The entanglement of poetry, protest and politics

IS protest the best way to ‘use, deploy, handle or mishandle’ poetry? Is poetry a gun, a Webley Scott, or a Smith and Wesson to be brought out of the armoury at chosen moments, not when a guy is having a good time with his wife, but when politics is involved? Does poetry get a look-in during the heat of battle? You leftist scum! You rightist nerd! You commie! You urban Naxal! What happens when each side uses rhyme to slam the other?

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When reading about old historical crises, you wonder, what exactly was cooking? While racing through those burning issues, why were they so excited? When American war veterans look back on Vietnam, they must be shaking their heads. ‘What was all that about, Charlie? Why did we get into the swamps? Why did we murder the kids in the paddies? Hey Stan, what was it called, My Lai, was it? And Dien Bien Phu? Phew! And who put us all through it? One of the best Presidents we had, JFK, to start with? And all the Presidents who followed right up to that angel Richard Nixon! How come the Pope forgot to canonise him! Can’t believe they put us through Vietnam.’

Well chum, the poets sure knew. They viewed anti- communist propaganda with scepticism. And you can’t bomb a nation to kingdom come because you don’t fancy their philosophy. Nadir Shah never came to Delhi to chastise our philosophers, nor Timur, of skull-mountains. May I carry you back to some of the things that American anti-war poets, as distinct from anti-communist Presidents and politicians, wrote? Take Denise Levertov, Professor at Tufts University and the University of Washington. I have been reading her since the Sixties, the staunchest anti-Vietnam war poet you could think of. As an activist and poet, she did what she could. Here’s how she starts a poem called “Distance”:

‘While we lie in the road to block traffic from the air force base,/ over there the dead are strewn in the roads./ While we are carried to the bus and off to jail to be ‘processed’,/ over there the torn-off legs and arms of the living/ hang in on burnt trees and on broken walls.’

Worse is to come in the poem “A Poem at Christmas 1972 during the terror bombing of North Vietnam”. She imagines herself ‘as a waitress at the inaugural dinner’. She starts:

‘Now I have lain awake imagining murder; …I was saving the knives until I reached certain men… Yes, Kissinger’s smile faded as he clutched his belly…’ (She knifes him in the poem). Then she throws napalm at President Nixon’s face! Near the end of the poem, she writes: ‘O to kill/the killers.’

This is just a stray example of poetry turning into a vehicle of protest. Doctrines can betray you. Look back at history, most wars seem stupid retrospectively. Stalin had millions of Kulaks liquidated, not that he spared the communists, Borodin, Bukharin and the rest. What about the witches who were burnt, the polytheists executed in Islamic countries? How many may die because of the blasphemy law in Pakistan, though so far the courts have shielded the so-called culprits from the hangman’s rope.

“Hum dekhenge” by Faiz Ahmad Faiz has become famous overnight. It is a searing poem of course, but Faiz has written better verse, and more gently. Faiz had good reason to be upset. The Pakistanis were almost going to execute him for murdering their Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan!! “The Pindi conspiracy”, they called it. They involved him on a trumped-up charge. Incidentally, the Pakistan police have never been able to successfully unravel their political murder mysteries, whether it is Liaquat’s muder, or the Zia-ul-Haq air crash, Benazir’s murder, or the police shootout with her brother. The only thing we can be certain about is ZA Bhutto’s hanging, who was behind it, Zia of course, and who pulled the rope, their famous hangman Tara Masih.

Don’t rule through doctrines

Doctrines are fads which last for a while and then vanish. When critics write about AAP’s electoral victory, I hope they won’t restrict themselves to bijli, pani and the freebies over the last three months. They need to talk about the political ambience, starting from August 5 when J&K was turned into union territories, leaders jailed, and still rotting, and three unpopular legislations which the people have agitated against, mostly youngsters of all faiths. I hope they talk not just about what the Aam Aadmi Party did, but also what the BJP central leadership did. Not a ticket given to a Muslim by the party in the 2019 elections, and the beating up of students by the police in JNU, Jamia, and AMU, and speeches by Yogi Adityanath and the ‘sexologist’ minister warning Delhi people how their daughters and sisters could be raped if certain people enter Delhi. And Shaheen Bagh became both a beacon and rallying cry.

One last thought. The BJP won 40 per cent votes and got 10 per cent seats. That’s absurd. The first past the post method needs to be changed.