Homer wrote on the Trojan War; Alfred Lord Tennyson, the Crimean War; Walt Whitman, civil war; Wilfred Owen, World War II. Their poems are part of global history and culture. Poets must and must document the destruction and horrors of war.
But can poetry improve a war or accelerate a peaceful resolution? Perhaps, but only if poets and readers can slide behind enemy lines, or if the poetry of “the enemy” can cross these lines. The last war in the Middle East and the repercussions here illustrated the power and the difficulty of reading the verse on the other side.
At the risk of being accused of naivety, I believe – I affirm – that poetry can be a vehicle of change and peace in the midst of war and other conflicts. Robert Bly and Denise Leverov influenced the social conscience of the Vietnam War. More recently, a rebirth of marginalized voices has favored a more general awareness of systemic racism in the United States.
No history of lynching is more lively than “Jasper Texas 1998” by Lucille Clifton, on the murder of James Byrd Jr. and all the accounts of the murders who triggered the Black Lives Matter movement, I remember the most deeply of “A Small Faits” by Ross Gay, on the murder of Eric Garner in New York.
In the conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, Palestinian voices must be heard if lasting peace must be made. Among those who deeply moved me are the poets Mosab Abu Toha and Fady Joudah. They brought me to Gaza like no television coverage could.
I invite any Jewish or Israeli poet who has not plunged into contemporary Palestinian poetry to put themselves behind the enemy lines to read these poets and others. Reading them means living not only the sorrow and the horrors of war, but also to meet all the strength of another rage. And beyond rage is a human who does not commit themselves.
The “well of my grandfather” of Abu Toha contrasts an image of the poet “pulling buckets of water / the well of the camp” with that of his grandfather, whose “hands flow the water / down in the well” in Yaffa, where he always stands: “he never left him, even after the Nakba, / even after death.” He connects the Palestinian poet to this American Jewish poet, because the grandsons whose life of the grandfathers continue to support them. Such moments of empathy, in my opinion, move mountains.
How strange it is to have read that thousands Writers and members of the entertainment industry had signed a letter engaging in the boycott of Israeli cultural institutions – those which could bring them back their Enemies lines to show them something they closed to know. It is as if these writers and these artists are committed not Knowing, to not Let art do what only art can.
A at the corner Published in the New York Times last year, “A Chill came across the Jews in Publishing”, referred to an online spreadsheet of allegedly “Zionist” authors intended to be put on black. He read as the recent prohibited book targeting gay and trans literature, the revisited McCarthy era, or even the joy fires that consumed “decadent” books in Nazi Germany. Why are the blacklisers afraid to go beyond enemy lines, the lines they trace to separate from the Israeli and American Jewish experience?
The original working title of my next book was “My Partisan Grief”, which remains the title of his first poem. I was shocked and angry that a large part of the artistic and poetic world is not interested in Jewish sorrow. It seems to me that no sorrow should be privileged or silenced.
True peace can only be achieved by a calculation of the sorrow and the rage of “the other”. If artists and poets cannot do this, how can we expect our politicians to accomplish anything? Opening your heart to the sorrow of the other, listening without judgment to the rage of the other, is the only way to cure a rift which widens by generation.
I invite the artists who promised to boycott Israeli cultural institutions to read 10 of the 59 poems recently published in a bilingual edition of “Shiva: Poems of October 7 October” Shuri Haza writes: “The table is filled with space / empty pain hidden in holes and cracks.” Eva Murciano writes: “When I tried to write poetry / After this terrible day / The words fell on the ground.”
Yes, we are all hidden on the ground. Each Palestinian, all the Israelis, all the Jews.
I invite the boycotters to open the pages of the 2019 collection of Yonatan Berg “Frayed Light”, translated in an expert by Joanna Chen. I invite them to imagine an era when, as Berg puts it in “After the war”, “the last ships were defeated, the sea resumes / speaks to itself. A black center / flows behind the hills “and, later, from the same poem,” the earth returns from betrayal “.
I stop and repeat this line: “The terrain comes back from betrayal.” We all betrayed this land which wants peace and coexistence. And wouldn't it be a betrayal not Read and reflect on these lines simply because the writer is Israeli? However, I suspect that those who boycott Israeli cultural institutions believe that it is a betrayal to read Israeli poetry.
Self-imposed censorship destroys the chances of peace. Self-imposed censorship destroys this vital curiosity which makes artists prosper, which could lead them behind enemy lines.
Thanks to my poetry and others, I invite the thousands of people who supported a boycott to share the experience of an American Jew with a family in Israel, the one who wants to see freedom maintained for everyone in this country and peace and stability for all in the Middle East.
Naively, I affirm, lions poetry. Let us deliver everyone's poetry, as painful as it can be. Naively, can I ask, can poets speak? Can all Poets speak?
Owen Lewis is a professor of psychiatry in the Department of Human and Ethical Sciences at Columbia University and author of the next poetry collection “A prayer of six wings. “”
