COVID-19 is changing us second by second. It’s changing who we are; how we treat one another; how we love; how power works; how we are governed and how we challenge that governorship. Amidst the storm of infomation – facts, rumours, lies, spin and opinion – we are trying to work out how to live through this moment to moment. The stories of how we do this – of how we became the change – will be the stories that endure because these changes will define the next age in the same way the World Wars defined the last age. It is important to keep a daily record (not just for future academics to argue about) but so that we can tell the story of how it really happened, how it really felt to be living through this – every day a little bit more history is made and you are making it – so start writing it.
As you know, I’ve dedicated so much energy to supporting people to write their truth and there is going to be a lot of lies in this mess. Every day we will hear the ‘official’ version of events in newspapers and on screens and radio waves and we will shout and say ‘but that’s not what it’s really like.’ So write what it’s really like, loudly and share it. But that blank page – how to start? Here are some routes in to writing about now.
Last August I delivered a workshop called The Poetry of Witness as part of my Book of Godless Verse project, at Book Corner in Saltburn. It wasn’t just about how to write poetry but all kinds of writing that capture the truth of a lived experience, here are the notes from that session.
Submission Opportunity: If you write something as a result of this I’d love to share it as we are all going through this together. I’ll share it on the Book of Godless Verse page that was created to celebrate how we deal with what life throws at us. Please send all submissions to carmenellen@hotmail.co.uk with the subject heading: POETRY OF WITNESS.
Poetry of Witness
So can writing really make a difference?
Here is an extract from Tough by Tony Walsh (Longfella) from the Common People Anthology, published by Unbound this year, showing that the power of writing is to bring people together.
They don’t like it when our writers can ignite us into fighters
But it’s tough, we’ve had enough and we are coming.
Tony Walsh
Let’s take this as our mission in our writing for this task. Walsh is talking about how writing brings people together in the cause for change. But it’s just as important to chart the interior impact of external change too, here is Jeanette Winterson on the power of writing and its impact on her private revolution.
I had no one to help me, but the T. S. Eliot helped me. So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn’t be read at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language – and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers – a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn’t a hiding place. It is a finding place.
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal, Jeanette Winterson
So let’s just agree now that language can do the job of witnessing these chaotic times, it can deliver a political message, it can deliver an emotional message, it can deliver a private message, it can help the writer, it can change the reader. It can witness that wound.
That’s what language does.
What To Witness?
Firstly let’s look at the official version of a situation that needs witnessing. Let’s take the issue of UK poverty as an example.
Here’s a headline from the Huffington Post:
Chancellor Philip Hammond has faced a backlash after dismissing the idea that vast numbers of British people live in dire poverty. Hammond hit out at a report by UN special rapporteur Philip Alston which stated one fifth of the British population – 14 million people – live in poverty.
Here’s what the BBC said: The UN report cites independent experts saying that 14m people in the UK – a fifth of the population – live in poverty, according to a new measure that takes into account costs such as housing and childcare.
Here’s The Guardian: Multimillionaire Hammond lives in a different world to the rest of us. He displays a brutal complacency about the scale of poverty and human suffering his austerity programme has created,” John McDonnell shadow chancellor said.
What’s missing? Did any of the news papers ask someone living in poverty what it’s like to live in Britain today? Someone with a name? Poetry of witness restores authority to the author – to the one who experiences not the one who observes.
Here’s an extract from author Kerry Hudson’s Lowborn: a memoir of growing up in poverty in Britain. In her opening chapter Hudson simply lists the raw events that characterised her life until her 18th birthday.
1 single mother
2 stays in foster care
9 primary schools
1 sexual abuse child protection order
5 high schools
2 sexual assaults
1 rape
2 abortions
My 18th birthday
There’s something very powerful and poetic about the list form – about what it states and what it doesn’t say. By holding back, Hudson allows the events space to make an impact. It’s not statistics. It’s what happened. They have left a mark – a wound.
