The week before a work conference in Miami Beach I had been tip-toeing my way through Carolyn Forche’s 1993 anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness. I say tiptoeing because it’s hard to read. The book is arranged chronologically into the following sections:
- The Armenian Genocide (1909-1918)
- World War I (1914-1918)
- Revolution and Repression in the Soviet Union (1917-1991)
- The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939)
- World War II (1939-1945)
- The Holocaust, The Shoah (1933-1945)
- Repression in Eastern and Central Europe (1945-1991)
- War and Dictatorship in the Mediterranean (1900-1991)
- The Indo-Pakistani Wars (1947-1972)
- War in the Middle East (1948-1991)
- Repression and Revolution in Latin America (1900-1991)
- The Struggle for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties in the United States (1900-1991)
- War in Korea and Vietnam (1945-1979)
- Repression in Africa and the Struggle Against Apartheid in South Africa (1900-1991)
- Revolutions and the Struggle for Democracy in China (1911-1991)
These are poems from people who were there, the people these things happened to, the people who (mostly) died. Noting that many of the sections are dated to 1991, it is clear that these sections would be widely expanded if poetry of witness were to be collected from the intervening 25 years.
Because we celebrate Shabbat on Fridays as part of our household practice of “Episco-Judaism,” where really I’m the only Episco part of the equation, I had started with the section on the Holocaust/the Shoah. Actually I started with the erudite introduction which itself took me almost a week to read, resulting in a detour back to Bakhtin and my early intellectual attempts to understand literary philosophy—my feeble apprehension of the nature of language and its relation to lived experience versus artistic rendering in poetry and fiction. I still get lost in Sausseurian “signifier and signified” and Bakhtin’s “code switching,” which is now the name of an NPR radio segment. In any case, my philosophical detour was prompted by the following passage from Forche’s introduction:
“It is impossible to translate [Paul] Celan into an accessible English, an English of contemporary fluency. Rather, to encompass Celan, we might have to translate English into him, that is, denature our language just as he denatured German. [Walter] Benjamin argued that a poem brought into a new language had to transform that language: a good translation would enrich its adoptive tongue as it had changed the linguistic world of its original. Perhaps all the poems in this anthology—even those written in English—are attempts at such translation, an attempt to mark, to change, to impress, but never to leave things as they are.
“To talk about a poem as the sole trace of an event, to see it in purely evidentiary terms, is perhaps to believe our own figures of speech too rigorously. If, as Benjamin indicates, a poem is itself an event, a trauma that changes both a common language and an individual psyche, it is a specific kind of event, a specific kind of trauma. It is an experience entered into voluntarily. Unlike an aerial attack, a poem does not come at one unexpectedly. One has to read or listen, one has to be willing to accept the trauma. So, if a poem is an event and the trace of an event, it has, by definition, to belong to a different order of being from the trauma that marked its language in the first place.”
I think that she’s explicating here her earlier categorization of this poetry of witness using a “third” term—neither political nor personal but “the social … the space between the state and the supposedly safe havens of the personal. … By situating poetry in this social space, we can avoid some of our residual prejudices. A poem that calls on us from the other side of a situation of extremity cannot be judged by simplistic notions of “accuracy” or “truth to life.” It will have to be judged, as Ludwig Wittgenstein said of confessions, by its consequences….”
Cut to Miami Beach two weeks ago. When the conference ended—it had rained the entire week—we decided to walk down to see the Holocaust Memorial. We walked about three miles; it was flat and not unpleasant in a a light drizzle. From the street corner as we approached, I saw the hand reaching to the sky.
Meridian Ave. in Miami Beach
After inquiring at the information room, we began. The memorial is open-air and, like reading Hebrew, you move from right to left as you read the horror that is the history of European Jews. The words and photos are etched on shiny black granite slabs. Even on this rainy, overcast day, there was a glare such that the words were difficult to read because the reflection of my face in each slab obscured the words—I had to keep moving out of the way to read. It was striking to see myself reflected in the history, implicated.
The final words of the history are “…while the world watched and did nothing….” That section ends with The Hymn of the Partisans.
Next, you enter a structure reminiscent of a temple, there is a flame burning, and you pass through a rotunda to a covered ramp. Upon entering, you realize the passage is only partially covered. There are slats of light top and sides—the feeling of being in a boxcar; you can see thin slices of the outside world as you pass. There is a soundtrack playing…children’s singing voices wrap around you as—in our case—you walk down the dark, wet ramp, intermittently dripped on by the rain as you pass under each slash of daylight. The passage narrows near the end to an open doorway through which you see the sculpture of a small child on the ground reaching out to you. Still the voices of the children echo in the stone passageway.
I stopped at the doorway and could not walk through. I was standing just yards from the base of the giant sculpture I had seen from the street—the hand reaching to the sky with hundreds of emaciated, mostly naked figures crawling up the forearm. The large sculpture is in the middle of a circle. Scattered around the circle are sculptures of others: an elderly couple preparing to die together, a mother and her children dying together, individuals in poses of stasis and motion, evidence of fatigue, starvation, physical brutality, and death. Everywhere suffering. But there is also love, victims attempting assistance to each other, to the elderly, the children.
I could not walk through the doorway. I was at once completely nauseated and devastated. In this public place I was struggling to hold back tears and vomit simultaneously. I chose not to walk into the circle, not to see the sculptures up close, not to look through the reflection of my face in the black marble panels where millions of names are etched, names not in alphabetical order I’m told, just listed in the same random way these victims were piled up. These people, the victims and the survivors, had no choice, no matter how nauseated and devastated they were, no matter how afraid. But standing there in Miami Beach, transformed by my experience of the Holocaust Memorial, I had the choice to go no further, to stop, to cry and breathe, to absorb what I could of the experience and then walk out of it at my leisure.
As Forche so clearly explained, “it was a specific kind of trauma” for me, “an experience entered into voluntarily.” This means that I could also leave it voluntarily. I will never be the same—both for the experience the sculptor and curators designed for me and for acknowledging my absolute freedom to stay or not, to pay attention or not, to remember or not.
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