FOR A POETRY OF CONCERN

K. Satchidanandan

Thedore Adorno, the well- known thinker from Frankfurt once said that poetry is impossible after Auschwitz. The statement, clearly, was not meant to be literal;it was an intense comment on the violence of our times that works against creativity of every kind. Indeed the Holocaust produced its own variety of great poetry: remember Nelly Sachs, Abba Kovner, Paul Celan and several others who still remind us of those days of the genocidal mania. It was about such poetry that the Polish poet Tadeuz Rozevicz had said in his introduction to the anthology of post-War Polish poetry: “…a poetry for the horror-stricken, for those abandoned to butchery, for survivors, created out of a remnant of words, salvaged words, out of uninteresting words from the great rubbish dump.”

The history of poetry in our time has also been a history of censorship, exile and martyrdom.We have the examples of Lorca and Neruda, Nazim Hikmet and Ossip Mandelstam,Mayakovsky and Ai-Ching,Shamsur Rahman and Tasleema Nasrin, Benjamin Molois and Kensaro Wiwa, Cherabandaraju and Saroj Dutta, Subbarao Panigrahi and Safdar Hashmi who had all raised their voice against some form of dictatorship, discrimination and injustice for which they had to suffer insult, imprisonment, life in a labour camp, banishment or death. Plato who had kept poets out of his ideal republic has had several followers in our time: Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Franco, Pinochet,Id-i -Ameen, Sani Abacha, Ayatolla Khomeini, Saddam Husain and many other champions of totalitarianism and fundamentalism of diverse hues, even avowed democrats who were eager to defend the status-quo. James Joyce once said of writers,” Squeeze us, we are olives”, meaning the writers yield their best under oppressive environments. While it is true that various forms of oppression have produced some of the most passionate poetic works of our times, it is equally true that they have also silenced a lot of real and potential poets. Brecht was right when he asked, “Will there be poetry in dark times?”, and answered, “Yes, poetry about dark times”.

It is impossible for the genuine writer today to ignore the valence, injustice and social inequality of our times. Blood floods our bedrooms and our drawing rooms are strewn with corpses and that is often the blood and corpses of those who have neither drawing rooms nor bedrooms. Even the ivory towers of pure aesthetes are being swept by the winds of violence and change. Poets can no more be comfortable with a historicity. It is impossible for a sensitive poet to be indifferent to the big and small wars often engineered by divisive forces and imperialist agencies, ecological devastation, the growth of an insensitive technocracy, the speed of the new career-oriented life in the commercial cities that marks the end of creative leisure, the criminalization of politics and the communalisation of society, the starvation of children, the solitude of the old, the discrimination on the basis of class, caste, gender and race, the growing inequality between classes and nations, the cancerous growth of the market turning everything it touches-including culture- into commodity, the depletion of inner life, the death of languages and of the local knowledges and regional cultures expedited by the cultural amnesia imposed upon its victims by the process of globalization – that according to Baudrillard is the greatest form of violence in our times-, and the consequent threat to cultural diversity, democratic pluralism and positive internationalism.

This is not an argument for a narrow ideological commitment, for, we know how the diverse forms of prescriptive and normative poetics have sounded the death-knell of art and encouraged new forms of fascism, especially the kind that Umberto Eco calls ‘ur-fascism’ in his Five Moral Pieces- a Fascism that sees dissent as betrayal, defines nation negatively to the exclusion of minorities thus promoting xenophobia, fears difference, advocates action for the sake of action, rejects all rational thinking, looks at pacifism as collusion with the enemy, scorns the weak, encourages the cult of death, upholds machismo as a value and opposes all non-conformist sexual behaviour, treats people as a monolith, fears critical thinking , avoids any kind of intellectual complexity and creates a cult of tradition taking truth to be already known. What I am arguing for is a literature of concern, that even while not subscribing to mega-ideologies and Utopias, is deeply aware of human suffering and dreams of a world of justice, a more humane and egalitarian- less patriarchal, racist, communalist, cateist and exploitative- dispensation, peace and amity among nations and communities, and a deeper understanding of the relationship between man and nature.

Poetry, even with its element of play, is no mere combinatorial game that a machine can play. It is more than a mere permutation of a restricted number of elements and functions. It always tries to say what it cannot say and its power comes from its willingness to give a voice to what is voiceless and a name to what is nameless. Poetry becomes important, as Italo Calvino says, not when it reproduces established values, given truths or ready-made slogans. It is an ear that hears beyond the understanding of common sociology, an eye that sees beyond the colour spectrum of everyday politics. It promotes self-awareness through a criticism of the staus quo and the cultural and material violence it perpetrates. It is the mission of poetry today to retrieve the past without being atavistic, to disentangle the effects of power from representations, to reestablish the almost-lost connections between man and nature, to redefine the boundaries between the self and the other and the self and nature in the context of man’s species- arrogance that cripples the environment as well as his own moral and spiritual life, to resensitise man to suffering, alienation and solitude and to give love and justice the central place it ought to have in all human discourse. May be it requires an alternative poetics, like the aesthetics of resistance Peter Weiss constructed from Dante’s hell-fires that he rediscovered in the Nazi concentration camps.

( Repeat Print from Old issues )