Column
No matter what theorists say, art and
politics must mix
By DEMETRIA MARTINEZ
The author Salman Rushdie has
written, When intellectuals and artists withdraw from the fray,
politicians feel safer.
The bizarre, fashionable notion that art and politics dont
mix dominates much North American writing, particularly that coming out of
university writing workshops.
One can point to several reasons for this phenomenon. Certainly a
major culprit is the McCarthy period, which saw political and artistic dissent
crushed in the crusade against communism.
Like a victim of abuse who has not yet gotten around to therapy,
our nation has yet to count the ways our political imagination suffered, and
still suffers, from that beating.
I recently taught a course called Writer as Witness as
part of a yearlong visiting assistant professorship at Arizona State University
in Tempe.
Students were encouraged to explore political themes in their own
poetry, fiction and essays. Our main text was Zapatas Disciple
(South End Press), a new book of essays by Martin Espada, an attorney and poet
who teaches literature at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Political imagination goes beyond protest to articulate an
artistry of dissent, Espada writes in his essay, Poetry Like
Bread.
The question is not whether poetry and politics can mix.
That question is a luxury for those who can afford it. The question is how best
to combine poetry and politics, craft and commitment, how to find the artistic
imagination equal to the intensity of the experience and the quality of the
ideas.
Many of the authors that I assigned to the class are Native
Americans, Latinos and African-Americans.
The prosperity and power of this nation was secured through
genocide of American Indians, the slave trade and the seizure of half of
Mexicos landmass. Yet the authors we contemplated write not as victims
but as survivors whose commitment to historical memory, and to healing,
has, particularly in the past 30 years, created a remarkable body of literature
informed by political concerns.
We read the the poet Joy Harjo and novelist Paula Gunn Allen, both
Native Americans; Chicano novelist and poet Benjamin Saenz; African-American
poet and essayist June Jordan; and in a unit on prisons we read Luis Rodriguez,
a prominent poet/activist whose books include the nonfiction account Always
Running: La Vida Loca, about his life in gangs.
Many of these author-activists came of age during the Indian,
Chicano and black power movements of the 1960s and early 1970s that were nearly
destroyed by the FBIs counterintelligence program. Their literary
production has added relevance at a time when progressive publications continue
to focus relentlessly on white activists with roots in mostly white, male-led
movements that ended in the 1960s.
Adrienne Rich, a lesbian and a Jew, was awarded a MacArthur
fellowship, and has spent much of her long life championing the work of people
of color. In 1997, she turned down the prestigious National Medal for the Arts,
proffered by the Clinton White House.
Her stand epitomizes the writer-activist who pushes her privilege
on behalf of the oppressed.
The radical disparities of wealth and power in America are
widening at a devastating rate, Rich wrote in a statement about her
decision. A president cannot meaningfully honor certain token artists
while the people at large are so dishonored.
Our class was blessed with visits by writers who have devoted
their lives to social change. These included Daisy Zamora, one of
Nicaraguas leading poets, who helped bring down the Somoza dictatorship
as a combatant with the Sandinista Front and a voice for the clandestine Radio
Sandino. She later served as vice minister of culture under Fr. Ernesto
Cardenal.
Another visitor, poet George Evans, was radicalized during his
time as a medic in the Vietnam War. In recent years he has brought the works of
Vietnamese and other Third World authors to U.S. audiences as part of his
Streetfare Journal, a project that places posters of poetry and photography in
buses in a number of U.S. cities.
Evans urged students to read dead white male writers
such as Shakespeare with an eye to the political events that shaped them
and not merely analyze a text as if it were written in a historical vacuum.
Laura Tohe is Dine (Navajo), and a professor at Arizona State
University. She spoke to the class about the use of boarding schools to
civilize Indians by enforcing brutal English-only policies. Her
poetry deals with this topic; she sees her work as an opportunity to educate
young Native Americans about the importance of maintaining their linguistic
roots.
John Nichols numerous novels and books of photography range
in topic from Vietnam to environmental destruction. Nichols, a longtime
activist, is best known for The Milagro Beanfield War, the first of his
New Mexico trilogy.
The books tell the truth about my home state New Mexico our
extremes of wealth and poverty, and the struggles of Indians and Chicanos for
self-determination at the times when the Land of Enchantment has been up for
sale to the highest bidder.
How can one person make a difference? was a question a
student asked. Indeed, it was a question we asked ourselves throughout the
semester.
Youve got to develop a class analysis, Nichols
said. You have to understand how the system works. We have been
fooled into believing that its too complicated, but the
superrich such as Donald Trump, he said, know better. They learn how the system
works so that they can manipulate it.
Nichols urged the class to consume less, vote, join movements. A
grasp of our economic system gives us a crack at long-term solutions, he said,
and a desperately needed awareness of how policies pit people of color against
one another (divide and conquer) so that we fail to act from mutual class
interests.
The last thing we suspected at the start of the semester was that
by the end bombs would be falling over the Balkans. I had all my students write
a poem, if only a few lines, about the Albanian refugees. Thirty years from now
you can pass it on to your children or nieces and nephews, I told them.
Somehow we must bear witness, I said. We cant say that we
didnt see.
Demetria Martinez is a novelist and poet who writes from
Tucson, Ariz.
National Catholic Reporter, May 28,
1999
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