Writing in Turbulent Times

5 WRITING IN TURBULENT TIMES very generation has its soul-searching moments, when redis- Ecovering difficult aspects of the past is key to the process of self-examination and ascertaining the legacy of historical trauma. Between the Covid-19 pandemic, the renewed concerns over racism and inequality, and the deepening climate crisis, we are experiencing a significant period in our history as a global com- munity, when we are compelled to meditate on the human cost of our choices. This brings upon a deeper reflection on the relation- ship between civilization and oppression, and perhaps it is useful to remind ourselves of the remarks made by Miguel de Unamuno in his book, The Tragic Sense of Life: Civilization began on the day on which one man, by subjecting another to his will and compelling him to do the work for two, was enabled to devote himself to the contemplation of the world and to set his captive upon works of luxury. It was slavery than enabled Plato to speculate upon the ideal republic, and it was war that brought slavery about. Not without reason was Athena the goddess of war and of wisdom. But is there any need to repeat once again these obvious truths, which, though they have continually been forgotten, are continually rediscovered?1 1 Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life, trans. J.E. Crawford Flitch (New York: Dover Publications, 1954), p. 280. Poetry and the Language of Oppression: Essays on Politics and Poetics. Carmen Bugan, Oxford University Press (2021). © Carmen Bugan. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198868323.003.0006 writing in turbulent times The importance of reminding ourselves of ‘obvious truths’, especially those that reveal the foundations of civilization, cannot be overstated. Many are beginning to reread literature for its own tales of salvation and downfalls, and, even more importantly, for its portrayal of civilization. The writer who engages with oppression must use language as precisely and as skilfully as a surgeon uses the knife: whatever cut must be made, it must be a part of the curative process. Nowadays there is both a political and politicized outlook of literature, as entirely distinct from its significance ‘as a form of resistance’, or as Heaney has put it, as an expression of ‘solidarity with the doomed’.2 Contemporary injustice and oppression, as well as the abhorrence of such things not only find their expres- sions in language but are perpetuated by language. The creative writer is in a unique position to question, reimagine, discover and rediscover how language works, in an attempt to sustain the values that hold humankind together. Writing about public duress entails certain risks, the most dangerous being the presumption that one person is capable of understanding the energies of the culture and society, and some- how can function as the speaker of collective consciousness, especially at times when so many communities in particular societies are in conflict and competing for power. For this reason, writing 2 Seamus Heaney, ‘The Interesting Case of Nero, Chekhov’s Cognac and a Knocker’, in Government of the Tongue: Selected Prose 1978–1987 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988). He writes: ‘The shorthand name we have evolved for this figure is the “poet as witness”, and he represents poetry’s solidarity with the doomed, the deprived, the victimized, the under-privileged. The witness is any figure in whom the truth-telling urge and the compulsion to identify with the oppressed become necessarily integral with the act of writing itself.’ (p. XVI). 145 poetry and the language of oppression necessitates deep reflection on the place the individual occupies in society, the nature of freedom, the sense of civic responsibility, and the uses and abuses of ordinary and literary language. Poetry is to be valued precisely because its readers can recognize themselves and their human condition in the emotional, spiritual, and intellectual fabric of the poem. Poetry succeeds in speaking ‘heart to heart’ through images, music, and figurative language which render the harsh reality with precision, while creating a protected, reflect ive space for the mind. So, how does the poet become attuned to the language of the world’s upheaval? What is the appropriate expressive language that is at once dulce et utile, as Horace would have it? Furthermore, to what extent should the contemporary poet consider the demographics of literary readership in order to achieve that ‘solidarity with the doomed’? The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics defines political poetry thus: ‘Political poems concern situations that might be otherwise. Causes and consequences, choices—these are the special concerns of political poets.’ It defines political verse as: Gr. Politikos stichos, the verse of the polis and its citizens. A Byzantine meter of 15 syllables, accentually based on iambic. First appears in 10th century A.D. and is the standard meter for Mod. Greek Poetry from at least the 12th c. to the present day.3 This chapter investigates whether literature that engages with politics is, or indeed should be, ‘political’, and in what sense. It also asks whether the poet, in dealing with the world of inner feelings in the context of public emotion has an opportunity to question 3 Robert von Hallberg, ‘Politics and Poetry’, in The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger and T.V.F. Brogan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 960–4 (961); see also ‘Political Verse’, p. 960. 146 writing in turbulent times our foundational understanding of what makes us civilized, or uncivilized, and what we mean by an ‘examination of language’. Furthermore, it turns attention to the defining characteristics of power narratives in the literature about oppression, focusing on how they expose the oppressor, enabling the oppressed to resist. During the course of the present book I have considered the language of oppression, located the interface between poetry and politics, and discussed writing in a non-native language from the point of view of a poet who makes a personal testimony, while writing herself free. The personal aspect of experience has been emphasized so that the contact with political language is under- stood as part of the normal course of life, rather than a poetic incursion into political realities for the purpose of championing particular political ideas. Making a personal testimony in poetry requires awareness of the dangers of the suggestive. There needs to be a very precise balance in the poem that is a personal utter- ance about a shared public trauma: the voice must remain entirely one’s own as it joins the public grief, so that it presents the individual while it paints the larger situation truthfully. But should poetry born in a turbulent time participate in partisan politics? What is the difference between poetry that is profoundly political and simple verse propaganda? What is the role of imagination in literature that deals with a troubling historical reality? How does figurative language affect the way we experience public conflict? To put it another way, what claims can we make for poetry in troubled times? And at what point does lyric language break under sustained pressure? In his book, Language and Silence, George Steiner devotes a sec- tion to Marxism and literature, acknowledging the profound influence communism had on many of the major writers, critics, 147 poetry and the language of oppression and philosophers of the last century and beyond. His essay, ‘The Writer and Communism’ ends with a question which is at the heart of my work: ‘Where do we cross the line between the artist as conveyor of the ideals of his society and the artist as the maker of mere propaganda?’4 Though the question is left open, it seems to me that he hinted at the complicated political relation- ship between a writer and his time, when he expressed irritation with the standard reading of George Orwell’s 1984 as an allegory of Cold War totalitarianism: 1984 is not . a parable of the totalitarian rule of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao Tse-tung. The polemic of the fable is not unilinear. Orwell’s critique bears simultaneously on the police state and on capitalist consumer society, with its illiteracy of values and its conformities. “Newspeak,” the language of Orwell’s nightmare, is both the jargon of dialectical materialism and the verbiage of commercial adver- tisement and mass-media . Our own acquisitive society appalled him. He noted in it germs of inhumanity comparable to those endemic in Stalinism . To make 1984 a pamphlet in the intellectual cold war is to misread and diminish the book.5 This defence of 1984 could not be more prescient: Steiner died in 2020 and he must have shuddered at the culture that produced Donald Trump, and at Kellyanne Conway’s use of the term ‘alter- native reality’ at her presidential press briefings. George Orwell’s novel went to the top of the bestseller charts in the United States following the election of Trump in 2016. 1984 is certainly a polit ical book if we view politics in literature beyond their use as mere 4 George Steiner, Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature and the Inhuman (New York: Atheneum, 1972), p. 364. 5 Ibid., p. 361. 148 writing in turbulent times partisanship: the book creates an imaginary world that indicts any abusive political system. What Steiner says about the book is fundamental to the understanding of the term ‘political’ I raise here in relation to literature, and especially poetry: it’s not polit ical one-sidedness (of which every writer is at risk) but politics in the sense of reassessing how we govern ourselves with language.

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