“They make a desolation and call it peace.”

Agha Shahid Ali, “Farewell”

In a recent conversation about the continued relevance of Roman history, the distinguished historian, Margaret Beard, talked about the importance of learning from history. International institutions like the United Nations and its agencies, and laws, rules, policies, agreements, covenants and declarations are humanity’s attempt to learn from history so as to avoid past mistakes, to do better.

To history, I would add literature: poets from different parts of the world and from different eras have written powerfully about wars and their devastating effects; about the consequence of wrongs left uncorrected; about dehumanization of subjugated peoples; about humanity’s hopes and aspirations for a better world; about responsibility. They help make sense of what’s happening now, perhaps to find solace, and to understand our responsibility in a way that political arguments, theorizing and posturing, on one hand, and divine invocation, on the other, do not. They give us the emotional and intellectual anchor to get past the political rhetoric and the media propaganda. 

I share a few poems in which their creators have made poetry out of – or about – war, violence, injustice and degradation. I begin with poems by two poets writing from ‘captive lands’ – Mahmoud Darwish, a Palestinian, and Agha Shaid Ali, a Kashmiri.

1. Mahmoud Darwish

“I Have The Wisdom Of One Condemned” is a 2003 poem by Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008), a Palestinian poet and political activist. Darwish wrote this poem while the Palestinian uprising known as “the Second Intifada” (2000-2005) was happening in the West Bank. 

Mahmoud Darwish, born in Galilee on March 13, 1941, spent his early years in the village of Birwa. Forced to flee their home in 1948, following the establishment of the State of Israel, his family stayed in Lebanon for a year. Birwa was completely destroyed by the Israeli army, as well as many other villages. The family settled clandestinely in Dair al-Assad. In 1996, Darwish settled in Ramallah, where he directed the prestigious literary magazine Al-Karmel, whose archives were destroyed by the Israeli army during the siege of the city in 2002. (Source: Selected Poems by Mahmud Darwish – Medellín International Poetry Festival (festivaldepoesiademedellin.org)). 

“I have The Wisdom Of One Condemned” is prescient. The postponed “hour of execution” this 2003 poem mentions appears to have arrived!

I Have The Wisdom Of One Condemned…

I have the wisdom of one condemned to die,
I possess nothing so nothing can possess me
and have written my will in my own blood:
‘O inhabitants of my song: trust in water’
and I sleep pierced and crowned by my tomorrow…
I dreamed the earth’s heart is greater
than its map,
more clear than its mirrors
and my gallows.
I was lost in a white cloud that carried me up high
as if I were a hoopoe
and the wind itself my wings.
At dawn, the call of the night guard
woke me from my dream, from my language:
You will live another death,
so revise your last will,
the hour of execution is postponed again.
I asked: Until when?
He said: Wait till you have died some more.
I said: I possess nothing so nothing can possess me
and have written my will in my own blood:
‘O inhabitants of my song: trust in water.’

(Source: I Have The Wisdom Of One Condemned… – by Mahmoud Darwish | Poemist)

2. Agha Shahid Ali

Agha Shahid Ali (1949-2001), a Kashmiri-American poet born in New Delhi on February 4, 1949, grew up in Kashmir. After attending universities of Kashmir and Delhi, he came to the US. He obtained his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and taught in India and the US. In the 1990s, I had the pleasure of meeting Agha Shahid Ali when he stayed with us during a visit to Toronto as the star of a week-long cultural event. He was a gregarious man, gentle, quick to laugh and always ready to engage in conversations. His poetry reflects these qualities, and, yet, his poems reveal a deep concern for the plight of the people of his beloved Kashmir.

I last visited Kashmir in 2010 and was deeply struck by how it had changed. The once joyous and lively place felt lifeless and desolate. There were AK-47 carrying soldiers under every lamppost in Srinagar, and surly young men clustered in front of tea stalls, talking in low undertones. There was no youthful laughter or energy. 

