Malinda Words: The poetry of resistance

The tenses are inhabited by one and all, one way or another. There are things in the past that we visit and which visit us. We travel to futures with hope and trepidation. We inhabit a present that is unutterably magical or unbearably sad. Most times it’s somewhere between those extremities.

It is the same with collectives when they are compelled by circumstances to walk together along the time-spectrum. Sometimes it is about things historic when directions were changed or different tomorrows envisaged with both informing the parameters of today’s engagement.

An hour ago my friend and indefatigable activist for peace in the world and especially South Asia, Beena Sarwar, sent me a request: ‘Do you have any poem you can read for the #PoetryOfResistance series? Can be your own or someone else’s.’

Beena had earlier written to me asking if my sister, Ru Freeman, could read a poem she had recently written titled ‘Life Line to Gaza’ published in Literary Hub. She agreed.

It is a ‘say it all’ poem and for a moment I thought to myself ‘what more can I say?’ one might say but then again the world resists full stops and that’s a good thing. There’s always more to say. There’s always a reason to recite something someone said in some other time, on some other continent where resistance was demanded or had become a way of life. Sometimes that’s the only way one can breathe. And so I said ‘I’ll look for one.’

What could I offer the ‘Poetry of Resistance’ campaign launched by ‘Joy of Urdu,’ which Beena informed me is a bilingual, nonprofit organization of which she is a founding advisor for and is now run by [her] ‘dear young(er) friend Zarminae Ansari’?

Every epoch, every country, industry, university, workplace has known poets who resisted tyranny, oppression, injustice and other objectionable things with words. They sometimes stood up and say ‘No!’ Sometimes they sat down and wrote. They were soldiers who stood with people who fought battles they believed were worth fighting or they simply had to fight or die. So there are place-specific and moment-specific verses which console and empower. There’s also poetry that is forged in the irreducible commonality of struggle. Such words are timeless. They slip out from the languages they are originally written in, from the battlegrounds where they first stood tall and tender.

In short, it’s not too hard to find a poem written by someone else. Like ‘Spain,’ written by W H Auden in 1939 which I have referred to in an article titled ‘The world shall not be emptied of poetry.’ I remembered this poem because when I tried to think of something I had written, my mind went all the way back to 2007 when I wrote a rather long poem titled ‘An Ode to Today.’

It was written when there were moves by powerful nations as well as spoilers within Sri Lanka to turn back the offensive against the world's most ruthless terrorist outfit, the LTTE, and at a moment when these forces sought to oust the then government by defeating the budget. I used the structure of Auden's poem.

Here’s some lines from the master:

Yesterday the installation of dynamos and turbines,
The construction of railways in the colonial desert;
Yesterday the classic lecture
On the origin of Mankind. But to-day, the struggle.

Here’s mine, words of the unwashed mendicant:

Yesterday the unthinkable embrace of leader and led
The wild humour of illusion and the waiver of colonial debts
The return of monarch in tie and coat and Old Spiced tongue
The manufacture of skies and winds for spider-web kites.

And the master again about the future:

To-morrow, perhaps the future. The research on fatigue
And the movements of packers; the gradual exploring of all the
Octaves of radiation;
To-morrow the enlarging of consciousness by diet and breathing.

Mendicant:

Tomorrow perhaps a different time, a landscape differently contoured,
The support for the necessary impeachment, the dethroning of tyrants,
The investigation of pilferage, the evicting of clowns,
The restoration of law and order, and the beatification of the saintly.

‘Today, the struggle,’ Auden narrows it down. And I, in 2007, concurred thus:

Tomorrow, a time for the political joke and the odd cartoon,
The scoring of debating points, the parry and thrust of nation-making,
Tomorrow the time to change faces, the showering votes of no-confidence,
Today, the hour of the resolute heart that fights the intruder.

Valid in 2007, I am still convinced. Valid during the ‘Aragalaya,’ in 2022, one could argue. Valid today in Sri Lanka. Valid in Palestine, occupied and devastated by Israel. Auden still writes. And we still read. And we commit our hearts and strength to resistance that will not be brought down by place names or languages but in fact eminently made for transliteration, embrace and empowerment.

['The Morning Inspection' is the title of a column I wrote for the Daily News from 2009 to 2011, one article a day, Monday through Saturday. This is the 276th article in the new series that began in December 2022. Links to previous articles are given below]

26 November 2023

The poetry of resistance

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