Jaquira Díaz
Today I find myself thinking of Audre Lorde.
“Poetry is not a luxury,” Lorde wrote. “It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.”
Today I find myself thinking about poetry and about art-making—necessary as breathing. “It is a vital necessity of our existence,” Lorde wrote.
In the last few months in Gambier, I have seen Latinx students and faculty organizing, engaging in conversations that challenge racism and the normalization of weaponized anti-immigrant rhetoric, having to fight for their visibility and humanity. I have seen black students organizing protests, having to write letters to affirm their own humanity, engaging in conversations with non-black students, faculty, staff, and administrators in order to create change. They have been ignored, dehumanized, mocked, targeted, threatened.
As part of his response to the Resistance, Change, Survival project, Matthew Salesses asks, “What is the Role of Art Under Authoritarianism?” In light of the events of the last few months, years, generations, I find myself asking similar questions: What can poetry do in the face of such hate, such violence? What good is art when we are fighting for our lives, for our humanities, for our right to exist?
In his essay “On White Noise and Better Care,” Keith S. Wilson reminds us that to be allies, one must not be silent, that we must not allow facts to be manipulated in defense of white supremacy. He argues against Thomas Chatterton Williams’s incendiary New York Times piece “How Ta-Nehisi Coates Gives Whiteness Power.”
In her essay “Selective Perception of Disinformation,” Kavita Das examines the importance of cultural terms excluded from E.D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy, reminding us about the power of words, how certain words and exclusions and attempts at erasure are forms of violence.
I see something of myself in Ladan Osman’s “I Cried, Power! (On Protest and Masterful Citizenship),” which examines the aesthetics of protest, also looking at citizenship, blackness, language, and how images and words in an essay can speak to each other. Osman’s essay, I find, speaks directly to me in this cultural moment: “America,” she writes, “has finally broken my heart.”
In both his poem “Warrior Song” and his essay “Resist, Change, Survive: Learning to Sing,” Benjamin Garcia looks toward community and the power of a collective experience and a collective voice, and finds hope.
Art alone will not save us. But through poetry and art we are moving toward something meaningful, something greater than ourselves, toward the future. And today, as I’m thinking about that future, what I find there is not only resistance, change, and survival, but also, surprisingly—like Benjamin Garcia—hope. And that’s because of you: you, rising up to take care of each other; you, organizing and protesting despite the ways you have been targeted, threatened, dehumanized; you who continue to fight. I see you. You are the future. I hope that one day this country will finally be able to see that we are all better because of you.
Gambier, Ohio. March 2018.
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Margaree Little
In her memoir Hope Against Hope, which documents four years of the Stalinist terror, Nadezhda Mandelstam describes the unexpected support she and her husband, the poet Osip Mandelstam, received when they were forced into exile in Cherdyn:
These people who collected money for us, as well as those who gave it, were breaking the rule that governed relations with victims of the regime. In periods of violence and terror people retreat into themselves and hide their feelings, but their feelings are ineradicable and cannot be destroyed by any amount of indoctrination. Even if they are wiped out in one generation, as happened here to a considerable extent, they will burst forth again in the next one.
Nadezhda Mandelstam’s book is an unflinching portrait of this time; the period of exile she depicts is only a short interval between her husband’s first arrest and his second, final arrest in 1938. If the book is anything it is a document of the human capacity for immeasurable cruelty, violence, and complicity. Yet it also includes passages like this one, evidence of resilience and solidarity. Most of all, perhaps, it is the presence of the author’s living mind on the page—and that of her husband, the poet—that refutes the totalitarianism in which they lived.
I think of this passage now when reflecting on the pieces we have been able to include in this project, the way each records the presence of life, imagination, and ethical thought. The way each is, in itself, a form of resistance:
The luminous, grounded meditations of Afaa M. Weaver and Rebecca Seiferle, which show the presence of the soul as part of, not separate from, tangible, daily realities, with both their violence and their possibility;
The outpouring of image and metaphor in Cynthia Dewi Oka’s work, in which past and present, elsewhere and here, are inextricably intertwined;
The indisputability and fundamental courage of Alison Stine’s essay, speaking from a silence too many of us share;
The truth, told slant, in Sherwin Bitsui’s poems, in which ghosts are living presences, altering and part of the landscape, images moving unexpectedly, gracefully toward “a chain of floating islands”;
The vibrancy and humor in Shelley Wong’s poems and prose, which “go under// to drag the words out of the deep,” yet emerge singing;
The glimmering in the dark of Leila Chatti’s lyric essay, on living with fear, and how someone survives it, to write about it, to name it.
I am grateful to all of the authors who lent their voices and their work to this collective whole. As we wrote in the introduction the project, we look to these writers for a way forward. But I find that I also look to them as a way, and ways, to live now.
Mount Vernon, Ohio, March 2018.