“Farewell” is taken from Agha Shahid Ali’s 2009 collection, Veiled Suite: The Collected Poems (Norton, 2009). It plays on, and uses as a refrain, an imaginary comment Tacitus, the Roman historian, attributes to Calgacus, a Scottish chieftain. Agha Shahid Ali translates it as: “They make a desolation and call it peace.”

Farewell (an excerpt)

                   Solitudinum faciunt et pacem appellant.

• TACITUS (speaking through a British chieftain regarding Pax Romana)

At a certain point I lost track of you.

They make a desolation and call it peace.

When you left even the stones were buried:

The defenceless would have no weapons.

When the ibex rubs itself against the rocks, who collects

                   its fallen fleece from the slopes?

O Weaver whose seams perfectly vanished, who weighs the

                   hairs on the jeweler’s balance?

They make a desolation and call it peace.

Who is the guardian tonight of the Gates of Paradise?

My memory is again in the way of your history.

Army convoys all night like desert caravans:

In the smoking oil of dimmed headlights, time dissolved—all

                   winter—its crushed fennel.

We can’t ask them: Are you done with the world?

In the lake the arms of temples and mosques are locked

                   in each other’s reflections.

Have you soaked saffron to pour on them when they are

                   found like this centuries later in this country

                        I have stitched to your shadow?

In this country we step out with doors in our arms.

Children run out with windows in their arms.

You drag it behind you in lit corridors.

If the switch is pulled you will be pulled from everything. . . .

3. W. B. Yeats

W. B. Yeats (1865-1939) is one of our era’s most celebrated and influential poets. Steeped in Irish nationalism, his work speaks to people across national boundaries.

“The Second Coming” (1920, 1921) is one of Yeats’s best known works. Written in the aftermath of the First World War, it uses a biblical allusion, “the second coming,” to comment on the state of the world. It asks: is here any hope as “things fall apart”?

The Second Coming (1920, 1921)

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely, some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

4. Robert Frost

Robert Frost ((1874-1963) was born in California, but after the death of his father, his mother moved the family to New England when he was in his teens. Known as a “New England poet,” it was not until he was in his 40s that Frost came to be one of America’s best known and loved poets. In 1961, John F. Kennedey invited him to read a poem at his inauguration as the President.

“Fire and Ice”(1923), one of Frost’s best known short poems, is characteristic of his ironic comment on the world as he saw it. And, I think, it speaks to the world in which we find ourselves.

Fire and Ice

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.

5. T. S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot (1888-1965), one of English-speaking world’s pre-eminent and influential poets of the 20^th century, was born in St. Louis, Missouri. He studied philosophy and literature at Harvard, and universities in France and Germany. In 1915, at the age of 27, he went to England and studied German philosophy at Oxford. He remained in England. Eliot, who embraced Anglican Christianity in the 1920s, was steeped in Western philosophical and literary traditions, and much engaged in questions of tradition. However, his work, like Prufrock, The Waste Land and The Hollow Men, reveal a figure who is grappling with the desolation of Europe following the First World War, and draws on his knowledge of ancient and modern literature, mythology and philosophy to paint a bleak picture of the world he encountered.

“The Hollow Men” (1925) is concerned with the “Waste Land” that was Europe after the war and the decay of culture in the modern world. It draws on Dante’s Inferno and Joseph Conrad’s novel about European colonialism and barbarity in Africa, Heart of Darkness, to paint a picture of a post-war world of societal decay and moral emptiness comprised of people who are hollow inside, lacking substance and spirit.

The epigram, “Mistah Kurtz—he dead,” is taken from Conrad’s novel. 

The Hollow Men (excerpts)

Mistah Kurtz—he dead.

                                    A penny for the Old Guy

                   I

We are the hollow men

We are the stuffed men

Leaning together

Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

Our dried voices, when

We whisper together

Are quiet and meaningless

As wind in dry grass

Or rats’ feet over broken glass

In our dry cellar

    Shape without form, shade without colour,

Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

    Those who have crossed

With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom

Remember us—if at all—not as lost

Violent souls, but only

As the hollow men

The stuffed men. . . .

