• Home
  • Contact
  • Archive
  • Resources
  • Events
  • Home
  • Contact
  • Archive
  • Resources
  • Events
POETRY & POWER

Poetry // Protest - Isabella Bowker

4/17/2016

2 Comments

 
        Those of us in Baltimore know all too well what happened here a year ago. The story of a young man’s murder, of Freddie Gray’s murder (let’s not allow ourselves to forget his name), continues to be part of the public discourse, remains at the center of public tensions, epitomizes what Reginald Dwayne Betts calls “this American dance around death.” Yet even a year later, there are arguments about how to talk about last spring. Some refuse to call what happened to Freddie Gray a murder; they simply call it a death, because death is what happens to everybody at some point, death does not require causation. When they call the end of Freddie’s life simply “a death,” they create a memory of what happened on April 19, 2015 in a manner that is completely divorced from context, from causes before and consequences after. The same is true for how these same people (members of our communities!) speak about the public reaction to Freddie’s murder. (I choose this word, “murder,” deliberately, because murder connotes complicity—on the part of individual(s), of institutions, of society.) The same people who characterize the passing of that young man a “death” (I’m looking at you, CNN) were the same people who called the response a “riot,” as though their actions came out of nowhere, as though the youth and families and community leaders who took to the streets were motivated by nothing other than by seeing destruction. As though there were not a cause worth fighting for. I, however, choose to follow the lead of those who called the marches an Uprising. Because an Uprising is a groundswell, a unanimous decision of having had enough, of flexing democratic muscle to remind society of the inequity of how its foundational principles are applied. The Wikipedia page for last spring’s events in Baltimore pleads neutrality, calls the whole thing, “2015 Baltimore Protests.”
    “It matters what you call a thing,” writes Solmaz Sharif in her poem “Look.” Sharif was a participant at this weekend’s Split This Rock Poetry Festival, and in the hours since attending the festival, I’ve been reckoning with the ways in which talking about poetry parallels the events of last spring’s Uprising. “It matters what you call a thing”—a simple declarative statement, and yet an idea that is full of subversive, dangerous potential—it matters how we talk about things. Our vocabulary has consequences. This is especially true for poets, who, more than the average citizen, are acutely aware of the precise impact of every choice of language. Poets can argue for hours about the placement of a comma, about the multitudinous divergences that can arise from choosing one synonym over another. Poets, in short, believe in the power of language. It matters what you call a thing.
    Reginald Dwayne Betts explores this profound truth in his poem “When I Think of Tamir Rice While Driving,” which he read as part of Saturday’s Featured Poets reading and which can be found in the April 2016 issue of Poetry. Again, parallels—Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray; Cleveland, Baltimore; the pervasiveness of police violence in both instances, violence that supersedes differences in  geography, age, dreams, education. What we talk about when we talk about the killing of a black boy. “Taboo,” writes Betts: “The thing that says that justice / is a killer’s body mangled and disrupted by bullets / because his mind would not accept the narrative / of your child’s dignity” (24-27). Ultimately, he argues, our avoidance of giving things accurate names is a manifestation of our cowardice, of our inability to take the responsibility necessary to change systems and society. Calling the Uprising a riot creates personal distance, removes any sense of ownership from creating the climate that made such a response not only possible, but necessary. “This American dance around death,” as Betts succinctly puts it, is one that sees the source of the problem, but stubbornly calls it by the wrong name.
    Poetry, above all else, is a form of protest. Its very nature breaks every rule of polite conversation. It is at times uncomfortably reticent and intimidatingly eloquent, frequently refusing to give clear answers when the safety of clarity is most desired. Poetry challenges—assumptions, habits, the tools of communication. It matters what you call a thing, and the act of writing poetry is the pursuit of pursuing the most precise representation of reality as is possible.  Which is why writing this blog post, publishing it in such a public setting, makes me nervous and uncomfortable. As a poet in training, I worry that my vocabulary for talking about Freddie Gray, and about poetry in general, is incomplete. Claiming expertise of a subject about which you are not equipped with a proper vocabulary is dangerous and the worst form of arrogance, and I know for certain that I lack the authority to make any claims about reality. These insecurities are compounded by the plain fact of my racial/socioeconomic/educational background. As an audience member of Split This Rock, I saw for myself the pitfalls of what can happen when one substitutes technical mastery for empathy and humility. (I do not wish to name this poet publicly, for I am sure that they are a lovely person. However, several audience members who I spoke to were equally unsure of how to feel by this reading, and the poet’s race (white) vs. the race of their subject matter (black) created a strange, depersonalizing dynamic that was hard to reckon with.) It matters what you call a thing, and this extends to how one should properly analyze a poem or a phenomenon. Misrepresenting reality can have far more pervasive and destructive consequences than simply saying nothing at all.
    Much like poetry, I want to resist concluding with any firm answers. Language is such a fickle entity, always vulnerable to failure, or at least to imperfectness. At Split This Rock, we heard a thousand answers to the same question, and yet I left with more to think about when I arrived. I do, however, want to end on a conversation I had with one of my fellow festival-goers. After Dominique Christina’s earth-shattering performance, as we streamed out of the auditorium on unsteady feet, I remarked to this woman that Christina’s poetry had left me hollowed out. “Me too,” she said. “But that just means when we get filled back in, we’ll be a little bit better off than before.”
2 Comments
Madison
4/18/2016 03:30:48 pm

