Blog: About the Dark Times/Common People - Tracy Gillman

                                   

                                     In the dark times, will there also be singing?
                                     Yes, there will be singing.
                                     About the dark times
                                                                                     Motto by Bertolt Brecht


Poetry of Witness is positioned by Carolyn Forché as being 'against forgetting'; of not allowing the divisive and murderous consequences of oppression to lapse into an amnesiac past, but to yield to its persistent song, speaking truth to power.

In these days of binary politics it is a sort of perverse blessing to be able to forget, it is hard work to stop remembering long enough to find one's rest, to try to forget the stream of toxic post-truth we are wading through now.

Easy to forget though, that we are not jobless and hopeless in West Virginia, or Stanley, Co Durham, because, for most of us, in one way or another, like Jarvis Cocker sings in 'Common People': "If you called your Dad he could stop it all".

So hey, its Christmas soon, lets just forget about it, let numb-normalisation commence, but that, forgetting feels like a betrayal to the poet witnesses throughout the world who struggle to keep remembering for us.

Turning the pages of Forché's anthology, looking for redemption and a peculiar solace, one finds 761 pages of poems which say: "How can you forget? " then it dawns that we can never forget, because we haven't remembered yet, it has not stopped, not slipped into memory. In Aleppo, in Burstall, Moscow, London and Washington DC, at this juncture, this fag-end of 2016 it is now, present, and still here; it has not passed.

The poems in 'Against Forgetting' are witness to the ceaseless cycles of the diminution and resurrection of the compassionate faculty of the human psyche so often swiftly coerced by self-interest, threat and degradation into remorseless othering, as the Chinese poet Duoduo writes in one of the last works:


                                          And we, are birds beak to beak
                                          in time's story
                                          with people
                                          engaged in proving our differences for the last time:

                                          The key is turned in the ear
                                          shadows have broken away from us.
                                          The key turns incessantly.
                                          We have degenerated into people
                                          we have become unrecognizable people.