A Blog Post by Ina Roy-Faderman
In the two months before the US midterm elections, I stopped writing poetry. In fact, I stopped being a poet, with all that implies beyond writing: participating in panels, providing poetry workshops to local kids, assisting in online poetic projects. In the welter of day jobs, parenting, day-to-day “women’s work,” and pacifying the machine that keeps my chronic illness under control, I felt that I couldn’t add anything else. Given the potential impact of the midterm elections, and the fact that I can no longer pull all-nighters, I decided that poetry had to go.
The current state of US politics is damned personal in my household. I’m a birthright citizen. My spouse is Jewish. We’re an interracial couple. My parents were immigrants at a time in which only ten people were allowed into the US from their birth nation each year. My in-laws are gay and were only able to get married thanks to Gavin Newsom. Basically, we’re the kind of family a small, currently-emboldened sub-group of Americans would like to remove from this country and maybe this planet.
So I stopped writing poetry. Instead, I engaged in the political activities which so many middle-aged women are quietly engaged in: calling Congresspersons and emailing Senators, protesting, phone banking and texting, squeezing a few dollars from family budgets to support organizations that stand between us and the mob that seems to be running our country. Creative writing was even, in a way, involved: I texted potential voters with personal messages and sent postcards of encouragement to far-away blue voters.
But now that the midterms are over, barring ballot counts and recounts working their way through bureaucratic tar, I’ve got a moment to look at the decision I made. And I am reconsidering the idea that it had to be a choice: writing or activism.
Since 2016, talented, well-known writers have filled the online multiverse with entreaties that and reasons why We Should Continue to Write In These Dangerous Times. Often, they are fiction writers, not poets — maybe because fiction writers have a direct awareness that the dystopian elements of the political current climate are seeping into writing everywhere. Fiction, after all, has the ability to illuminate and comment, more or less directly, on the ills of our time. In contrast, poetry seems indirect, almost indulgent. Why write poetry now?
After wrestling with the question and with my conscience, I’ve identified three reasons that, for me, writing poetry in these times is not just necessary but right and important.
1. Creativity is a bulwark against authoritarianism
I was recently a panelist at a speculative fiction writer’s convention. Another writer described a science fiction convention that was held in the PRC prior to the advent of the internet. The underlying “ask” from invited American speculative fiction authors: tell us how to do this, because we don’t know how.
Hierarchical cultures and authoritarian political systems stifle creativity. It need not be in the form of a conspiracy or a conscious plan (but see e.g. the UK’s Profanity Act, the PRC’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, the USSR’s Glavit). Rather, creativity depends upon individuality and in turn nourishes it. Through existence and manifestation, creativity subverts external limits placed on individuality, including those of oppressive governments. Creations built of words threaten the foundations of authoritarian systems, since those systems rely on people believing that the world is “as it is told to us.” Tell a different story, and the imposed system is no longer a given, “just the way things are.” As poet-activist Francisco X. Alarcón has said, “Poets question dogmas, notions taken for granted, and speak ‘truths’ that defy the ruling order of things.”
We don’t have to live in a formally authoritarian government for poetry to illuminate the limitations of narratives supported by people in power. Against an apparent, militaristic threat to the US’ European allies, WWI soldiers exhibited both strength and heroism, characteristics we admire and promote. But e.e. cummings’s poem, “’i sing of Olaf glad and big,” reminds us that there are other incompatible, but equally moral, stances to be taken by those drawn into war.
2. Poetry is community
Community is at the heart of activism. When our actions are motivated by the needs of more than ourselves, we are activists working with and for a community.
Inherent in the use of language is a presumed audience. When we create with words, we are presuming that we are not alone –- that the possibility of communion with an audience exists. In creating with words, we both assume and create community.
Poetry, as a creation of words, is founded on the knowledge that we can share a vision with another. This sharing is the beginning of a greater understanding of what we might to for others. As poet Sonya Renee Taylor says in an interview in Autostraddle, “…art is an essential element of how we make the messages of activism accessible and how we invite new people into the dialogue and how we open up new minds to the issues. “ By existing, the poem creates an audience-shaped space. The audience enters that space, and a community is born. And the best thing about the space – it can expand as needed. It is an encompassing space, but not a constricting one.
3. Silence = Death
I was fortunate. When “Silence = Death” was coined, I survived. I was a medical student in the San Francisco area when AIDS appeared. People in my community were getting sick, quickly, and we had no idea why. Most healthcare workers — who were not, by and large, personally affected by illness raging through their communities — were still hurting. Doctors were forced to suit up in plastic to comfort beautiful people who were dying. This is not the way to comfort anyone, but it was what we were told we could do.
The community that finally did — that went beyond what we were told we could do — wasn’t largely healthcare workers. Rather, community activists — suffering and watching suffering — refused to stay silent, who refused to stand by while lovers, friends, and neighbors died.
My activism then, such as it was, was small. I held the hands of men in wheelchairs who knew they’d never walk again. I gave blood. I lent my hands in the clinic in which some students refused to work. I came left the clinic and took shifts caring for a dying friend whose parents had left his clothes in a box on the street when he became ill. I acknowledged that there were many other people who were dying with no help at all.
I hadn’t written anything creative since my teens, but I started writing again. It was therapy, an outlet. But at some point, the outpouring became more; it became my hope for conveying to people who were in outside the zone of suffering just what suffering looks like.
To be silent is to allow pain, need, anguish to go unnoticed. For a poet to be silent is not just to silence herself but to let others, those in power, determine what is important and what is not –- who matters and who doesn’t. Poetry balances the scale; in writing it, we say, “We live. We matter.”
The midterms are over, and I have space to breathe. But the long-term work needs to be done, and it won’t get done by short-term actions, no matter how necessary. The people who are close to me, and the people who aren’t but are also fighting for their lives, their identities, their rights to pursue simple peace, are being subject to shock after shock in the US. And that is not okay. While the last two months required immediate action, I cannot continue to put aside my contribution to longer-range change. I can’t let those who feel no pressure to go into hiding, feel no fear of hate being unleashed against them, live in their quiet, safe bubbles. I will make the time for poetry. I return to poetry to say, “No, you don’t get to look away. Not from me, not from mine, not from people you think don’t matter. We live. We matter.”
Ina Roy-Faderman (inafelltoearth.com) teaches college and graduate biomedical ethics and is an associate fiction editor for Rivet Journal and librarian for a school for gifted children. Her poetry, fiction, interviews, and literary analyses have appeared in The Rumpus, Transition: Poems in the Aftermath (Indolent Books), HIV Here and Now, Inscape, Midwestern Studies in Philosophy and elsewhere.