I.

The history of the poetry of resistance is a well-rounded one, filled with both artistic beauties and pragmatic consequences. Ovid, one of the canonical poets of Latin literature, for instance, found himself at the cross hairs of the Roman emperor Augustus because of his writings in Ars Amatoria (Art of Love) written in 1 BC, eighteen years after the emperor passed the Julian marriage laws. The laws were Augustus’s attempt to fulfil his moral obligation as the princeps of Rome—his obligation of extinguishing the moral decay that had gripped his nation to the teeth. But Ovid’s poem not only stands in contrast to the emperor’s vision of promoting marriage among the nobility, but it is a subtle resistance to the laws in that the poem seems to encourage adultery, at least according to Augustus, who took offense in Ovid’s didactic eloquence, admonishing women how to manipulate their husbands, and the men how to court and seduce their sexual counterparts. In 8 AD, Augustus banished Ovid to Tomis, on the Black Sea, for his rhetorical troubles. “Two crimes undid me,” Ovid later recounted in exile, “a poem and a mistake.”

“Our lives no longer feel ground under them,” Osip Mandelstam, the Russian and Soviet poet, writes in the beginning of his incisive criticism of Stalinist regime titled, rather boldly, “The Stalin Epigram,” not knowing that the berating feet of his poem are composing the epigram of their own to his exile. In May of 1934, Mandelstam was arrested for the composition of the poem and sentenced to three years in exile in Cherdyn, in the Northern Ural, accompanied by his wife Nadezhda. This sentence, according to Ralph Dutli, Mandelstam’s most recent biographer, “was an extraordinarily mild sentence, an act of particular clemency.” Mandelstam’s wife, Nadezhda, would call the sentence “a miracle” because in Stalinist Russia, the offense is easily rectified by shooting the offender on the spot, especially when the object of that offence is regarded as “terrorist document,” which is the official designation of Mandelstam’s poem. However, the poet not only paid for his resistance with his freedom and home, but also with his sanity, and, in more ways than one, with his life. Four years after his arrest for “The Stalin Epigram,” now back in Russia with Nadezhda, Mandelstam was arrested once again while on holiday on the charges of “counter-revolutionary activities” and sentenced to five years in correction camps. On 27 December, 1938, he died of typhoid fever while in a transit camp. “Only in Russia,” Nadezhda Mandelstam would recollect his husband saying in her memoir Hope Against Hope, “is poetry respected, it gets people killed. Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?”

Poetry might not be so common a motive for murder anywhere else except in Russia and in Spain, the latter of whose right-wing military authorities were involved in the assassination of the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca. But historically everywhere else, poetry of resistance has been a motive for murder’s maternal cousins: persecution, banishment, displacement, and dehumanizing punishments like imprisonment. One would think that such repressions have been curtailed by our technologically advanced civilization, which has hyper-connected our worlds and demanded more accountability in our political and social processes, especially with the widespread adoption of democracy. But this is not the case. Poetry is still a motive for these systemic vices.

Even in the second decade of the 21st century, persecutions of poets that resist through their poetry persisted and still persists. In 2018, the Uyghur poet and teacher, Gulnisa Imin, was imprisoned by the Chinese authorities on the ground that her poetry promoted “separatism,” as reported by Yasmeen Serhan in The Atlantic. She was sentenced, lacking Mandelstam’s initial “miracle” of “particular clemency” and Ovid’s still liberating exile, to more than 17 years in prison. Imin’s poetry of resistance takes a jab at the discriminatory and genocidal system in which she and her people of the Uyghur ethnic group find themselves, where expressive freedom is an irony in itself—regulated, superintended, and punished. This phenom is articulated in one of the stanzas of Imin’s poetry quoted by Serhan in her report:

Where the words are banned The flower are not allowed to blossom And the birds cannot sing freely.

Instances of these brutal responses, like the baseless imprisonment impressed upon Imin, to poetry of resistance proliferate history and it does not seem to be stopping anytime soon.

II.

After witnessing the horrors of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), W. H. Auden, like his subject W. B. Yeats had witnessed the Irish War of Independence (1919–1921) and the Irish Civil War (1922–1923) after that, writes in his infamous elegiac poem for the Irish master “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” that “poetry makes nothing happen.” Throughout the years, many readers and critics have proposed theories and arguments, sound and grounded, disproving the transformative value of poetry. In The Western Canon, Harold Bloom’s controversial thesis on literary canonization, the critic’s hypothesis is quite radical. Bloom argues that literature is not an instrument of “social change” while dubbing the moralist, the feminist, the Marxist, the multiculturalist, and the New Historicist readers as “School of Resentment,” as “the rabblement of lemmings,” whose readings are serious obstruction or total destruction of the fundamental demand of the canonical in aesthetic value. “The work of great poetry,” Bloom later declares in his seminal essay “The Art of Reading Poetry” with a nod to G. W. F. Hegel’s infamous observation on Shakespearean characters, “is to aid us to become free artists of ourselves.”