                   IV

The eyes are not here

There are no eyes here

In this valley of dying stars

In this hollow valley

This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

    In this last of meeting places

We grope together

And avoid speech

Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

    Sightless, unless

The eyes reappear

As the perpetual star

Multifoliate rose

Of death’s twilight kingdom

The hope only

Of empty men.

6. W. H. Auden

W. H. Auden (1907-1973), born in York, England, and educated at Christ Church College, Oxford, was one of the most prolific English poets of the 1920s and 1930s. With a decidedly left-wing outlook and influenced by Freud and Marx, his early poetry shows a deep concern about an England marked by industrial stagnation, mass unemployment, poverty and an antiquated economic system. His poetry is characterized, as well, by a poetic wit and irony learned from T. S. Eliot, but his England is not Eliot’s metaphorical Waste Land; it is a literal waste land. In 1939, Auden came to the US, becoming a citizen in 1946. His poetry since the 1940s shows a move towards a religious view of personal responsibility and traditional values. (Source: The Norton Anthology of English Literature, vol. 2)

“Spain, 1937,” written in 1937 and revised in 1940, deals with the Spanish Civil War caused by the 1936 rebellion by the fascist forces of General Franco against the left-wing Spanish government. It was viewed as a struggle between fascism and democracy, and Auden served briefly as an ambulance driver for the anti-fascist or republican side. Published first in 1937 as a stand-alone poem, the proceeds from its sale went to the “Medical Aid for Spain.”

Spain, 1937 (excerpts)

Yesterday all the past. The language of size

Spreading to China along the trade routes; the diffusion

                   Of the counting-frame and the cromlech;

Yesterday the shadow-reckoning in the sunny climates.

Yesterday the assessment of insurance by cards,

The divination of water; yesterday the invention

                   Of cart wheels and clocks, the taming of

Horses; yesterday the bustling world of navigators.

Yesterday the abolition of fairies and giants;

The fortress like a motionless eagle eyeing the valley,

                   The chapel built in the forest;

Yesterday the carving of angels and of frightening gargoyles.

The trial of heretics among the columns of stone;

Yesterday the theological feuds in the taverns

                   And the miraculous cure at the fountain;

Yesterday the Sabbath of witches;  but today the struggle.

Yesterday the installation of dynamos and turbines;

The construction of railways in the colonial desert;

                   Yesterday the classic lecture

On the origin of Mankind. But today the struggle.

Yesterday the belief in the absolute value of Greek;

The fall of the curtain upon the death of a hero;

                   Yesterday the prayer to the sunset,

And the adoration of madmen. But today the struggle. . . .

Tomorrow, perhaps, the future: the research on fatigue

And the movements of packers; the gradual exploring of all the

                   Octaves of radiation;

Tomorrow the enlarging of consciousness by diet and breathing.

Tomorrow the rediscovery of romantic love;

The photographing of ravens; all the fun under

                   Liberty’s masterful shadow;

Tomorrow the hour of the pageant-master and the musician.

Tomorrow, for the young, the poets exploding like bombs,

The walks by the lake, the winter of perfect communion;

                   Tomorrow the bicycle races

Through the suburban summer evenings: but today the struggle.

Today the inevitable increase in the chances of death;

The conscious acceptance of guilt in the fact of murder;

                   Today the expending of powers

On the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting.

Today the makeshift consolations; the shared cigarette;

The cards in the candle-lit barn and the scraping concert,

                   The masculine jokes; today the

Fumbled and unsatisfactory embrace before hurting.

The stars are dead; the animals will not look:

We are left alone with our day, and the time is short and

                   History to the defeated

May say Alas but cannot help or pardon. 

7. Faiz Ahmad Faiz

Faiz Ahmad Faiz (1911-1984), one of South Asia’s greatest modern poets, was born in Sialkot District, Punjab,in the united British India. After partition of the subcontinent, end of British rule and creation of Pakistan in 1947, the region Faiz came from became a part of Pakistan and he became a citizen of Pakistan. Faiz served as an officer of the British Indian Army, rising to the rank of a lieutenant-colonel, but he is better known for his role in establishing the Progressive Writers Association. A member of Pakistan’s Communist Party, he was arrested and imprisoned in 1951 for his alleged part in a conspiracy to overthrow the country’s government. After four years in prison, Faiz spent time in Moscow and London. In the 1970s, he worked as an aide to Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, but went to exile in Beirut after Bhutto’s execution by the dictator, General Zia ul-Haq in 1979.

