Ominous omissions

Poets offer the world in a conceit. The space of a stanza may contain histories and geographies and etymologies and the dying breath of empires and a passion for peaches or the night sky and the skeletal remains of love. Their words provide an elusive syntax for beauty, for truth, for our incomprehensible spirit. Our poets are makers of meaning in a chaotic universe, lending it a metaphysical rhythm and metre. We find pleasure in their intricate structures; we glorify them for introducing us to our souls. But when they overwhelm us with too much meaning, we erase them.

Who can blame us for our casual omissions and erasures? Matters pertaining to the soul are, after all, overwhelming. They are empirically unverifiable — no studies or experiments can validate them. There are no laws that govern these matters of the soul, no statutory warnings that preface their consumption. But they have been known to cause unrest. Often, their anthemic fervour has roused a disgruntled people to collective action. Governments denounce them, and their creators. Institutions are wary of them.

That translated excerpts from two Urdu poems of Faiz Ahmad Faiz have been removed from the National Council of Educational Research and Training’s (NCERT) Class 10 Social Science textbook, perhaps testifies to the poet’s unsettling influence. This elimination also brings to mind other poets from other milieus, whose verses have been similarly damned. There is Pulitzer Prize winning Gwendolyn Brooks, whose poem “We Real Cool,” published in 1960 in her collection The Bean Eaters, was removed from schools in Mississippi, Nebraska, and West Virginia in the 1970s. “We Real Cool” has eight lines, with four stanzas of two-line couplets. The penultimate line, “We / Jazz June” was interpreted as sexually suggestive, which led to the poem’s ouster from school districts. The poem’s subtitle provides its setting, and explains its feisty, defiant tone: “The Pool Players / Seven at the Golden Shovel.” The pool players prefer the thrills of summer to the tedium of school, and the poem tells of their unscholarly pursuits.

There are others, notably, Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, whose “Howl” or “Howl for Carl Solomon,” published in 1956 in Howl and Other Poems, led to an obscenity trial. The publisher, poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights Books, was arrested in 1957 for its dissemination, although he was later acquitted. “Howl” is an incantation, a lament, a poet’s outrage at consumerist America. Its famous (and much parodied) opening lines cite this despair:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

Condemned poets lie scattered across eras and geographies with unique political exigencies and religious compulsions. The late Palestinian poet and author Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry is the bone and sinew of Palestinian exile. His canonical “Identity Card,” written in 1964, is the vehemence of a Palestinian narrator who has been reduced to a number by Israeli officials. Its smouldering refrain “Write down!I am an Arab” turned it into an anthem of an oppressed people. In 2016, Israel’s far-right defence minister Avigdor Lieberman was infuriated when the poem was aired on Israel Army Radio, and compared it with Hitler’s Mein Kampf. There have been other denunciations of Darwish’s work. In 2014, the Riyadh International Book Fair removed his books for allegedly containing “blasphemous passages.” But the poet, who passed away in 2008, accepts and even embraces his recurrent banishments. In the poem “Who Am I, Without Exile?” (translated by Fady Joudah) he cries out:

What will we do…what will we do without exile, and a long night that stares at the water?

Blasphemy, profanity, seditious intent — poets have been accused of causing a variety of outrages. Greek lyric poet Sappho, who lived in the 6th century BC on the island of Lesbos, was celebrated in antiquity as the “Tenth Muse” and “The Poetess” (high praise indeed; Homer was called “The Poet”). It is believed that her works, of which only “Hymn to Aphrodite” has survived in its entirety, roused the ire of prudish theologists, and the medieval Church. In 1073, Pope Gregory VII called for a burning of her recorded works in Rome and Constantinople.  

To bring back Faiz (for it would be doubly wrong to exclude him from textbooks and the concluding observations of this piece) he too had known repression and imprisonment in his lifetime. Faiz, the left-leaning “protest poet,” was arrested in 1951 for being a co-conspirator in the Rawalpindi Conspiracy — a bid to overthrow the government of Pakistan’s first Prime Minister, Liaquat Ali Khan. His collection of poems Dast-e-Saba (Hand of Breeze) was published in 1952, while he was in prison. To remove excerpts of his writings from educational materials is to snuff out a luminous history.  

The writer is the author of Stillborn Season, a novel set amidst the anti-Sikh riots of 1984