Echoes across ruins: Poetry as resistance in Gaza & Kashmir
In Kashmir, poets smuggle words across barbed metaphors; in Gaza, they write under drones and dust. It does not prescribe political ideas or actions but helps us live in political history.
Updated At : 07:07 AM Jul 05, 2025 IST
Resistance literature: The act of writing is often all that remains when the rest is rubble. Reuters
FOR poetry makes nothing happen... it survives.../ From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs/ Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives." WH Auden (in 'In Memory of WB Yeats') captures here the paradox of political poetry: Indeed, poetry makes nothing happen but emerges from the depths of solitude and the overwhelming sorrows that beset cities ravaged by violence, siege and deceit. Therefore, to write a poem in Gaza or to recite a ghazal in Srinagar is to bear witness and speak in the face of an unprecedented crisis in the history of civilisation. It does not prescribe political ideas or actions, but helps us live in political history.