In 2019, the Nigerian-American writer Teju Cole continues the argument on the practical uselessness of imaginative literature with empirical evidence: “How can literature help us here? The claim is often made that people who read literature are wiser or kinder, that literature inspires empathy. But is that true? I find that literature doesn’t really do those things. After observing the foreign policies of the so-called developed countries, I cannot trust any complacent claims about the power of literature to inspire empathy. Sometimes, even, it seems that the more libraries we have over here, the more likely we are to bomb people over there.” After reading this, one would not be wrong to address Cole’s observation as an echo of Bloom’s rather bleak conviction in The Western Canon that: “If we read the Western canon in order to form our social, political, or personal moral values, I firmly believe we will become monsters of selfishness and exploitation.”

Then, we wonder, if poetry makes nothing happen as Auden said, if it is incompetent in effecting social change as Bloom and Cole seconded, if the sole purpose of writing and reading literature is for aesthetic pleasure as the aesthetes would have us believe, then why does it warrant the authoritarian need to contain its rhetoric through book banning, and through the banishment, imprisonment, and persecution of its sources, the poets? We wonder yet again: What is it about words, spoken, sung, and written in resistance, that the apparently powerful as to be efficiently tyrannical without any practical repercussions so scared of? “You write in order to change the world,” said James Baldwin in an interview with John Romano in 1979, “knowing perfectly well that you probably can’t, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world.” So, our wondering continues: if even the most radical and resiliently resistant writers we have, Baldwin evidently well-placed among them, can contend the transformative uselessness of literature, then what is it that is so seductive about the rhetoric of resistance that, despite the historical evidence of its practical consequences in persecution, assassination, imprisonment, and banishment, the poets cannot help but engage in their poetic production? Is it because of the writers’ deeper understanding of literature’s essential role in shaping the world, as Baldwin emphasized, that they continue to engage in resistant poetry despite the risks? Or is it because the contents of their poems insult the subhuman ideals of the oppressive and despotic?

To answer the two most important questions here, the first being on what the tyrants find intimidating about resistant rhetoric of poets, we must first look to the psychology of the mind that oppresses. Mandelstam, a poet of uncanny grasp of the figurative, in his “Stalin Epigram,” infers the tyrant as a lonely personality, seeking the warmth of familiar connection while referring to his complicit fellows with an original, biting collective noun: “a scum of chicken-necked bosses.” They are, to Stalin through Mandelstam’s voice, “half-men.” Also, by definition, Stalin, in need of the internal substance of the corporeal ring of friends ingratiating with him, subsumes the Mandelstamian identification of his fellows as half-men, whose prognosis is the fear of being alone. In consequence, this fear formulates the tyrant’s violent response to something as harmless as rhetorical rebellion, exemplified by poetry of resistance.

The fear is, however, intensified by the simple fact that the literary artefact is a much more durable phenomenon, or has the potential to be, than their time and achievements in their political offices. Oppression, however powerful, brutal, and barbaric, cannot conquer and has never conquered what Helen Vendler calls “the inextinguishable fertility of creative mind.” Instead, it fuels and fans it lit beyond containment. Therefore, the edge that the poets have against the oppressive and tyrannical is the same knowledge that intimidates those in power, that the literary works have the potential of transcending the present and dark times, outliving the tyrants, and becoming destructive of the tyrants’ legacies as undeniable documents of history.

Poetry of resistance, therefore, in Terry Eagleston’s words on art in general, “is radical not so much because of what it says as because of what it is,” hence the tyrants’ preference for silence or ingratiating praises as companions in their political pilgrimage to fulfil their destiny through subhuman ideals. In addition, this mutual comprehension of the potential temporal transcendence of the poem reveals one major thing about the poetics of resistance. It reveals the resistant propensity of the poets to the oppressive is not in any way directed at the latter’s power, or their concept of it, to be precise, but to the nature and the result of their politics.