There are interesting similarities between Faiz and the Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda (see below). Both were Communists, both spent time in public service, both saw time in exile, and, as poets, both wrote lyrical love poetry as well as very powerful poetry about the plight of their people, society and country.

“Mujhse Pahli Si Muhabbat” is the first poem in the second section of Naqsh-e-Fariyadi (1943), which marks Faiz’s shift from traditional Urdu poetry to “poetry with purpose.” Probably one of the most well known, influential and enduring compositions of Faiz, it has been made immortal by the singing of the amazing singer of the region, Noor Jehan. (Source: mujhse pahli si mohabbat meri mahbub na mang – Faiz Ahmad Faiz (rekhta.org))

Mujhse Pahli Si Muhabbat

Urdu original (followed by English translation):

mujh se pahlī sī mohabbat mirī mahbūb na maañg 

maiñ ne samjhā thā ki tū hai to daraḳhshāñ hai hayāt

terā ġham hai to ġham-e-dahr kā jhagḌā kyā hai 

terī sūrat se hai aalam meñ bahāroñ ko sabāt 

terī āñkhoñ ke sivā duniyā meñ rakkhā kyā hai 

tū jo mil jaa.e to taqdīr nigūñ ho jaa.e 

yuuñ na thā maiñ ne faqat chāhā thā yuuñ ho jaa.e 

aur bhī dukh haiñ zamāne meñ mohabbat ke sivā 

rāhateñ aur bhī haiñ vasl kī rāhat ke sivā 

an-ginat sadiyoñ ke tārīk bahīmāna tilism 

resham o atlas o kamḳhāb meñ bunvā.e hue 

jā-ba-jā bikte hue kūcha-o-bāzār meñ jism 

ḳhaak meñ luThḌe hue ḳhuun meñ nahlā.e hue 

jism nikle hue amrāz ke tannūroñ se

piip bahtī huī galte hue nāsūroñ se 

lauT jaatī hai udhar ko bhī nazar kyā kiije 

ab bhī dilkash hai tirā husn magar kyā kiije 

aur bhī dukh haiñ zamāne meñ mohabbat ke sivā 

rāhateñ aur bhī haiñ vasl kī rāhat ke sivā 

mujh se pahlī sī mohabbat mirī mahbūb na maañg 

English translation:

Do not ask of me, my love, for that same love I once had for you

I had thought that with you, my life shone brightly

What worldly pain could possibly rival the pain of being without you?

Your face makes the world’s springtime everlasting

Besides your eyes, what else even is there in the world?

If we were to meet again, fate would submit before me

It was not like this, I just wished that it was

There are other sorrows in this world besides the sorrows of love

There are other joys besides the joy of reunion

The dark, savage enchantment of countless centuries,

Embroidered in silk and satin and brocade

Bodies everywhere being sold in lanes and marketplaces

Coated in dust, bathed in blood

Bodies that have emerged from the fires of affliction

And the pus flowing from swelling cysts

My gaze returns there sometimes, what should I do?

Your beauty is still fresh in my heart, but what should I do?

There are other sorrows in this life besides the sorrows of love

There are other joys besides the joy of union

Do not ask of me, my love, that same love I once had for you

(Translation: Mujh Se Pehli Si Muhabbat English Translation | By Peyaam)

8. Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes (1902-1967) is one of the most popular and versatile African-American writers of the 20^thcentury, known for his association with the cultural phenomenon known as “the Harlem Renaissance,” which played a major role in the flowering of Black culture and the arts in the US. One of his enduring themes was the condition of Black Americans and racial justice. 

“A Dream Deferred” (also known as “Harlem) is part of a volume-length poem suite, Montage of a Dream Deferred. The play, A Raisin in the Sun, popular in high school curricula, is titled after a line in this poem. Published in 1951, the poem uses an enduring motif of Black American struggle for justice and equality – the dream. It is one of the most influential poems of the 20^th century.

