Song of Becoming
They’re only boys who used to frolic and play releasing in the western wind their blue red green kites the colour of the rainbow jumping, whistling, exchanging spontaneous jokes and laughter fencing with branches, assuming the roles of great heroes in history. They've grown suddenly now grown more than the years of a lifetime grown, merged with a secret word of love carried its letters like a Bible, or a Quran read in whispers They’ve grown more than the years of a lifetime become the trees plunging deep into the earth and soaring high towards the sun They're now the voice that rejects they're the dialectics of destruction and building anew the anger burning on the fringes of a blocked horizon invading classrooms, streets, city quarters centering on the squares and facing sullen tanks with streams of stones. With plain rejection they now shake the gallows of the dawn assailing the night and its deluge They’ve grown, grown more than the years of a lifetime to become the worshipped and the worshipper When their torn limbs merged with the stuff of our earth, they became a legend They grew, and became the bridge they grew, grew, and became larger than all poetry. from A Mountainous Journey (Graywolf Press, 1990)
Earlier this week, I dug through a stack of my poetry books, looking for an anthology edited by Carolyn Forché — Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness. It’s a big book. Thick. Heavy. It is one of those books that, when you carry it around with you, as I have this week, you can’t really forget that you are carrying it around with you. I like a book like that. The kind of thing that never stops reminding you, even after you put it back in your bag. The kind of thing that proves that even holding something is a kind of reading.
This poem today is in that book, a book that I was carrying and holding and reading because I wanted to bring a tradition of poetry — a poetry of witness — into my own personal conversation and act of sense-making with what I was witnessing in the world — namely, the ongoing protests in solidarity with Gaza at college campuses across the country, and the ongoing intervention, escalation, violence, and conflict on the part of police forces with those protests.
And it’s funny, what happens when you read and re-read. I dog-ear my books of poetry, perhaps excessively, and when I return to a book, it is not just an act of returning to a book; it is also an act of returning to a self — to myself, a past self. Re-reading Against Forgetting, I moved through past selves that had been moved and stunned by poems, and I kept those pages dog-eared, even if I no longer felt as moved, as a reminder of that past self, which is the same self that I am, in the sense that today, as I write this, I contain that movement from my past, a movement that changed me into who I am today. I am part of who I am because of it. And I also am still capable — always capable, I hope — of being moved and being stilled into newer imaginations and possibilities of this forever-self I am forever-becoming.
Re-reading Against Forgetting, I came across today’s poem, which I had never dog-eared. And I was moved and stilled and stunned. I was moved, especially, by the poem’s own movement — how it moves from this opening:
They’re only boys who used to frolic and play
To this moment:
They've grown suddenly now grown more than the years of a lifetime
To this beautiful realization:
They’ve grown more than the years of a lifetime become the trees plunging deep into the earth and soaring high towards the sun
And to this saddening conclusion:
They're now the voice that rejects they're the dialectics of destruction and building anew the anger burning on the fringes of a blocked horizon
It’s a wonder that we call epic poetry what we call it. I think that this poem, too, is epic. I think it is epic in the sense that it somehow, in its short length, manages to capture the scope of a life — how such a life is defined by the world and how it moves against the world, and how the world has the power, often, to chisel away the parts of childhood, the aspects of “frolic” and “play” that bring magic to a life, and to call such chiseling a kind of growth. It is a wonder, then, that part of the growth of the subjects of this poem is that they become voices of “plain rejection” instead of acceptance. It’s an act of courage, too — that rejection.
I was struck, too, by how present this poem felt. I was struck, for example, by the image of these boys “facing sullen tanks,” and how it reminded me of Rachel Corrie, who was killed in 2003 after standing in front of a bulldozer as an act of protest and solidarity with those in Palestine. And I was struck by how, too, such an image reminds me of Lujayn, a 14-year-old Palestinian girl who watched her mother stand in front of a bulldozer coming for her home. Lujayn wrote about it in the aftermath:
Suddenly, we heard a loud noise. The bulldozer was coming for our house. Mom stopped and told me, “I must go out and try to stop them because we’ll die under the bulldozer. I’ll try to go out and tell them that we are civilians. If they hit me and let you all out, then you leave after me. If they hit me and continue to demolish the house, know that I tried everything I could with my last hope that you would be safe.