This is a great post; I understand the concerns about lacking a vocabulary to talk about these issues, lacking authority, etc. Still, one thing I think I took away from Split This Rock is that we have to write through these doubts and questions, because they cannot be resolved, and we will grapple with them as long as we are alive and writing. Silence is less sufficient than insufficient speech. I'm glad you chose to publish this.

It makes me think about an essay I read a few months ago, called "Have We Got a Theory For You! Feminist Theory, Cultural Imperialism, and the Demand For ‘The Woman’s Voice’" by María C. Lugones and Elizabeth V. Spelman, particularly one short section on the language and context in which discussions of feminist theory take place. The entire essay is broken into sections; some are written in Spanish, some in English. This choice is explained when the pair writes that the language of theory is almost always English, and almost always excludes; not only does it exclude non-English speakers, it excludes those who lack the training and educational background to parse these dense texts. I think a similar thing can be said of poetry, which can feel so inaccessible, as you mentioned. If language is so important, we should question the very language we write in, that Split This Rock worked in (though they did hire an English to ASL translator!), that we speak in our classrooms. Perhaps it's more practical to use English when we are attending a school in America, where the primary language is English; still, it's dangerous to think this is not an imposition of power, or that it does not have ethical implications.

I wonder if there is a way that language can ever be inclusive; even when we are choosing appropriate words (e.g. saying that Freddie Gray was murdered, rather than saying that he died), we are choosing them in a language that has a problematic imperialist history, and that continues to be a force of white supremacy (I am thinking especially, here, about efforts to delegitimize AAVE.)

Anyway, this is taking your thought on a bit of a tangent, but one that I thought might be interesting to discuss!

Reply
Mia
4/19/2016 04:53:26 pm

Ahhh! Thank you, thank you, thank you! I have the same grievances when it comes to the way people and institutions (especially the media) talk about certain issues. The phrases "death," "murder," "riot," and "uprising" are used in this context because we don't have a word for "the slaughter of a black man at the hands of the police because of systemic racism" or "a ton of people protesting, a minority stealing stuff and/or damaging property, in the streets of their city because they are all so f***king tired of police officers killing members of their community due to systemic racism." Maybe we shouldn't have a word for that, I don't know. Hopefully if we did it wouldn't be needed for much longer. It just seems that our words lack the specificity that could ensure 1) accountability, and 2) their use, because that would be the only accurate (or I guess precise, if we're being, well, precise) word.

...which reminds me of a question Bry asked during the Black Words Matter write-in at Red Emma's, "What do you wish there were more words for?" I wrote about the opposite some time ago, reflecting after Bry asked this question:

And then there are the words for rape, which I believe are too plentiful (“non-consensual sex” is one of the most aggravating terms that has ever left its s**t stain on the earth). We shouldn’t make up cutesy, discreet, un-disturbing names for rape because people don’t like hearing the word. In fact, I’ve had a poetry workshop tell me they didn’t like the fact that I used the word “rape” because it felt too loud and graphic in the context of the poem. Perhaps they didn’t consider that rape might be a loud and graphic event in the context of one’s daily life; maybe in that way "form followed function" as poets like to say… But I digress.

In this context, too, people censor (and too often self-censor) in order not to "offend," to "make uncomfortable." In doing so, we don't call the thing what it is, which is reductive, which is often inaccurate, and which undermines and delegitimizes the struggles of victims--whether they are victims of police violence, rape, or any other manifestation of systemic oppression. It really *does* matter what you call a thing. And I think that diction can influence broader dialogue in these cases; the sooner we call a spade a spade, the sooner a spade must take accountability for being a damn spade!

Reply



Leave a Reply.

    Young Writers in Baltimore . . . 

    exploring the intersection of poetry and social justice.

    Archives

    December 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016

    Categories

    All
    Bryonna Reed
    Patrice Hutton
    Poetry & Social Justice
    Rejjia Camphor
    Writers In Baltimore Schools

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.