The tyrants, on the other hand, respond to poetry of resistance with such violence because the poets are sons and daughters of Mnemosyne, the Greek goddess of the Muses and memory. “Literature’s powers,” James Butler has said through Italo Calvino, “‘are indirect, act only over the long term, and influence areas that escape the grip of the visible power’.” By resisting through poetry, the poets, powerless in a political and pragmatic sense, are banking on the possibility that their words would live long enough to be the destructive punishment to the names of the tyrants and their legacies as their poems relegate them to hell in the annals of history. Because, in the end, the pragmatic influences of the politically powerful—perhaps a bill passed into law, perhaps boulders of stone carried from miles away to erect an unprecedented architectural phenom, perhaps deals struck on their citizens’ behalf—become secondary, if not mere referential shadows, to the subjective historian’s summation of the time in which they both lived.

A case can also be made that the easy malleability or appropriation of history by literary artefacts also undergirds the tyrants’ violent responses. Literature and its strata, unlike the schematics of politics which show only the ends barring the means of their practical accomplishments, is accessible to everyone in the society and through time. Literature, unlike the narcissistic body and mind that oppresses, can teach the future of the present time without the physical presence of its source. In this case, it is no doubt that authoritarian politics is not only envious, but anxious of literature’s potential for temporal transcendence.

To answer the second important question on what the poets find so seductive about the rhetoric of resistance that, despite the historical evidence of its practical consequences in persecution, assassination, imprisonment, and banishment, they cannot help but engage in their rhetorical eloquence, we must look to the psychology of the poet as not a social but as an imaginative or an aesthetic analyst of her immediate experience. To say the poet’s response to tyranny or cultural decay, as the case might be, through literary means is her duty as a citizen is not only naive, but also absurd. Also, to say the same is his literary duty is not only a form of intellectual reductionism, but also a shallow summation that borders on noetic mediocrity. Why? Because the poet, like the critic, by nature or by essence, is not a moralist, nor is he an ethicist. He is, however, a person, another citizen in a society with active duties as a citizen, but with a vocation or an avocation of the imaginative and rhetorical kind. Therefore, his protest and resistant poetry is not a social necessity, nor is it an ethical obligation. Rather, it is a literary and personal expression of the poet, his gift and voluntary contribution, so to speak, to the cultural continuation of his society. The poetry of resistance is a literary expression of the poet, first and foremost, in the sense that he writes the poem to affirm his literary relevance, even in tumultuous times. It is personal, on the other hand, in the sense that the poem of resistance is perhaps born out of his desperation—if he is a sentimental and empathic kind of a poet—which itself might be born out of his pragmatic and understood uselessness, due to his choice of vocation, in changing the brutal or the unacceptable circumstances of the present time in which he lives and writes.

Just like there are many poems of resistance, as there are others of different subjects of different motivations, written simply to affirm literary relevance, there are also those written simply because the poet can do nothing else to show that he is alive, living, and useful to his society. The latter is more durable, more reasonable an hypothesis as to why the poets persist in their resistance to the powers that be, even when they are empirically aware of the irascible, violent impulses of their opponent. He must resist the tyrannical regime through his poetic expression because without that resistance there is nothing else he could do to address the situation that is choking him and vandalizing his human rights.

The former, on the other hand, is surprisingly (now I am talking solely from the aesthetic stance) part of his vocational integrity. Although when writing purely for aesthetic sake, without any moral or social or cultural underpinnings, what the poem—which, in this case, is the written artefact of resistance to be—asks of the poet is sincerity, something that has been largely misunderstood in our literary discourse. Literary sincerity cannot and should not be construed as a social phenomenon—that which bares a speaker’s true situations naked to the listener, that which we naturally demand of our acquaintances. Rather, it should be understood, in the realm of literature, as what it is: a literary fact, if it can be called that. This is because there is no way we can know if Sappho, for example, is being truthful when she writes in her Lyric XII: “In a dream I spoke with the Cyprus-born.” Or the “non-fiction” writer when he writes of his time with his grandmother in Iseyin or in the northern part of Manila. The poet’s sincerity, however, even when he is writing against the oppression he has not witnessed, can only be realized in the only possible scenario in which he treats his subject, under whatever motivation, with the same seriousness that the medical scientist does his delicate yet critical profession, in which form is not subordinate to content, but both coexisting in a synchronous state.

