Artistic Visionaries Stand Against, Avoid, and Navigate Amidst Resistance
A reimagined voyage of defiance
From a Guantánamo cell, a prisoner whispers a prayer. Rural Brazilian women labor dutifully despite the encroachment of expanding agribusinesses. A poet uncovers a 1846 British treaty, claiming Kashmir, weaving it into verses that testify to the power of resistance. ThesePoetic testaments expose the universal truth: wherever oppression reigns, there's resistance brewing. In every injustice, there's refusal blooming. Wherever power seeks to bind and control, there's an alternative route being forged.
In life's most critical moments, we employ an anthropological gaze, scrutinizing the intricacies of power and autonomy. Those at the helm of power often attempt to sustain and justify their authority by crafting narratives, choosing what stories to accentuate or suppress. Navigating the convoluted game of power can be challenging, yet discerning the strings being pulled and the reality twisters becomes clearer when studying the resistance people present.
To trace the footprints of power, one must focus on what individuals and communities fight against, turn their backs on, and insist on embracing an alternative perspective. Through such a lens, hidden seeds of justice, and future possibilities can be observed, camouflaged beneath the powerful's veil.
Using poetry to preserve these invisible footprints, we can feel and witness the struggle against dominant narratives thatinflict harm and control.
In June 2024, our editorial team issued a call for submissions of anthropological poems of resistance, refusal, and wayfinding. We sought to understand "how poets, guided by anthropological themes and research, speak to the ways sociopolitical movements and everyday moments resist and refuse as a means to protect or usher in new ways of existing."
Over 150 poems poured in from around the globe, prompting the difficult task of selection. What followed was a collection of thirteen courageous voices challenging power across various landscapes. They shed light on exploitative systems, both large and intimate. These voices resist colonization, contest environmental destruction, and speak with urgency, joy, despite the overwhelming and mundane violence they face. They enlighten us with myriad methods of resistance, refusal, and wayfinding.
In "Translation Notes," Eric Abalajon angrily echoes the silenced voices of Indigenous communities in Central Panay in the Philippines, massacred or jailed in December 2020 due to the construction of a megadam. Through a fragmented poem, the Tumandok community's plight is laid bare while poignantly disrupting bureaucratic coherence.
Don Edward Walicek's poems in this collection inhabit the docupoetry genre, informed by his visits to the U.S. Guantánamo Bay Detention Center in Cuba, conversations with former prisoners, and documentary analysis. Both "Order for my Backpack" and "Three Stages of Nowhere" use straightforward language to portray, with brutal clarity, the routinized brutality of carceral violence and Imperialism. The former, inspired by a Günter Eich poem, explores a prison inventory list, defying the carceral logic of guilt by repeatedly listing themes and words the speaker has promised not to utter.
This collection transports readers to diverse locales, cultures, cities, and battlefields, battlegrounds against common enemies: injustice and oppression. Yet in some poems, resistance must venture beyond the ordinary to spark the imagination and direct it toward radical possibilities.
Nadia Said's "Jesus Is Palestinian," for example, reinterprets a contested icon, asserting the power of solidarity against contemporary experiences of settler colonial and white supremacist violence. Jesus is depicted as a man with "woolly hair," "lactose intolerant," and "who must stare straight ahead when pulled over." The call for recognition of the interconnectedness of struggles is stronger in "Heaven on Earth," where Said writes that "they have created hells that used to be heavens of Gaza and Sudan and Congo," to keep "your" heaven running. Yet, the speculative register is also one that inspires hope, presenting an image of rain that has "continued to fall for centuries into the hollows of the earth."
While resistance assumes various forms, individuals' actions and words materialize on their own terms, transcending mere reactions to domination or oppression. Refusal can manifest as a rejection of unequal power relationships or the terms imposed by dominant structures. Refusal can also be expressed through poems that withhold revelations or insights intended for the outsider's gaze.
"Passing Notes" illustrates linguistic refusal, facing colonization. Melanie Hyo-In Han's bilingual poem features untranslated Korean lines, mirroring the secret messages that were passed by Korean subjects, defying linguistic erasure and preserving their language during Japanese occupation.
Khando Langri's "Emic/Etic" challenges linguistic expectations, protesting against the academic conventions of separating or denoting local concepts through italicization. Langri's poem attempts to craft an "anti-glossary," questioning who it is that "writes me into being, whose heart / I carry-whose voice." It challenges anthropological concepts, insisting that social scientists invented the "observable body," creating an architectural framework of categories.
"Pequi Winds" by Jacqueline Ferraz de Lima resists environmental devastation in central Brazil boldly, lending a voice to rural women in Minas Gerais. Their powerful narratives weave together stories of resilience amid large-scale plantation damage and the damage left by Portuguese colonialism and diaspora. The women refuse the logic of agribusiness, promising that true wealth comes from an intimate connection to the land and its offerings. Despite the ongoing loss and devastation, "the same pale mother violet in the middle of / the wasp nest, / has no bordered meaning to form ground / in the thread of time."
Sneha Subramanian Kanta's "Broken Sonnets for the Anthropocene" emphasizes refusal as abundance, flouting humanity's terms of engagement with nature. The speaker embodies defiance, surrounded by a text literally dripping with lush language and long lines, inviting readers to immerse themselves in its depths.
Experimentation with language offers other poets in this collection an avenue for wayfinding, heralding new methods of creating awareness and language. Moving beyond resistance and refusal, these innovations lead to new understanding and new expression. In "Debitage," Jade Lomas-Trejo crafts a new poetic form inspired by archaeological terminology. Debitage are the "debris and discards" of stone tools and weapons. The poem not only excavates inherited trauma but also chips away at it, empowering the speaker to take control of their history, undoing the traumas of gendered and domestic violence. In the end, only the speaker's individual identity remains, reaffirmed by the singularity of "i."
In the "Tallahassee Ghazal," Noland Blain draws upon a classic poetic form, yet innovates by using it as a means to convey the complex feelings of growing up queer in the American South. By repeating "town" and "June" throughout the poem, Blain reinforces a sense of cyclicity and entrapment. Despite the oppressive environment, a sense of pride remains, acknowledged in the poem's conclusion: "June, and most of us are breathing. This is enough to be proud."
Finally, Uzma Falak's erased poems (excerpts from a series of six) refuse the British sale of Kashmir in the 1846 Treaty of Amritsar, resisting the exploitative capture of colonialism. The fragmented, erased verses call on readers to sing and march, envisioning a liberatory future for Kashmir. The poems draw on the intricate map-shawl of Srinigar, the summer capital of Kashmir and Jammu, affirming the resistance of said country, river, and its people.
The poems in this collection encourage us to see resistance and refusal as layered acts, expressed subtly and overtly within the realm of creative expression and everyday life. The political and poetic intertwine within the landscape of language, form, and expression, emphasizing the potential of the mundane to harbor resistance.
Read these poems and witness the world from a new perspective. Join the voices of the resisters, the refusers, the dreamers and maximize the power found in their words.
Join them on their journey of resistance, refusal, and wayfinding. May their tales inspire and comfort you in these opportune times.
- In the realm of poetry, poets challenge power structures through their submissions, shedding light on various forms of resistance and refusal across diverse landscapes.
- The anthology of poems serves as a call-to-action, inviting readers to join the voices of the resisters, refusers, and dreamers, and to harness the power found in their words.
