Will you write about Duggan? the man wants to know.
Why don’t you? you ask.
Me? he asks, looking slightly irritated.

(Claudia Rankine, Citizen).

When Tim Dooley approached me about writing on the subject of poetry as witness, he was concerned the idea might sound ‘crass’. I understood his reticence; the term is overgrown with meanings, no longer overwhelmingly positive. It might help to get things rolling by focusing initially on the last thirty years and the anglophone poet with whom the term is most closely associated, Carolyn Forché, (Celan would be the obvious choice outside this language). Her 1981 book, The Country Between Us, with its powerful poems about the civil war in El Salvador, where she worked as a human rights advocate, marked her starting point as a self-described ‘poet of witness’. Subsequently Forché became influential on both sides of the Atlantic, not just for the acclaimed poetry she continued to write but through her two anthologies: 1993’s remarkable Against Forgetting; then, perhaps less successfully, in collaboration with Duncan Wu, The Poetry of Witness: The English Tradition, 1500–2001. Published by Norton in 2014, the latter is described in their blurb as:

the first anthology to reveal a tradition that runs through English-language poetry … The three hundred poems collected here were composed at an extreme of human endurance – while their authors awaited execution, endured imprisonment, fought on the battlefield, or labored on the brink of breakdown or death.

It’s hard to see inclusions such as Marvell’s ‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’ fitting into those categories, never mind representing

an unrevealed tradition. Questions were also arising by now about the voyeuristic dimensions to this concept of witness and the authority it bestowed on the poet’s presence – as well as about Forché’s careful distancing of herself from being thought of as a political poet as opposed to one who is ‘politically engaged’.

Times change. Cathy Park Hong’s essay ‘Against Witness’ in Poetry magazine this year asked: ‘Is it enough that a poem ‘remembers’ when we are now entrenched in an era of total [digital] recall?’. The context for this remark is Hong’s discussion of work by ‘secondary witness’ Colombian artist Doris Salcedo, quoted as saying, ‘I have constructed the work as invisibility, because I regard the non-visual as representing a lack of power. To see is to have power’. Salcedo’s comments speak to both issues of power and the tyranny of the eye in our lives now, surrounded by screens – a word invoking both what is and isn’t seen. A benign example of the power of primary witnessing might be the heartfelt response to the picture of the drowned body of two-year-old Aylan Kurdi. But within days Gucci had used it as the basis for a fashion shot in Le Monde. Photographs of dead children have been used for propaganda purposes from very soon after the medium was invented. A few weeks later, Charlie Hebdo was producing cartoons about Aylan Kurdi’s death – sporting McDonald’s logos and with jokes about children’s meal deal bargains and Christians being able to walk on water.

Sooner or later in writing about the word ‘witness’, its etymological connection to ‘martyr’ will suggest itself. A connection made closer nowadays by the internet’s ability to deliver footage of acts of martyrdom instantly to witnesses in the suburban bedroom as easily as to battlefield headquarters. ‘Martyr’ is so weaponized a word that employing it in online discussions frequently accelerates the application of Godwin’s law (that as a discussion grows longer, the probability increases of a comparison involving the Holocaust being invoked, or worse, denied). Related controversies you’ll be likely to hear alluded to include the Nazi symbolism of the black triangle1, followed by the phrase ‘competitive victimhood’. That always reminds me of a different kind of triangle, Karpman’s: a model of compulsive behaviour between people in conflict typified as persecutor, rescuer or victim, a psycho-emotional Wankel engine that can sustain groups with self- justifying energy for generations. Those engaged in sustained social action need to be alert to whatever psychological payoff they might be getting in order to be truly disciplined and effective. For my part, that is coming to terms with a ghost: not exorcizing it, but accommodating it, like the Babadook.

When I came to Leeds in 1974, my first job was as a labourer in the Hepworth cloth warehouse. Their head of security was Ken Kitching, who had walked into this cushy job recently after a short spell in open prison as a result of his involvement in a brutal campaign of persecution leading to the death of David Oluwale, a homeless Nigerian Empire migrant. Oluwale’s fate haunted me and was one of the reasons I started to work with the homeless after finishing my literature and art degree. I maintain an involvement with the David Oluwale Memorial Association (DOMA), which continues to campaign locally in the same way that the Manuel Bravo Project (named after another tragic case) offers legal advice to asylum seekers. I’ve written about Manuel Bravo in a poem, ‘Dependant’, which appeared in the Spring 2013 issue of Poetry London and which will appear in my next book, The Blind Roadmaker.

this is an excerpt, to read the full article go to Poetry London