Poetry of Resistance and Songs of Protest

Since I started collaborating with Matthew Fox on these Daily Meditations, I have often been praised for offering a non-American point of view on things: on current events, as well as on America itself. This is made possible only by the fact that I lived in America for a total of almost 18 years. One needs to know the culture from the inside, while still remaining an outsider, to see things in an uncommon way.

One thing I see, and that I am not sure is seen so clearly by American citizens, is that the quality of poetry of resistance produced on your soil is astonishing. As well as the tradition of protest songs, which has been recently revived in Minneapolis and elsewhere. I am not making comparisons, and I am not saying that the American genius at poetry of resistance and songs of protest is better than that of other nations. But it is surely a gem in the cultural history of humanity.

When everything else fails, and the heart sinks… it is precisely there that the creative impulse surges from within. In America, the blood sings, even the blood of martyrs poured on sidewalks. Had I not lived in America, had I not been immersed in its culture, I could not dream of writing a poem of resistance — in fact, a friend beautifully translated my recent Poem for Renee and Alex into Italian, but it fell flat, because it does not work in another linguistic and cultural context.

It might be important to recognize this fact, precisely when the image itself of America is crumbling before the eyes of the world, as well as before the eyes of more and more shocked citizens of the United States. Is this my country? people ask in disbelief. My question instead is this: will the proud, excessively proud America, which prides itself on military might, recognize one day that its real treasures reside in the verses singing of its poor people? In the hope squeezed out from oppression and poured into Negro spirituals and songs? In the solidarity emerging from the rubble of brutal capitalist rule?

One major American poet, Margaret Walker, penned her famous poem For My People in 1942, which is a glorious hymn of hope in the midst of travail, recognizing the long road traveled by black folks. It opens with these lines:

For my people everywhere singing their slave songs repeatedly:
their dirges and their ditties and their blues and jubilees,
praying their prayers nightly to an unknown god,
bending their knees humbly to an unseen power.

It goes on retelling the humble jobs of slaves and servants, which never were good for them: dragging along, never gaining, never reaping… It touches on the people being able to move up from being playmates in the clay and dust and sand of Alabama to professions and schools, and it remembers the bitter hours when we discovered we were black and poor and small and different and nobody cared and nobody wondered and nobody understood.

It paints the life of the boys and girls who grew in spite of all these things to be man and woman, to laugh and dance and sing… It goes on with a description as beautiful as disturbing of the people tied and shackled and tangled among ourselves by the unseen creatures who tower over us omnisciently and laugh. An incredibly apt description of today’s capitalism.

It recognizes the efforts of the people trying to fashion a better way from confusion, from hypocrisy and misunderstanding, trying to fashion a world that will hold all the people, all the faces, all the adams and eves and their countless generations.

Walker’s poem ends with a glorious song which is so apt for our days, 84 years after it was penned:

Let a new earth rise.
Let another world be born.
Let a bloody peace be written in the sky.
Let a second generation full of courage issue forth:
let a people loving freedom come to growth.
Let a beauty full of healing and strength of final clenching
be the pulsing in our spirit and our blood.
Let the martial songs be written, let the dirges disappear.
Let a race of men now rise and take control.

In the last two decades or so, it has become clear to many that the only path to lead America out of its present troubles is that of learning from the epic of its black people. The revolution must be deep; it must be deep precisely to this point, otherwise it will amount to nothing. Let us learn, therefore, today from Margaret Walker, and each and every day from the poets among us.

Banner Image: The original Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Freedom Singers perform during a Black Church Burnings Rally at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington DC, July 1, 1996. Photo by Elvert Barnes on Flickr.

Queries for Contemplation

What inspiration comes to you by reading or re-reading Margaret Walker’s verses?

Related Readings by Matthew Fox

Occupy Spirituality: A Radical Vision for a New Generation

Creation Spirituality: Liberating Gifts for the Peoples of the Earth

Creativity: Where the Divine and Human Meet

Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality

A Spirituality Named Compassion: Uniting Mystical Awareness with Social Justice

The Reinvention of Work: A New Vision of Livelihood For Our Time

The Tao of Thomas Aquinas: Fierce Wisdom for Hard Times

Prayer: A Radical Response to Life