we are supposed to be polite.
A smile, a container.
To express ourselves, to get it out of ourselves, ourselves out, means we have to resist that pressure.
That is why we need poets, now, more than ever, always now, always more than ever, whenever your now is.
The need for new words is not new.
Consider Lorde’s short essay ‘Poetry is not a Luxury’. The title is a claim. Lorde is making a claim about what poetry is not, perhaps because she is challenging an assumption about what poetry is.
For whom would poetry be a luxury? Lorde responds by saying that poetry is not that, not a luxury, that poetry is necessary, as necessary, perhaps, as bread. Poetry is what we need to sustain ourselves.
It is “through poetry,” Lorde suggests, “that we give name to those ideas which are ‒ until the poem ‒ nameless and formless ‒ about to be birthed, but already felt.”
Poetry is giving birth to new form. Feeling, for Lorde, is giving form to something.
Those who don’t fit the old forms need to create their own forms.
If we need to create our own forms, we don’t yet have what we need.
So, we need each other.
Lorde writes, “As we learn to bear the intimacy of scrutiny and to flourish within it, as we learn to use the products of that scrutiny for power within our living, those fears which rule our lives and form our silences begin to lose control over us.”
We are told that to leave the safety of a brightly lit path, the happiness path, the straight path, would be to cause your own misfortune, to steal your own future happiness, such that if something happens, if the worst happens, and let’s face it, shit happens, then you have brought this upon yourself.
You have to go towards what you have been taught to fear.
Speaking the words you have been told will cost you.
Speaking them louder.
Pointing to history, feeling the weight of the words.
Returning to that history with a demand for freedom.
With words, what can you do?
In her essay, “Eye to Eye,” Audre Lorde described racism and sexism as ‘grown-up words.”
We experience them before we can name what we experience.
To return to your past with these words is to see something that you did not, could not, see at the time.
This is why some of the work we do in giving problems their names could be understood as poetry.
The past becomes alive with new meanings. You become estranged from the past; you rearrange it. To rearrange the past is more than rearranging furniture, although it can feel like that, creating a different sense of space.
We open the door to the past, we let in it, because of what we did not see in what happened when it happened, the violence, the structure of it, the repetition, the pattern.
When we open that door, so much spills.
History spills.
I think of Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity, her ode to the work and wisdom of Black feminist literary critic Hortense Spillers. Gumbs attends to Spillers’ words with love and care, to what spills, to words that spill, to liquid that spills out from a container, to being somebody who spills things.
Spillage can be a breaking, of a container, a narrative, a turning of phrases so that “doors opened and everyone came through.”
Spillage can be, then, the slow labour of getting out of something.
A poem, too, what spills.
In Undrowned, Gumbs teaches us to learn from marine mammals, what we need to breathe, to live, despite what is diminishing. We can be captured by the net of language, by names and pronouns, by how we are called into being. To free ourselves, we invent ourselves. We don’t demand recognition, to be seen. We cast our hopes elsewhere.
Gumbs asks: “What becomes possible when we are immersed in queerness of forms of life that dominant systems cannot chart, reward, or even understand?”
Dominant systems make so much and so many impossible.
We fight for possibility.
I think again of Lorde, who picked up on possibility, too, the time it takes.
Lorde wrote, “Poetry is not only dream or vision, it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. Possibility is neither forever nor instant. It is also not easy to sustain belief in its efficacy.”
Possibility can take the longest time because to make something possible requires dismantling what makes it not so.
Possibility is not plucked out of thin air.
Possibility comes from intimacy with what has thickened in time, the walls, the doors, how rooms are occupied, making it hard to breathe.
History is stale air.
A poem, a breath of fresh air.
To make something is to make it possible.
What we create is fragile because we need it to survive.
It is a loose thread.
Maybe our writing becomes looser as we refuse the requirement to express ourselves in a certain way.
We become conscious of words, how they matter, the sound of them.
In the language, we breathe.
Lightening a load by loosening the words.
Leaving our ends loose,
flopping and fraying.
We write, like we love, like we live.
telling tales, leaving trails.
The more we leave behind us, the easier it is to find us.
And by us, I mean each other.
Maybe that is what we do: find a way of getting no to you.
I talk about these words from Audre Lorde often. Because I hear so much in them. More each time.
How she was “sickened with fury” about the acquittal of a white policeman who had murdered a Black child that she had to stop the car to get her feelings out.
What came out was a poem she called “Power.”
Lorde teaches us that we sometimes have to stop what we are doing to register the impact of violence.
In that poem, Lorde uses an image of what poetry is not, poetry is not letting our power “lie limp and useless as an unconnected wire.”
Lorde uses words like electricity, snap, snap, sizzle.
When Lorde stopped the car to write a poem about power, she took so much in, the violence of the police, the violence of white supremacy.
She took it in to get it out, a no, so that it can be passed around, so that it can be passed to others.
So, we can read her words now. So, we can pick them up and take them with us.
Language is a lead.
I am writing now, in the face of so much violence.
I am writing as Israel is carrying out a genocide against the Palestinian people, so much more violence built on so much more violence: long histories of forced displacement, of colonial occupation.
Our government is not only complicit in that genocide but is seeking to criminalise those who protest.
We protest.
Silence about violence is violence.
We cannot pass over the violence happening now.
Without passing over justice.
It makes it hard to speak.
What makes it hard to speak is why we need to do so.
And it is poetry that comes to mind, words sent out, such as those by Refaat Alareer, Palestinian writer, scholar and poet, killed by a targeted Israeli strike on December 6, 2023.
His poem, “If I must die,” begins
“If I must die
you must live
to tell my story”
A poem can be the gift of an image.
Alareer gives us an image of a piece of cloth, and some strings, becoming a kite, “flying up above,” so that a child in Gaza, might see it and “think for a moment an angel is there, bringing back love.”
That poem, read out, by so many, translated, by so many, kept alive, by so many.
We need to be so many to keep you alive.
That cloth, those strings, words strung together, becoming a story we must live to keep telling.
A hand, setting the story free.
It is an image of hope. And of freedom.
We fight for that hope. For freedom.
We fight for the liberation of Palestine, and we do so collectively, each line, each lead, each fragile thread, delicate, precious, leading us to each other.
To keep the connections alive is to carry the words, Alareer’s, Lorde’s words, too, onto the streets; the snap of a slogan, a no, a stop, stopping the flow of human traffic, stopping the cars, taking it in, more of it, in.
#FreePalestine #EndTheGenocide