I started crying. Everyone told her to stop, saying the army would kill her. At the same time, we could hear the bulldozer approaching. Mom quickly went out and stood in front of it, exactly in its path, and started telling them that there were civilians, women, elderly, and children in the house. The bulldozer kept coming.
And I was struck, finally, by the image of anger in this poem:
the anger burning on the fringes of a blocked horizon invading classrooms
This is an image that is so palpable and present today, for obvious reasons. And I wonder about that word — invade. I wonder about it because, though such a word carries a deeply violent connotation, a connotation that might indicate that the poet does not approve of such “invasion,” I wonder if such invasion is really a result of feeling resistant to the work of those classrooms. Perhaps, in this poem, as is true sometimes in this world, the work of the classroom is to uphold a dominant culture rather than to question it. And I think, too, of the way, prior to the police invasion of Columbia University’s encampment, that so many professors and students worked together to create, for a brief moment, a radical kind of classroom — a people’s library, a long day of teach-in’s, a commitment to imaginative learning.
When I think of that line from today’s poem, of the “anger burning on the fringes of a blocked horizon,” I think of that word — horizon — and how it reminds me of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. I think of how Janie, Hurston’s protagonist, moves through that novel in search of all a horizon might mean — freedom, possibility, permission, love, imagination — and stumbles and struggles against all who limit that sense of boundlessness for her. All those who pinch the horizon into “such a little bit of a thing.” Janie is someone who might be labeled overly idealistic today, without an understanding of how the world really works. And yet, I find in Janie a radical imagination worth loving and living towards. Hurston writes:
[Janie] had been getting ready for her great journey to the horizons in search of people; it was important to all the world that she should find them and they find her. But she had been whipped like a cur dog, and run off down a back road after things. It was all according to the way you see things. Some people could look at a mud-puddle and see an ocean with ships. But Nanny belonged to that other kind that loved to deal in scraps. Here Nanny had taken the biggest thing God ever made, the horizon—for no matter how far a person can go the horizon is still way beyond you—and pinched it in to such a little bit of a thing that she could tie it about her granddaughter’s neck tight enough to choke her.
That violence — “tight enough to choke her” — feels intentional on Hurston’s part, and it rings true across the years as an example of the kind of violence often used by those who represent or internalize the dominant culture of a society in order to quell the attempts at horizon-journeying or truth-seeking or possibility-wondering or power-resisting of those who long for whatever possibility and freedom the horizon might represent. It is the same violence of a bulldozer moving towards a mother and her family’s home. It’s the same violence of a massive police force moving against a group of young students. The situations are different; the contexts are different, sure. But the violence is partly the same — a violence of dominance against resistance to such dominance, a violence of power against resistance to such power, a violence of authority against longing and imagining and dreaming of something different, something more permissive and possible.
That violence, sadly, has marked so much of this week. Here’s an account from an oral history of the protests of Columbia University campus, documented by student-journalists of the Columbia Spectator and published in New York Magazine:
It was a moment of horror when I went up to the barriers — the physical force of the NYPD, the menace and the threat that was there. It was a horrible ending, which had, I think, a certain necessity to it. It’s hard to see how this was going to go another way, as much as I regret it and as much as I would have hoped and dreamed that the administration would see reason and move to a more imaginative, different position.
The sadness of this passage, to me, is in the hope and perspective offered by this voice — a hope of something “imaginative” and “different,” and yet a perspective made sharper and more pessimistic by the reality of force and the reality of violence. That violence — the “menace and the threat” of it — was real. In that same article, one student describes police who “threw our friends down the stairs,” and another describes “500 cops…with body shields and heavy machinery, like giant hammers.”
Reading through internet comments on various articles, I was struck by how much we have come to accept and even rely on this very idea of force and violence. I was struck by the calm rationality with which anonymous commentators described the need for a forceful counter to these protests as a return to order. What it really represents, to me, is less of a return to order and more of a return to a world that restricts and limits our capacity to imagine the ways in which this world could be different.