These two instances, however, are not attempts to disregard or dismiss the poet’s natural passion, which in considerable cases is the human passion, for justice. They are merely alternative occasions that produce the poetry of resistance. Because what is the poet’s central concern beyond his natural passion for justice—which is obvious enough as to become “a hum of thought evaded in the mind,” as Wallace Stevens aptly says of the subconscious in the tenth section of “It Must Be Abstract” in “Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction”—if not himself, as both instances have demonstrated. However, this—writing for literary relevance or out of desperation in times of chaos—is not a bad culture. Nor is it a bad representation of the poetic self in a time of need for radical change, despite what our contemporary culture of appearance and shallow otherness promotes. The best and most influential poets we have have, as their central characters, themselves or the selves they aspire to be. And by braving self-singing, self-admiration, and self-promotion, which in themselves are a recent literary phenomenon in a sense, which are also historically and culturally unattractive, these poets were able to achieve what the literary purists, naturalists, and the romantics struggled to achieve in influencing cultural interaction with ease. By making himself the centre of his poetic universe—his lines, his stanzas, and his sections—Walt Whitman, for example, gets to be successfully radical and radically successful in a culture as hostile, if more visibly and more unapologetically, as our own. And the subjects of his resistance, ranging from social, cultural, economic, material to literary planes, have now become, in most parts, our main projects of expression.

III.

Since no practical change can come from the composition or the reading of poetry that resists, so what are the ultimate achievements of its existence, how does it affect our consciousness of the world? Like I have said earlier, the poets resist through their writing because of the possibility that their poems might outlive them to bring our present into the future that will eventually be. However, to answer this question, we must look to the poems that have persisted through the times in their motivation of resistance. But before looking at the poems themselves, there is something important about the poets and their tradition of rhetorical resistance that is easily overcast by their works’ own differences in style and mode of expression. It is that their achievements, as aesthetic or literary analysts of our collective experience, begin with their writing, not from the readers who read and then misread what they put out.

Poets—and I mean this in the sense that the late American critic Angus J. S. Fletcher meant it, in which the designation include novelists, dramatists, philosophers, visual artists, musicians, and those who write verse as their primary mode of expression; and echoing Shelley in his essay “A Defence of Poetry” and Fletcher in Time, Space, and Motion in the Age of Shakespeare—invent social phenomenons. For instance, according to Fletcher, the English playwright Christopher Marlowe “invents the deadline” in his play Doctor Faustus published in 1604. The poets of resistance poetry, in the same breath, invent rhetorics of dissent not for themselves nor their present time per se; they are already suffering the slings and arrows of oppressive circumstances. Rather, like the purpose of the aeronautical “black box” which stores operational information in order to refine future models of planes should accident occur, the poets, with their poems of resistance, identify, name, and then analyse the patterns and schematics that be in the politics they find bordering on those ideals demeaning and destructive of human rights. Like when W. H. Auden, in “Epitaph on a Tyrant,” describes the effect of the tyrant’s behaviour as contagious and anchoring of his subordinates’ behavioural responses: “When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter.” And when Mandelstam’s blatantly abusive “Epigram” portrays Stalin in the midst of his submissive associates in the fifth stanza: “Ringed with a scum of chicken-necked bosses / he toys with the tributes of half-men.” What they are both doing is prescribing the attendant patterns on political reality espousing tyranny: the rote complicity of the representatives of the people in torturing the people’s existence, a form of the Arendtian “banality of evil.”

In “If We Must Die,” the pièce de résistance poem of resistance, the Jamaican-American poet Claude MacKay goes a bit further in establishing the social and historical fact that the oppressive and the tyrannical are successful in their pilgrimage of oppression and tyranny through their false yet unchallenged supposition of the powerlessness of the oppressed and the conviction of the oppressed of their own powerlessness. The poet can be nothing but anthropocentric in articulating his disruptive stance at the beginning of the poem in which the weak and the powerless are not innately human, but animals “like hogs / Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot.” Even according to McKay, although insinuated, action, not rhetorical eloquence like poetry, is the proper and existentially transformative response to oppression. “O kinsmen!,” the poet calls in the third quatrain of his thoroughly Shakespearean sonnet, “we must meet the common foe!”

The achievement of “If We Must Die” is that it furthers, rather concretely, the claim that the poet’s work in his rhetorical resistance is merely descriptive and, sometimes, prescriptive, as the existence of the poem and its content itself confirms. “When we think, write, and act alongside movements,” Amna A. Akbar, Sameer Ashar, and Jocelyn Simonson declare in their essay “What Movements Do to Law” in Boston Review, buttressing McKay’s constitution of active resistance that borders on militancy, “we help disrupt the everyday violence of law and imagine more radical transformation”—“help” being the operative word. In addition, “If We Must Die” serves as a solid formulation against human psychology and their intuitive response to any form of political tyranny, although not in collective silence alone. The poem also, and more forcefully, resists passive resistance against oppression as a way of imagining “radical transformation,” which, as the poem has articulated, can only be achieved through active engagements from the supposedly powerless, the oppressed.

