Recommended Link: Poetry is a perfect form to challenge human rights abuses

Portrait of Shelley by Alfred Clint (1819) – for source see link

Given my recent interest in Shelley and the poetry of protest, this piece in last week’s Guardian by Shami Chakrabarti caught my eye. It also contains a reminder of a poem by Auden on Sigmund Freud which I must have another look at. Below is a short extract: for the full post see link.

I am on my way to Newcastle. It’s pleasing to note that the city’s university awarded an honorary doctorate to Martin Luther King in his lifetime and that the unexpected and impromptu speech with which he received it in 1967 is up there with the legendary “I have a dream” of four years before. It was filmed, then lost for many years, before its rediscovery in the annals of the academy. It was shown to me some years ago and you can view it online. Is it a great speech, though, or more aptly described as a thunderous political poem against racism, poverty and war?

So what better place for a poetry festival, and especially to discuss human rights and the “poetry of witness” with Carolyn Forché? Forché is a celebrated US poet, translator and human rights defender and I am fascinated by the way that this combination of skills and experience must have shaped all aspects of her work. I love her refusal to accept the bifurcation between “personal” and “political” poetry and to embrace instead a notion of the “social” that describes human rights thinking, so much great art and also, surely, the human condition itself. Aren’t we in essence all both individual and social creatures? Our rights and freedoms reflect the yearning for freedom, autonomy, privacy and conscience, but also our need to associate and express as family, community and society. A politics that ignores or suppresses the intimate sphere will allow or even ensure abuses of power in the home, on the streets and in its own institutions.

The poetry of witness has long compensated for censored or corrupted news media when truth must be spoken to power – think of Tennyson’s Charge of the Light Brigade or Wilfred Owen’s Anthem for Doomed Youth. Poetry and human rights are very often tied together; think of Muriel Rukeyser’s poetry, which are intimate while also tackling the huge themes of feminism, equality and being Jewish after the Holocaust. The civil rights poetry and activism of Langston Hughes are completely inseparable.

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Family Poems (14/16): Memas

After recently posting Unfinished Business in response to Sue Vincent’s book addiction post, and finally managing to finish Reading in the Park after only five decades, it struck me that it might be useful to post the family related poems, not in chronological order of composition, which is how they have appeared so far, but in a sequence that better reflects their chronological sequence in autobiographical time. I started last Monday with the first one after Unfinished Business, as that was posted so recently. The rest are following at the rate of a poem a day.

Memas

In Panchgani
in the cold front room
of the small cottage
which she didn’t own
she lay still
under the white sheet
beneath the crimson and green
of the freshly cut
half-opened rose
with her headscarf tight
against the breeze
from the open window
still in the pale flowered brown dress
she always wore for travelling

there were many guests that night
her granddaughter served tea in her stead
for everyone who came and went
throughout the cold black hours
and everyone sat down for a time
and talked, told stories,
laughed, wept,
about the days in Yazd
(no one knew how long ago
exactly) when her son at five
after his father died travelled
to India with his uncle on a donkey
when she was so hungry
she fell in search of flour
down the cellar
of the house she served in
and when the sharp-eyed
mistress returned
the flour she’d hidden in her scarf
was running down her face with sweat
and the bruises of her fall
were nothing to the bruises
of her beating for the flour

and in the morning
there was the washing of the body
which the women did
the arguments about
how many layers of cloth
should wrap her round
what should be written
on the ring she’d wear
whether the body should be
carried in a blanket
through the streets
so that the coffin could leave
from her son’s house not
from her daughter’s house
which had no proper bathroom
in which to wash a corpse
though it was where she had most loved
to clean and wash and cook
until the last
because nobody tried to stop her

in the end
the body was lifted
from where she left it
into the coffin
(I never knew till then
how heavy and cold a small old
dead woman could be)
then the coffin was lifted
into the jeep which drove us
to the big house where we prayed and ate

when the sun was directly overhead
and the dust on the road was slow
to settle and all the children
from the school she’d served
had gathered we drove off
at walking crawling pace to the gulestan
where a large crowd from almost everywhere
waited to see this long life end
in a small grave
under a small tree in bloom

and candles were lit
and joss sticks
and blossoms strewn
all round the grave
and her five year old
great grandson from Hereford
who had known her
only for ten days cried

first when they nailed the lid on
don’t let them for she can’t get out

and cried again
when they lowered her
down into the steep red soil
for fear she could not climb the sides

and cried again
when they heaved the grey slabs on top
please stop them for the weight
will be too much
and sobbed out loud
when the men threw
buckets of wet concrete
into the grave for smoothing down
to stop the monsoon
resurrecting her

for then he knew
she’d never wake again down there
to play with or serve us

Pete Hulme Text © 1991

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