Blog 28: The Political Nature of Poetry

I remember back when I was four years old in nursery, and my favourite time of the day was when we would do arts and crafts. Every single day, the teachers would set up my easel and I would stand there for what felt like hours (it was probably ten minutes, but I seem to suffer from perpetual nostalgia over the mundane) with my primary colour paints and pound shop brushes. It would always be the exact same image that I chose to paint: my house (that I would imagine as a detached house instead of my little terraced house), the bushes that birds nested in every Spring and Summer, the sun cut off by the corner of the page, and my family all painted as stick men. I would then stand back and admire my piece like a mini-Picasso before mixing all my paints into my own new streaky grey or brown colour and saying goodbye to my creation.

You see, the final step to this repetitive process was slathering the page in this mix of paint and completely erasing my home and family. Every inch would be covered in crusted, miserable colour, and I would bring it home expecting my mum to love it. And for a while, she would stick them up on the kitchen wall until it was completely covered in A4 and A3 paintings of what looked like unflattering backgrounds. Then one day, I came home from nursery (probably with another landscape of Hell in my hands) to what seemed like an art robbery. Surely, someone magically found out about my abstract, brutalist artistic talent and just wanted it for themselves, right? Shockingly, I found out that I was wrong when I turned to the left and saw my masterpieces rolled up and piled in the bin. Betrayal is an understatement because I never brought a painting home again after that. (Instead, I moved on to making ugly ashtrays for my nana, who smoked like a chimney, so never threw those babies away).

Now, you’re probably wondering why I’m rambling on about some random anecdote from my childhood. Recently I’ve been suffering with writer’s block and have been thinking about memories from my childhood to try and inspire themes or images for my poems. For some reason, this specific memory stuck in my mind, and the more I sat with it and questioned why I would paint the same thing repeatedly, the more I realised that it was a subconscious response to my environment. It was political.

Personally, I believe that all human behaviour and opinion is inherently political, from our favourite meals to our taste in music, and, of course, expression through art. I see art as a conduit for politics and culture as it is constantly engaging with the social and economical state of its environment or time. Artists and writers reflect on and respond to these environmental factors, whether consciously or subconsciously, because it is impossible to completely detach from the conditioning and socialisation of the specific cultures that shaped our personalities and beliefs. Culture is political, so any personal expression of said culture will be political, regardless of whether or not that is made intentional by the artist.

Poets often use language as a means to discuss and question the complexities of the human experience and socio-economical state of the culture and environment that has shaped them. We relay experiences, perspectives and struggles to people of different communities and cultures that may have different life experiences or belief systems. Poetry invites the reader to be an active participant in analysing and responding to the subjectivities of cultural experience through its use of voice and perspective. In her TED talk, the American poet and activist Amanda Gorman says that “poetry is political because it’s preoccupied with people”. We often see poetry central in political discourse: poetic devices used by politicians to push agendas and propaganda, and signs in protests with lines such as Warsan Shire’s, “no one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land” (from the poem Home in her collection Bless the Daughter).

Using our voices through our poetry is political because writing in itself is a political act. Remember, throughout the majority of written history, it has primarily been the elites who could read and write, who relayed history to the oppressed. It wasn’t until 1868 that the first women gained access to a university education in England, many women (such as the Brontë sisters) wrote under male aliases into the 19^th century to avoid prejudice. The fact is that straight, white, wealthy men have always dominated literature and the arts. But we have entered an era where we are seeing the emergence of various cultural voices and identities within the international poetic field, where a platform for marginalised communities is evolving away from the poetry of the elites, and where we can use our voices as an act of resistance in a politically messed-up world. Poetry is an incredible tool for gaining perspective on the intricacies of the human condition as experienced through diverse conditions. It gives us an understanding of the interconnectedness of the political landscapes across the globe and is an interwoven connection with the cultural experience of the people affected by them.

So, you may still be wondering, “But how was your four-year-old self’s repetitive erasure of your painting political?” I mean, of course, I wasn’t aware of the reasons I painted in this way as a child, but when I think about it now, it is glaringly obvious. We were poor. Dirt poor. And we didn’t exactly have a happy home. The memories of my childhood are consumed with the rabid effects of poverty, and ultimately, the socio-economic consequences of a political system that creates such a vast divide in class and wealth that this divide runs deep throughout the working-class community too.

I was painting the idealised version of my life, a life I saw some of my classmates had: the bigger home that felt like home, the happy family all stood together, the sun when it was probably raining half of the time (it is England after all). I was painting an imagined life without the inequality we faced. I would paint over the image because it wasn’t my life. I knew that I was going home to my crappy little terraced house and a family that wasn’t happy. That act of mixing the vibrant colours into the darkest that I possibly could and layering it over my painting until the white of the page no longer existed, was a subconscious act of rebellion against the intergenerational trauma of poverty. It was a response to the refines of poverty and the detrimental effects I saw it have on the community around me at an early age. It reflected my inner feelings and questions of “why?” that remained unanswered until my mum threw them in the bin. The answer became because we’re conditioned and forced to submit at the bottom of the hierarchy. Some people don’t have the privilege or accessibility to share their voice. Hence, the importance of gaining and sharing perspectives through interpersonal art forms like poetry.

I may have given up on one art form, but I immersed myself in another. Now, instead of using colour to express my interaction with my environment, I use language and poetry. The truth is that I find it impossible to write without the influence of the working-class culture that I was raised within, and its many symptoms that shaped myself and the community that surrounded me. Themes of crime, violence, addiction and the cycle of abuse are all recurring throughout my poetry because they are symptoms of the wealth gap disease. As a woman, these socio-economic factors are also interwoven with the politics of being a woman, because what is it to be a woman? At the very least, it is political. Every interaction, every experience and every expectation we face refers to the stereotypes defined by a patriarchal system. All our human experiences are defined by the constraints of the society that we exist within, so I recommend all poets, writers and artists to interact with the idiosyncratic experiences of members of their own communities, as well as the voices of people in different communities. You may be surprised by how much we could all learn from poetry and how much we all share in common (especially in the working-class community).

I thought that I would share a few of my favourite poetry collections from poets who centralise their identity, culture, and politics in their poetry:

• Caleb Femi – Poor – 2020 – Femi focuses on the struggles and the dreams of young black boys and men in a working-class Peckham. He draws from his upbringing and personal experience navigating both racism and classism.

• Joelle Taylor- Songs My Enemy Taught Me – 2017 – This book centralises the poet's experience of abuse and misogyny. Taylor navigates themes of sexism, survival and violence against women.

• Fran Lock – Contains Mild Peril – 2019 – Lock conveys the anxieties connected with everyday life and the experience of being a woman in an urban atmosphere.

• Warsan Shire – Blessed the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head – 2022 – Shire discusses the interconnected traumas of womanhood and migration. This collection responds to the experience of immigrants and the resilience that many people hold.

• Jay Bernard – Surge – 2019 – Bernard writes about black British history, focusing on the Grenfell, new-cross and Windrush scandals that directly affected working-class immigrants and black British members of the community. This collection is a reminder that the past forever haunts the present.