“Poetry today must be a weapon as effective as a leaflet, a pamphlet, a poster.”--Jacques Roumain, 1941
The German philosopher Theodor Adorno once wrote that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” But what then of poetry – indeed of art – after the barbarism of Gaza? What and how does one write in the midst of an indescribable violence that has seen 10,000 Palestinians murdered, including thousands of children, their shattered and lifeless bodies part of a continuous social media feed?
While many are indifferent, others are complicit. Some turn away from the images because of narrow and pathetic self-interest, or the desire to safe-guard careerism and coddle professional ambition; others believe the Palestinian, like the African, to be an animal, outside of civilization, their historical destiny only to make way for the chosen race. But there are also those of us marooned on islands of sanity, castaways in the seas of amorality, clinging to the driftwood of ethics and human decency and righteous hope, who recognize in the attack on Gaza an attack on our own people, who see our own children lifeless amidst the remains of the thermo-barbarically flattened cities, and who recognize that poetry, writing, is an essential tool of the struggle.
“Poetry today must be a weapon as effective as a leaflet, a pamphlet, a poster,” wrote Jacques Roumain in 1941. And Roumain would know. The radical Haitian intellectual, writer, and diplomat was arrested for writing against the US occupation and for being a member of the Communist party, and he was persecuted for writing against Haiti’s neocolonial elite and advocating on behalf of the Haitian masses. His essay “Is Poetry Dead?”, given as a talk at the League of American Writers and published in New Masses in 1941, is effectively a manifesto for revolutionary writing against colonial and capitalist onslaught — and, for us now, against the barbarism of Gaza. We reprint it below.
Is Poetry Dead?
Jacques Roumain
An inquiry into the fate of poetry is imperative. Poetry is a part of the ideological system whose manifold reflections, be they psychology, art, morals, philosophy, or any other manifestation of the human mind, express a concrete historical reality.
Poetry is not a pure idealistic distillation, a sort of magical incantation: it reflects that which in common language one calls an epoch; that is to say, the dialectical complexity of social relations, of contradictions and antagonisms of the political and economic structure of a society at a definite historical period. Hence, poetry is a testimony and one of the elements of analysis of this society. With some ambition I could have called these remarks: "From Mallarme to Mayakovsky." What distinguishes the great French poet from the Russian genius seems to me singularly to underline and illustrate my point. Mallarme is the product of an epoch when the progressive curve of capitalism has already reached its dead climax, when bourgeois society has entered its declining stage, at which, to the destruction of the productive forces, it adds the negation of cultural values.
If the writer does not retain from this process of agony anything but the negative aspect, if he does not grasp in the death of an obsolete social organism its replacement by another of a higher quality, his troubled disorder may translate itself into an evasion of reality susceptible of acquiring the most varied forms.
Je fuis et je m'accroche a toutes les croisees
d'ou on tourne le dos a la me
I escape and hold on to all the windows
from which one turns the back to life
sings Mallarme, and this escape he finds in the solitary construction of a rare poetry, in an exquisite alchemy of language, and a kind of fanaticism for pure sound. In this reinvention of language, there is not only an esthetic laboratory research. There is also a deliberate attempt on Mallarme's part to ignore the common people by refusing to let himself be understood by them. Language is not and cannot remain aloof from the class struggle. One can easily follow the development of social forces from, for instance, the seventeenth century to the French Revolution, through the study in literature of stereotyped periphrases, the aim of which is to avoid the vulgar, the plebeian, in short, anything associated with the people. From the works of French linguists like Brunot, Meillet, Vendreys, and Lagrasserie, one can see that the exclusion or the inclusion of certain words in language clearly indicates replacement of one ruling class by another. Viewed from this particular angle, Mallarme's poetry is among the most reactionary. Paul Valery has very neatly expressed this attitude of the poet who isolates himself from the people and finds in his attitude immeasurable pride: " The small number," he says, "does not hate to be the small number," And one of his most penetrating remarks is that Mallarme, "the least primitive of poets, by the unusual and almost stupefying fitting together of words—by the musical eclat of the verse and its singular plenitude, gives the impression of that which is most powerful in the original poetry: the magic formula."