The last achievement of the poem, and perhaps the most important from a literary and aesthetic point of view, is that it is a strong precursor to some of the most stirring poems of resistance in our modern imaginative literature. Among the poem’s immediate progenies is none other than June Jordan’s “I Must Become a Menace to My Enemies,” a strikingly confident poem in which the militant, quite motivational, pronouncements of “If We Must Die” is transposed from its generalist tone, along with its commandeering voice, to a more personal, individual tone, stripping its precursor poem from any insinuation of fear in the self. The poem opens: “I will no longer lightly walk behind / a one of you who fear me: / Be afraid.” In McKay’s poem, fear is the primary nemesis to be conquered for effective resistance to take place; in Jordan’s poem, however, fear is only the opponent’s reality, forced on his existence by the poet’s fearlessness and her self-acclaimed, equal capacity for responding in kind.

Jordan’s poem births, among others, Taylor Johnson’s metaleptic “Menace to.” Johnson also subscribes to the notion that active resistance is the necessary response to oppression, at least in order to “become something my enemies can’t eat, don’t have / a word for yet.” The obligate “must” that immediately precedes the quoted lines extends the poem from the designation of poetics of complaint (which is a constant subgenre of the poetics of resistance), but rather to that of strange and devastating insinuation that this particular enemy—in our technologically advanced world—is not only an invisible but also an invincible one:

my enemies being literate as a drone is
well-read and precise and quiet, as when I buy something
such as a new computer with which to sing against my enemies,
there is my enemy, silent and personal.

Then there is that sublime poem of resistance by Brandy Nālani McDougall titled, decidedly simply, “Resist.” The poem follows this tradition in which the insinuation of action as the transformative response to oppression is magnificently articulated, the point of each of these poems’ aesthetic achievement. Nālani McDougall introduces her poem with two epitaphs that remind one of McKay’s active, deviant, and militant stance against oppression: the first is the title of the Palestinian poet Dareen Tatour’s equally wild poem “Qawem ya sha’abi, qawemhum (Resist my people, resist them)” which she was persecuted for on the ground that her poem was “inciting violence” and “supporting terrorism”; the second is from the late Hawaiian poet Haunani-Kay Trask’s work titled Writing in Captivity: “Hawaiians are still here. We are still creating, still resisting.” These are, however, merely suspensive prefigurement to the impressive resistance verse to come as the poem begins with the same grandeur and clarity of engagement of its epitaphs:

Stand in rage as wind and current clash
                                   rile lightning and thunder
fire surge and boulder crash

      Let the ocean eat and scrape away these walls
Let the sand swallow their fences whole
                     Let the air between us split the atmosphere

We have no land         No country
          But we have these bodies          these stories
this language of rage                left

Reading these poems, it is no obscure fact that even the poets understand, as I have said earlier, that our want or need for radical change, as the presupposed and self-convinced ordinary people, in a time of oppression or tyranny has to be taken into our own hands, the way the Australian poet Henry Lawson understands—towards the ending of “Faces in the Street”—that words will not only lose their voice, but leave the metaphorical “street” completely for practical, radical uprising:

And so it must be while the world goes rolling round its course,
The warning pen shall write in vain, the warning voice grow hoarse,
But not until a city feels Red Revolution’s feet
Shall its sad people miss awhile the terrors of the street—
The dreadful everlasting strife
For scarcely clothes and meat
In that pent track of living death—the city’s cruel street.

As this ending suggests, poetry could be said to be merely an antecedent to the purveyor of the “more radical transformation” that can only be brought about by action, by revolution. “We are not subjects of a State founded upon law,” Ursula K. Leguin declares in The Dispossessed, “but members of a society formed upon revolution. Revolution is our obligation: our hope of evolution.” That is to say: action is our salvation from any social, political, or even personal dread. We are and thus must be, as William Ernest Henley famously wrote in “Invictus,” “the master of our fate and the captain of our soul.”

In the end, as far as these poems of resistance proper are concerned, their poets are the perfect enactment of Mahmoud Darwish’s summation of the transformative power of poetry in which the only change poetry is capable of effecting is transforming the poet’s consciousness of the world: “I thought poetry could change everything, could change history and could humanise, and I think that the illusion is very necessary to push poets to be involved and to believe. But now I think that poetry changes only the poet.” The poets of these poems of resistance do also conclude change to be the action, or the counteraction, against the powers that be, nothing else.