A Dream Deferred

What happens to a dream deferred?

      Does it dry up

      like a raisin in the sun?

      Or fester like a sore—

      And then run?

      Does it stink like rotten meat?

      Or crust and sugar over—

      like a syrupy sweet?

      Maybe it just sags

      like a heavy load.

      Or does it explode?

9. Pablo Neruda

Pablo Neruda (1904-1973), a Chilean diplomat and poet, is one of the 20^th century world’s greatest poets. Neruda (a pseudonym) was born Ricardo Eliezer Neftali Reyes y Basoalto, and grew up in Temuco, southern Chile. He began writing and publishing poetry while still in his teens. His work ranges from odes and love poetry to progressive political poetry about, among others, dictators, oppression, brutality, squalor and the power of the elite in Latin America and other parts of the world. A helpful biography of Neruda can be found at Pablo Neruda | Poetry Foundation. There are remarkable similarities between the lives, political engagements and poetry of Neruda and Faiz Ahmad Faiz.

“The ‘Free’ Press” is one of Neruda’s great political poems, and is very relevant to us today with its trenchant and acerbic look at the corporate media that calls itself “the free press.” The poem satirizes the media coverage of political upheavals in Latin America. The speaker is a Chilean newly arrived in Argentina. Neruda himself spent 3 years (1949-1952) in Argentina after Chile’s President, Gabriel Gonzalez Videla, outlawed the Communist Party in 1948 and a warrant was issued for the arrest of Neruda, a Communist Senator. (Source: Pablo Neruda – Poems by the Famous Poet – All Poetry)

The ‘Free’ Press

While briefly chilled, I want to tell

without vengeance and what’s more with joy

how from my bed in Buenos Aires

the police took me to prison.

It was late, we had just arrived from Chile,

and without saying anything to us

they plundered my friend’s papers,

they offended the house in which I slept,

My wife vented her disdain

but there were orders to be executed

and in a moving car we roved about

the tyrannous black night. 

They said it was not Peron, it was another,

a new tyrant for Argentina

and by his orders doors opened,

bolt after bolt was unlocked

in order to swallow me, the patios passed,

forty bars and the infirmary, 

but still they took me up into a cell,

the most impenetrable and hidden:

only then did they feel protected

from the exhalations of my poetry.

I discovered through that broken night

that three thousand were imprisoned that day:

jail, penitentiary, and as if not enough,

boats were set adrift

filled with men and women,

the pride of Argentinean souls.

My tale comes only to this:

the rest is collective history:

I wanted to read it in newspapers,

in La Prensa (which is so informative),

yet Mr. Gainza Paz does not know

if Argentinean prisons are being filled.

He is the champion of our “free” press

but if communist journals are closed

this grandee acts dumb without reporting it,

his feet ache and he has eye trouble,

and if the workers go to jail

everybody knows it except Gainza,

everybody resorts to newspapers,

but “large” journals do not publish 

anything about these stupid tales:

La Prensa is preoccupied

with the last divorce taking place

with motion picture asses in Hollywood

and while press syndicates cloister themselves

La Prensa and La Nacion are metaphysical.

Oh what silence from the fat press

when the people are beaten,

but if one of Batista’s jackals

is assassinated in Cuba

the presses of our poor America 

confess and print their sensational stories,

they lift their hands to their temples,

it is then that they know and publish,

the Sip, Sop, Sep meets

to save the virgins in trouble

and running to their purse in New York

they hurriedly solicit 

the constant inducement of money

for the “liberty” they patronize.

And these web-footed men

swarm over Latin America,

they kiss Chamudes in Santiago,

Judas Ravines waits for them in Lima

later enriched and enthused

by that liberty exhaled

from Washington where rock and roll plays,

they dance with Dubois and Gainza. 

(Trans: Miguel Algarin, Source: Pablo Neruda :: The “Free Press” | radical journal | Edited by Saswat Pattanayak)