CONFESSION OF FAILURE
It seems to me that this is the confession of a failure, if all the resources of intelligence, the welding together of syntax and the most refined thinking, the almost desperate search for the pure poetic expression, must reach that synthesis of primitive incantation. This is a trait that links such a phenomenon to the intuitivism and the "elan vital" of a Bergson, which are expressions of the denial of reason by the disintegrating bourgeois society. It is as if the exploration of the most elaborate forms of musical art should bring us back, by means of a kind of inverted paleontology, from a fugue of Bach to the archaic theme of a primitive drum.
However, that which essentially distinguishes the position of a Mallarme from that of the poets and writers who are today the architects of irrational thinking, is that Mallarme in his time was banned and ridiculed by what one might call the "good literary society"—the academy, bourgeois critics, the intellectual pillars of capitalism—whereas today these welcome with open arms the proponents of irrationalism and the whirling= dervishes of spiritualism.
The reason for this is that the world has reached an historical crossroads; the forces of socialism and of capitalism are facing each other in decisive struggle. On the eve of a fundamental historical transformation, the crumbling old society finds in idealistic construction, in the submission to the metaphysical idols, in recourse to the dark forces of mysticism, the ideological weapons of counter-revolution. It is not without ground that Heidegger is a fascist philosopher and that Archibald MacLeish has become the repenting Magdalene of liberalism.
One must examine with the scientific care of an entomologist these specimens that invent moral pretexts in order to pass over, through the service entrance, to the camp of the people's enemy. Thus one discovers the pitiful petty bourgeois overwhelmed by an abject anguish, seeking refuge in the cocoon of pure poetry or of what they call "the freedom of the spirit," because the inexorable march of history threatens the class interests of their employers who have debased intellectual production to the level of merchandise, a grocery article.
THE POET'S LIBERTY
Above all, one has to put an end to the myth of the liberty of the poet. Far from being an "Urmensch," as Valery claims, the poet is, I submit, before all a man of his time: the reflecting conscience of his period. He is not free if his thinking is not action. He is not free if he is not bound to the imperative necessity of making a choice, of making a choice between Garcia Lorca and Franco, between Nehru and Churchill, between Thaelmann and Hitler, between peace and war, between socialist democracy and imperialism.
His alleged freedom amounts to what one might call the Pontius Pilate complex, and it hides all the subterfuges of cowardliness and of renegacy.
The poet is at the same time a witness and an actor of the historical drama. He is engaged in it with full responsibility; specifically, at present, his art must be a first-line weapon at the service of the struggle of the Masses.
I know that some people will feel indignant at this mission assigned to the poet. For these, the poet belongs to the transcendental sphere of the spirit, and while the fate of mankind is at stake in a formidable historical convulsion, he—the poet—can withdraw into the private property of his spiritual solitude, and continue to give to poetry the sense of a little song swinging between the traditional poles of eroticism and dream.
IDEALISTIC JUSTIFICATIONS
It is characteristic, however, that these theoreticians of art above the contingencies of class, renounce this serenity in order to knit articles in favor of British "democracy," which keeps under servitude 400,000,000 colonial slaves, or to throw anathema at the Soviet Union which has liberated a sixth of the earth from capitalist serfdom.
It is because they, too, have made their choice, but they have to disguise the shame of this choice by means of esthetic-idealistic justifications.
Service to mankind is a moral imperative of the human mind. In my opinion, one of the most admirable things in Lenin's work is that the author of Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, that encyclopedic brain, that giant of thought, once wrote a leaflet insisting that the textile workers of Schlussberg be given boiling water for their tea. And Mayakovsky followed the true revolutionary mission of the poet, when he placed his art at the service of the fight against typhoid.
Poetry today must be a weapon as effective as a leaflet, a pamphlet, a poster. If we succeed in fusing with the class content of the poem the beauty of form, if we know how to listen to the lessons of Mayakovsky, we will be able to create a great human revolutionary poetry worthy of the cultural values we have the will to defend.
Jacques Roumain, “Is Poetry Dead?” New Masses, (January 7, 1941)
