ISSUE 6

Editorial

Naush Sabah

‘In the cause of silence, each of us draws the face of her own fear – fear of contempt, of censure, or some judgment, or recognition, of challange, of annihilation. But most of all, I think, we fear the visibility without which we cannot truly live.’

‘The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action’, Audre Lorde, 1977

‘Your silence will not protect you.’  
Only, sometimes it does. 
I admire (and publish here) the poet as warrior, as freedom fighter, as anti-colonialist, as feminist, as ecological activist, and more besides... the poet as a politically active and purposeful force in the culture—or at least witnessing, preserving, articulating; being curious and so encouraging curiosity. Yet, I am of course reminded of the Keatsian dictum, ‘we hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us’. There’s ample to prove the point; poems of piety and propaganda, poems that we might read and, while we agree with the political standpoint, regard as simply bad—corny, boring, pompous, obvious, indistinct in voice, reading as some anybody’s regurgitation of received opinion. When I consider what makes political poems powerful to me as a reader, the word authenticity comes to mind, though it’s one that’s had its own power diluted through overuse. Everyone is told to be your authentic self and none sound less authentic than those who repeat the phrase like a slogan, a formula that’s a straightforward cure-all, a mantra become currency to exchange in social circles, packaged and sold as part of the brand of career activists and influencers—the exhortation to others really a claim about oneself. 
Is there some static authentic self we’re all failing to unleash? Does each of us have a unified, whole sense of self that can be neatly expressed through speech or action, through Instagram post or tweet, through an identity label or outfit, through a poem? What if one’s authentic self is fearful, confused, changeable, guarded, private, ugly? What if one isn’t particularly interested in revealing the self? What if one’s self-preservation depends on not being too authentic or too much oneself—what if expressing oneself leads to vulnerability one isn’t willing to risk or pay the price for? Lorde acknowledges such fears and breaks silence nonetheless; not everyone can. Who’s to say those who don’t must necessarily lead lesser lives? What if a measure of silence allows them to survive and live the life they aspire to? Lorde also makes the often-elided distinction between language and action. Allowing speech to stand in for action diffuses that speech. When the poem or the protest suffices, the status quo prevails.
What I mean by authenticity in the political poem is some genuine quality of singular force, individual voice, that makes its sound unmistakeable, direct, and affecting in the deeply contextualised moments of both composition and reading—the poem is not reflecting some received opinion in borrowed language on generalised terms but is originating its own necessary expression. It’s why some poems translated into English, without that context, and stripped of the cultural knowledge and meaning they contain in the music of their original language, can sound flat or trite. Having access to the poetry of more than one language and culture can allow a reader to recognise those differences in sense and sensibility more clearly. English simply doesn’t have the culture to contain all the things Urdu or Punjabi poems carry or make me feel. That’s not a value judgement but simply a truth—the ecstatic, the spiritual, the romantic even, aren’t things I encounter in English poetry and culture in the same way I do in South Asian culture and languages; a bangle doesn't have the same meaning, nor a shrine, nor drunkenness. The singularity of an entire culture is in that way like the singularity of a good poem; neither allow paraphrase nor admit inauthentic replication. 

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‘Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying’ writes the Palestinian-American poet Noor Hindi. The poem begins, ‘Colonisers write about flowers’ but undercuts its own misdirected rage by ending ‘One day, I’ll write about the flowers like we own them’ (my italics). The poet knows neither craft nor flowers should be left to colonisers. In the face of death and settler colonialism, Palestinian children run with a football on beaches, play with toys under the rubble of their houses, rescue their pet fish or teddies, celebrate their birthdays; their parents pick up the leaves of books blown up after bookstores or libraries are deliberately bombed, they plant a garden of flowers in tear gas canisters, they stay on their land and live because living on the land is resistance. Living on the land is resistance. Living is resistance. 

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Writing about trees, birds, and flowers is political. Writing with the lyric ‘I’ is political. Particularly so when you’re seen primarily as part of some collective them, and as someone who should write primarily about the collective concerns of them. In that instance, the ‘I’ refusing to be subsumed by the collective chorus—often majoritarian on its own terms and often supremacist in its relation to the marginalised within it—is the resisting, the dissenting voice. The ‘I’ that refuses the controlling expectation of us and the marginalising exclusion of them.

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Entering a space is claiming it as your domain, declaring that you belong there.

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At my first call centre job, I had an Indian colleague who was a recent migrant and, during casual office small talk, asked where my family were from. ‘Azad Kashmir,’ I told him and then watched the discomfort appear on his face; such a place didn’t exist to his mind. You mean POK? ‘No. I mean Azad Kashmir.’ On our maps and weather reports in India, it’s Pakistan Occupied Kashmir. ‘Well . . . in the land itself—where my relatives live, where I lived for four months—we call it Azad Kashmir; not occupied.’ The propaganda of naming extends beyond the place to its people who Hindu nationalists in India claim are ethnically Punjabi and Punjabi-speakers rather than ethnically Kashmiri—as we are—and Pahari speakers. This erasure through misnaming is part of the imaginary foundations on which Hindu nationalist ambitions to ethnically cleanse and occupy the land can be justified through a false logic of supposed ‘return’. The longed-for return is not really of those families tragically and traumatically displaced by partition but is a cover for nationalist extremism and the further displacement and dispossession of the native population—the genocidal end goal of religious hatred and supremacism which continues to spiral out of control within India’s own borders under a fascist government. To occupy a land, you claim you are freeing it. To ethnically cleanse it, you claim you are returning its people to it. The fascist frees, civilises, purifies, restores.

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There is a sense of recognition many peoples of the world feel when witnessing or standing in solidarity with the struggle of Palestinians. It’s a recognition of the continuing effects of settler colonialism on a land and its people, dialled up in this instance as if commensurate with the density of Gaza, the firepower of Israel, the billions of dollars of US military aid a year, the complacent indifference of Britain. Britain, the colonial actor which left all this death and horror in its wake, the nation of patriots who balk at our mention of empire, who in the face of continuing post-colonial devastation across the globe, are shameless enough to utter absurd apologetics about railways and roads or abolition, who expect gratitude.
I dislike my own tone of outrage and rage. Can you approach poetry with rage? That was the question I began with when sitting down to write an editorial while witnessing nightly bombs fall on Gaza and kill at least 67 of its children. Can you approach poetry with rage? I don’t think so, not easily anyway. Poetry seems to demand a receptive mode that rage cannot contain. Reading poetry is a process of receiving and the mind in rage can only pour out, not take it. I come to poetry for grief, for a desolating expansion; I come to it empty and ready to be emptied further. I come to it when rage has subsided and there is space for something more. Even when buoyant, I approach poems for their melancholy, their quiet, for the weight they leave in the air of their endings.

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That brings me back to silence. 
In the defiant utterances of poets, we encounter silence as a crime, as a form of cowardice, as a sign of death—a deathless death. This all rings true. But it’s not the only truth. I sat with silence for a long time before being able to write this. It was an overwhelming silence, difficult to break, because the question is my speech better than silence? looms over any page. It’s not one I can answer, so the silence is only broken when the question can be pushed away. We’re compelled to silence like we’re compelled to speech. By turns. One the contrast and complement of the other; white space, black ink; empty vessel, poured liquid. Sometimes silence preserves and protects, sometimes it makes space and cuts through, sometimes it’s sacred and truer than words; it allows us to listen. As a spiritual practice, silence is a denial of the ego, an act of diminishing the self to perceive the divine other, to receive of the divine. It’s out of silence that the words to follow have come and it’s in your silence that you’re able to read them.