Earlier this week, I arrived at my high school to find a swarm of police around the entrance. Dozens upon dozens of them. I went upstairs to my school and learned that, the day before, a student from one of the other schools in my building (my school is part of a co-located campus, which is mostly the norm these days in New York City, a once-big public school divided into smaller schools, each on a different floor) was stabbed and killed a block away. She was seventeen and the child who stabbed her was fifteen.
We spoke to our students about it, and we held small group circles and processing spaces, and we learned that many of our students had already known about it. Had known about it nearly instantly, in fact — via social media posts that already had circulated videos of the violence. I was saddened at the normalization of this violence, how many students seemed to find it so close to the ordinary, so much of their life already. I was saddened at the quickness with which people seemed to shrug off this violence or use this violence to justify a desire to be tougher, to be less vulnerable. I tried to understand this justification, in part, within the broader context of being left on the margins, isolated out there, on purpose, policed and surveilled and made to fight to survive within a system that created and continues to create the conditions for such violence to occur. But still, despite this understanding: a deep sadness. That’s what I felt. And, too, I was saddened at the normalization of the police presence outside, a presence that, perhaps, might give off the sense of safety but really made our students all the more surveilled. I remember telling some of our freshmen to be careful of how they played when they got outside. Not to run too fast or touch each other, for fear of their play being misconstrued as something different by the abundance of cops on the street.
Imagine saying that: be careful of how you play.
I think of that as I think of this poem today and as I think of these protests and the forceful violence enacted upon such protests by institutions and systems far more powerful than the protests themselves. I think of how these institutions are saying something similar to be careful of how you play, and how, in some political camps, protest is a beloved act until it becomes too hard to reckon with. Too hard, why? Perhaps because what protest is asking for — divestment, an end to genocide — is too far from the aims of the dominant culture. Perhaps because of how the way in which protest makes that request is too uncomfortable for the dominant culture to sit with. But protest should be uncomfortable; it should be hard to reckon with. We have grown too comfortable with violence, too comfortable with comfort itself. We have grown too comfortable with cops outside of schools, and too comfortable with inviting cops into schools, and too comfortable with killing. It is a blessing — it must be — to be reminded, through the courage of others, to change. That courage is a kind of courage that is, as today’s poem reminds me, “larger than all poetry.”
In Douglas Rushkoff’s Survival of the Richest, he writes, of billionaires who are building hideouts for the end of the world:
For there’s the real problem those billionaires identified when we were gaming out their bunker strategies. The people and things we’d be leaving behind are still out there. And the more we ask them to service our bubbles, the more oppressed and angry they’re going to get, and then the more bubbled we will want to be.
The more I read and the more I listen and the more I teach and the more I live, the more I ask myself if the work I am doing is in service of a bubble that reinforces people’s power and reduces the capacity of anyone, really, to listen to anyone else. There are things “larger than all poetry;” sometimes they are as small as the everyday. Today’s reminds me that a poem can remind us of this, and reminds me, too, that the work of others in this world can remind us of this, as well.
In Against Forgetting, there is a poem — “You Who Sleep” — by Philippe Soupault, translated by Paulette Schmidt, that ends:
Listen listen all of you who sleep and you who suffer more each day who no longer hope but are still watching
Listen. Listen. Keep watching. Witnessing, and listening — these things are their own kind of hope.
Some notes:
I continue to follow this page (and this one, of the NYC chapter of the Palestinian Youth Movement) to see the ongoing developments of the Columbia University protests in solidarity with those in Gaza. I appreciated Hell Gate’s coverage of the protests, including this re-publishing of a piece written about the police violence against the 1968 protesters at Columbia.
As I will continue to mention, Writers Against the War on Gaza has been a powerful resource that has, in these days, reminded me of all the various potentials for solidarity in this moment. You can follow them on Instagram here.
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"Listen. Listen. Keep watching. Witnessing, and listening — these things are their own kind of hope."
No love in action too small.
Grateful for your writing. Time for me to revisit Carolyn Forché's book which I bought soon after it was first published on May 17, 1993. Thank you for bringing it to my attention in these current times. Just finished reading Wandering Stars, a novel by Tommy Orange, which goes further into the lives of the people in his first book There, There. Both explore generations of hope against all odds. And I'm reminded of Joy Harjo's anthology, When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry