On the Margins: Poetry and the Refugee
We transform the world but the world also transforms despite us. The world, our supports and repetitions, exists so that we can forget about the violence of the earth and go about our daily lives. But the earth is changing, and it will change the world and with it the sense of human existence.
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Right now so much of the discourse is tangled up in the idea of the Classical/modernist hero. This hero breaks with the law to found the law. He is his own law. He is strength, action, vision, fidelity, splendor. In one iteration, the hero thinks that money and breakthroughs in technology will permanently secure his domain; in another, he thinks that with collective action and the ability to exploit crisis, revolution can be achieved. There is also the terrorist hero or fanatic who wants to affirm the given law, to make others suffer with the law’s inscription.
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Uprising is the exhilarating and necessary response to deadening law and oppression. In life as well as art, the breakthrough is real, not just some juvenile fantasy: we punch holes in the fabric of reality; we recover dormant reservoirs; we extend possibility and reveal the unknown.
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And we can barely conceive of a structure of history outside of something like this:
Law → Oppression → Catalyst → Uprising → Possibility → Law →
A new law is set down, identity is re-founded. The law begins to foreclose on the possibility of others in order to protect and augment itself. Given the right conditions, the oppressed subject activates into uprising, shrugging off the law and embracing itself as possibility and the possibility of the law’s founding, only once again rigidly to impose the law in seeking to protect identity.
This is a drama of mastery and bondage, war and masculine assertion. It’s a drama of identity’s violent response to lack and dread, otherness and weakness.
We’re expecting that in the time of the disaster the script will be the same. Dread will still be there, a silent roar as ever, but what happens when the stage on which this Luciferian drama of history has played out collapses? What happens when the outside comes in, when the shelter of the world strains and breaks under the earth’s onslaughts? What happens when the world slips past our ideas of what it should be? And what happens when the problem doesn’t call for heroism or violence but something else?
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Politics and policy, as Arendt saw, will soon center around the question of the migrant and refugee. The test of radical commitment will be a test not of imposition—not of hammering through or down the law—but a test of our tolerance for vulnerability and exposure and our willingness to sacrifice.
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Poetry moves into the disaster not looking to impose the law but to discover its necessity. The hero can’t really understand poetry because the hero needs to see his own narrative expectations played out for it. The hero instrumentalizes the task of revolution, but poetry proceeds blindly or on a hunch, guided by music to that moment when contingency becomes necessity, when the demand becomes acceptance and resolution.
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When the destroyed and displaced flood the gates, will we welcome them? Will we be able to see and listen to them? Will we be able to understand that our story is not the only story? Will we be able to live in dread—of the loss of boundaries, loss of self, loss of power? How much risk can we tolerate? At what point will identity begin the work of totalitarian protection and exclusion? Whom will we let die?
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There is a poet of the margins we can’t even fully begin to conceptualize. She is outside, exposed, desperate, sensing the call but feeling its fragility, thinking that conditions may have rendered it impossible. She may play the hero and enact her own manic “no” to the law and “yes” to possibility. Against unthinkable odds, she may claim herself as a poet. And if she survives to see and affirm who and what she is, she may find herself compelled to sing not the heroic possibilities of a time of violent founding, but a new, uncanny time, the time of the transformation of the earth and the time of coming to terms with the human being as a revelatory animal—the time of accepting and living with, over the long term, the dread of this ontological endowment rather than fleeing from it into self-annihilating repetitions of uprising and downfall.
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The poem offers nothing, says the hero, and indeed this poet of the margins offers “nothing.” She is “nothing,” a no-place in discourse and the nothing of her own possibility, flesh and time. She is illegible, beyond our use. She is the refugee who offers nothing, who burdens us, who presses us with her seeing, her plea, which we refuse. The refugee is useless to the hero because he thinks she can’t fight. I look at your face, I hear your demand, and I see nothing. This failure to see, this failure of listening to what’s said on its own terms, is a failure to take up what the poem offers: a practice of revealing, an openness and a model for a long-term sojourn in uncanny time.
Like the refugee, poetry’s margin, its zero yield, its nothing, will have an essential role to play in what comes next. It is a “yes” to existence in the time of disaster, an affirmation of possibility when all else seems lost.
Originally published September 8th, 2015 at the Poetry Foundation.