We’ve had reason, lately, to wonder at the effectiveness of protest. Movements like Black Lives Matter and Me Too (or, earlier: the Occupy Movement) mobilised millions of people around the world, yet it feels – particularly in our current political moment – as though despairingly little has changed. This frustration is felt with acute horror in the face of Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, which has seen protestors gathering in the tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands every week for two years, demanding an end to the violence only to be ignored or painted as extremists by their governments.
Like protest, poetry, too, faces suspicions of material impotence. Poetry, after all, “makes nothing happen,” as goes Auden’s half-remembered and oft-repeated line. And yet, people continue to write it; people continue to protest; often, people do both at once. What, after all, is a chant if not a line of poetry?
In our thousands, in our millions / We are all Palestinians; the people, united / will never be defeated; Siamo tutti / antifascisti [we are all / antifascists]
Chants – frequently taking the form of couplets – rely on rhythm and metre to be memorable and repeatable, making poetry the medium through which most people engage with public protest and the predominant language through which protest is articulated. Even when it is not being shouted, poetry in inextricable from protest movements, as has been recently highlighted by Readers and Writers Against the Genocide, whose striking T-shirts and totes, each featuring poems or lines of poetry by writers like Evelyn Araluen, Omar Sakr and Sara M. Saleh on their back, have become ubiquitous at literary events and pro-Palestine demonstrations across the country.
There is a difference, of course, between a chant and a poem, and indeed, between a poem and a protest poem, though the line is blurry at best. Not so much a genre as an activist orientation towards poetics, ‘protest poetry’ has been described by Maggie Queeney for Poetry Foundation, as “a poetry of dissent”, a poetry which “exists to reveal what those in power seek to hide, to criticise and challenge, and to protest and resist established values and ideas.” Protest poetry is, definitionally, political. Though, as Solmaz Sharif writes, so is all poetry: “Every poem is an action. Every action is political. Every poem is political.” Explicitly political poetry goes further in that it must ‘speak truth to power’ and, as Solmaz explains in her conversation with Evie Shockley at the Radcliffe Institute, this means that it must speak to the moment, it must insist on specificity. The same is true of protest poetry.
‘Protest poetry’ is an admittedly awkward term, though it is the most succinct signifier that English offers to name the entangled concept of poetry-as-protest/protest-as-poetry. I use it to delimit something perhaps narrower still than what Queeney suggests and to foreground its goal-oriented character. In using the term ‘protest poetry’, I am not referring to poetry which depicts injustice or which attempts to place, as Seamus Heaney offers in ‘The Redress of Poetry’, “a counter-reality in the scales – a reality which may be only imagined but which nevertheless has weight because it is imagined within the gravitational pull of the actual and can therefore hold its own and balance out against the historical situation […] a glimpsed alternative, a revelation of potential that is denied or constantly threatened by circumstances.” My meaning is narrower, too, than poetry that attempts to bring the reader to share a moral view with the poet. Rather, what I mean by ‘protest poetry’ is poetry that seeks to inspire revolutionary action towards a change in the world. As Fargo Tbakhi writes in in his essay Notes of Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide: “what the long middle of revolution requires,” (he is talking, specifically, of Palestine) is “an approach to writing whose primary purpose is to gather others up with us, to generate within them an energy which their bodies cannot translate into anything but revolutionary movement.” (original italics). This is the purpose of protest poetry, and what makes it such.
It goes without saying that to be effective as protest poetry, the work must also be effective as poetry. What this means, according to Rajeev S Patke in his chapter ‘Postcolonial Protest Poetry’ from the Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Poetry, is that it must “constitute a memorable utterance that is relevant to the circumstances which bring it into existence, but also capable of sustaining a more lasting resonance.” In practice, this definition is somewhat subjective as Patke himself demonstrates by providing examples of what he believes to be an effective and an ineffective poem protesting South African apartheid: he praises Keith Gottschalk’s ‘After’ for its poetic irony and distance while referring to Dennis Brutus’s ‘A poem about Sharpeville’ as “banal and prosaic”. Yet Brutus’ words, a preliminary Google search shows, are widely shared and clearly deeply resonant.
As Tbakhi argues, there is power in clarity, in the plain speech that Patke might call prosaicness: “One of the basic conditions of success is a clear perspective of things,” he writes. This clarity may well be one of the defining features of protest poetry, which must be understood if it is to be acted upon. Vagueness, ambivalence, equivocation, obscurity: these are the enemies of political action and of protest poetry. It is, Tbakhi writes, “[b]etter to know what we’re saying and why, and to say it with force” than to submit to the “machine” of Craft. Indeed, Tbakhi is deeply suspicious of ‘Craft’, describing it as “a machine built to produce and reproduce ethical failures,” a “counterrevolutionary machine,” intended for “regulation, estrangement, sanitization” and to “elide and foreclose political thought.” Craft, he argues, allows a reader to read a work, feel a response to it, then put the work down and go about their day. It does not compel them to act.
The kind of writing that he argues for, on the other hand, “calls others into mobilization, generating feeling within [the] audience that cannot be dispersed through the act of reading, but must be carried out into collective action.” This is not to say that a protest poem must explicitly demand a particular action, but rather that such writing depends on clarity of expression because to be effective as protest it cannot allow for the inhibiting effect of ambiguity; it must be understood as a demand for change.
As with explicitly political poetry, a poem intending to ‘bring change’ must, according to the activist poet John Kinsella, have immediacy. It “necessarily lives in the moment”, though is not confined to it. It must speak to a contemporary issue, but this does not prevent it speaking with new and powerful reverberations as time passes or circumstances change. Such a poem, Kinsella writes, may “lose its activist event ‘purpose’ as its ‘moment’ passes, but it can be recovered, recontextualised, and brought back to act anew.” I am reminded, for example, of Iraqi poet Dunya Mikhail’s devastating irony in ‘The War Works Hard’, a poem which speaks equally to the Iraq war, as to the wars in Congo, in Gaza, in Sudan, in Ukraine:
How magnificent the war is! How eager And efficient! Early in the morning, It wakes up the sirens and dispatches ambulances to various places, swings corpses through the air, rolls stretchers to the wounded, summons rain from the eyes of mothers
Indeed, we have seen this recovery and recontextualization many times over: the persistence of pieces like Gil Scott-Heron’s ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised’ or Maya Angelou’s ‘Still I Rise’, which never fade away but resurface with renewed conviction in response acts of white supremacist violence against Black people in the USA. More recently, there is the the virality of ‘If I Must Die’ after the death of its author, Gazan poet and academic Refaat Alareer who posted the poem to Twitter in November 2023.
Arguably, ‘If I Must Die’ was not written as a protest poem but has become one after Alareer and his family were killed by an Israeli airstrike in December 2023. The poem begins: ‘If I must die / you must live / to tell my story’ and ends: ‘If I must die / let it bring hope / let it be a tale’. Readers quickly took up his call, and the poem amassed 33 million views and was translated into over a hundred languages with protestors flying kites in Alareer’s name and reading his words at demonstrations and vigils around the world. Though written in 2011 (a year with no shortage of Israeli violence itself), ‘If I Must Die’ gained renewed immediacy as a symbol of resistance to the intensified genocide in Gaza.
