The other day, my sweetie brought this smart, thoughtful article to my attention: “Feeling for the Edge of your Imagination: finding ways not to call the police.”
Engaging, convincing, and important, it’s an article that should be read in its entirety. For the purposes of this blog post, I offer this long-ish excerpt:
We live in a world that’s deeply damaged by policing, in which immediate and effective community-based responses don’t necessarily exist, or we don’t know how to find/create them. Our imaginations have atrophied, our resourcefulness has withered. There are moments when immediate intervention will save someone’s life, and it needs to be fast, and the readily available structure for that immediate intervention is the police.
We live in a world in which we can feel deeply powerless or afraid. It feels terrible when we, or the people we care about, get hurt or experience harm. When I think of the moments in which I could possibly imagine calling the police, I think of people I love, and of things I hope they never experience. Why do we feel afraid? Sometimes we feel afraid because we have experienced harm, because we have experienced trauma. Sometimes we also feel afraid because we have bought into aspects of racism, classism, and media-perpetuated images of danger. Sometimes it’s the complex combination of all these things–imagination, memory, and prejudice. For women, our experiences with physical safety are complex and painful–women in my life have understandably chosen and sought police intervention when it has seemed like the only available safety measure in situations of interpersonal or sexual abuse. So given these complicated realities, how can we assure that if police are called it’s an active, intentional and reluctant choice, not a knee-jerk reaction? What can we do to push ourselves further, to take another step towards a world without prisons, without police, and without the racism and brutality they reproduce?
As I read, I was excited by this explicit appeal to our creativity in addressing social justice issues. The article asks us to
Feel for the edge of your own police-calling “threshold”:
* Name the situation (or type of situation) in which you think you would call the police, where that response is the only thing you can imagine doing, or would be automatic.* Sit with that threshold for a minute. Imagine the creative response that would allow you to move that threshold back a bit and generate a more creative, community-based response. What would you need? Who would be involved? How can you start to build that possibility?
This articulation about how we can manifest social change is one of the best I’ve read in a while. The author exhorts us to think creatively, to stretch our imaginations as far as we think we can stretch them, and then go beyond that limit. What do we find there?
Of course, I thought of poetry. To me, that is the ultimate work of the poet ??? to bring readers to what we think are the limits of our imagination and to take us beyond them.
There are the poems that specifically address police brutality and damage to communities of color ??? like this June Jordan poem, and “Power” by Audre Lorde.
The policeman who shot down a 10-year-old in Queens
stood over the boy with his cop shoes in childish blood
and a voice said “Die you little motherfucker” and
there are tapes to prove that. At his trial
this policeman and in his own defense
“I didn’t notice the size or nothing else
only the color.” and
there are tapes to prove that, too.(from “Power,” Audre Lorde)
Poems such as these enter our imagination and alter us. And this experience can help us find ways to create change.
But I also thought of poems that push at language in order bring us to a new edge of understanding ??? poems by Myung Mi Kim and Paul Celan, for example.
For the most part there is the smell of dried meat
Detail of book smears
All at once the maggots were arrived
_
_
_
_
Capital _____ .______ wound fragrant(from “Commons,” Myung Mi Kim)
These poets are intensely aware of the political context in which they shape their poems and of the politics of language. As their poems unfold new linguistic possibilities before us on the page, they give us entryways into new kinds of thinking. Such poems open up and loosen our imagination.
To repeat from the excerpt above: “Our imaginations have atrophied, our resourcefulness has withered,” and the question is, how do we bloom them?
Poetry doesn’t solve problems, but I think it does help us think through some of the most difficult issues of our time. It takes us to the edge of our imaginations where we can ask new questions and create new solutions.