Poetry and Resistance

By Andrea Scarpino

 

“It is in stillness that we save and transform the world,” Eckhart Tolle writes. 

 

Anthony Bogues says there are two kinds of peace, negative peace (the absence of war) and positive peace (the presence of something positive). When we think about activism of any sort, we’re often thinking in the negative: fighting to end war, racism, sexism, poverty. But we don’t often think in the positive, of what we will create in oppression’s absence. 

 

My poetry has often been focused on witnessing oppression, war, atrocity, our global water crisis, bodily pain. I’ve been writing toward negative peace, pointing out what is wrong with our world in the hope that understanding what’s wrong will encourage the reader to enact change. But I haven’t been writing to construct something new and positive. I haven’t been supplying an alternate vision. 

 

And I’m not even sure how to do such a thing. What does a constructive poetry of peace look like? How would I write it? 

 

And does it begin in stillness? 

 

Last month, the NY Times published an opinion piece on meditation that quoted Buddha as having said, “I teach one thing and one only: that is, suffering and the end of suffering.” The piece describes a study that may demonstrate meditation’s ability to increase our compassion for other people. In it, 50% of participants who had taken an 8-week meditation course gave up their seat to a woman using crutches and sighing loudly in pain—compared to only 16% of non-meditators. One of the study’s authors describes its outcome thus: “The next time you meditate, know that you’re not just benefiting yourself, you’re also benefiting your neighbors, community members and as-yet-unknown strangers by increasing the odds that you’ll feel their pain when the time comes, and act to lessen it as well.” 

 

To feel another’s pain and act to lessen it. Isn’t that at the heart of activism? Of poetry? 

 

I used to read about Buddhist monks meditating all day for peace and find myself becoming angry—how did meditation help anything? Marching in the streets, that’s what those monks should have been doing! Writing their government officials! 

 

But I’m beginning to realize that resistance can look like many things. Feeling another’s pain and giving her your seat. Learning stillness, growing comfortable in it. Learning interconnectivity, and thus, compassion. Learning to envision a better world—and then sharing that vision with others. Learning to write towards a positive peace.