Task 1 The List
List five things you’ve experienced or seen that have left a mark. For example (relating to Covid-19) the empty shelves in shops, the STOP signs outside Doctor’s surgeries, the school leavers grieving their lost year.
Hudson goes on to outline what terrified her the most about writing her truth and why she still had to write it:
What are you afraid of writing about?
For me it was always about the shame of my mother’s mental illness and my mental illness. Later when I suffered from post natal depression, it took me so long to seek help because of the guilt – how could I have a beautiful child and still feel this way? How can it still be happening?
What do you need to write about to free yourself from the ‘tyranny of silence and gnawing shame that comes with voicelessness?
Task 2: Witnessing
There are moments that we witness, moments that happen to us, to someone close to us or nearby us and what happens is so unutterably wrong we can’t find the words. But it hits us. The adrenaline the rage. It never leaves us. We replay it in moments of fear and shame. We wish we had done / said something. That’s what this section is for – to capture those moments, to witness the injustice and say it, out loud without shame.
These things that make the rage are things the headlines miss or don’t make space for. They are protected and protecting from the hit, the wound. Here’s the BBC in 2017 on sexism.
Andy Murray corrects journalist’s ‘casual sexism’
Andy Murray has corrected a journalist after he said Sam Querrey, who knocked the British player out of Wimbledon earlier, was “the first US player to reach a major semi-final since 2009”. The newly-deposed Wimbledon champion reminded the reporter he was only talking about male players, as there had, of course, been considerably more success for the US on the female side of the sport. Since 2009, Serena Williams has won 12 Grand Slam tournaments.
The focus here was just on sexism but why hadn’t Serena Williams been seen by the journalist? It wasn’t just her gender. The BBC article kept its focus firmly on the sexism agenda but side stepped the misogynoir issue.
This cartoon (I’ve included the Guardian article on it too) of Serena Williams appeared in Australia’s Herald Sun in 2018:
The Guardian shared the statement that: Murdoch press has strongly defended Knight and his cartoon. The executive chairman of News Corp Australia, Michael Miller, said criticism of Knight “shows the world has gone too PC”.The editor of the Herald Sun, Damon Johnston, has said it had nothing to do with race or gender. “A champion tennis player had a mega-tantrum on the world stage, and Mark’s cartoon depicted that,” Johnston said last year. “It had nothing to do with race or gender. The press council ruled it was not racist.
What happened to Serena was sanctioned by the Press Council because it’s sanctioned every day on streets and schools and bars. It’s the lived experience of being a black woman but did anyone ask a black woman how it feels to live it? How it feels for legislation to okay it? To be represented in that way as the angry black woman stereotype with racially identifiable bodily features grotesquely exaggerated.
In Citizen: An American Lyric, Claudia Rankine, lays down a very personal account of the experience of being black in America, ‘being treated as if you are not absolutely normal’. It is addressed to you, the reader so that you can feel it too, the slights, the hurt, the invisibilisation. The lived reality of racism. She describes the emotional impact of having to live with and stay silent about moments of casual racism that happen daily:
Certain moments send adrenaline to the heart, dry out the tongue, and clog the lungs. Like thunder they drown you in sound, no, like lightning they strike you across the larynx. Cough. After it happened I was at a loss for words.
Rankine very effectively uses lyrical prose to drive the message home about how it feels to be invisible even to friends. Rankine finds a place between poetry and prose, memoir and essay to tell her story her way.
In her 1951 work, “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” Hannah Arendt wrote of refugees: “The calamity of the rightless is not that they are deprived of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, or of equality before the law and freedom of opinion, but that they no longer belonged to any community whatsoever.” The loss of community has the consequence of expelling a people from humanity itself.
By telling your story in your way you are insisting on taking your place back within the community of humanity.
Task 3: Get Personal
Think of a time when you have personally experienced / witnessed a moment that stinks, when you felt the adrenaline and your heart racing with the disbelief that someone just said that to you, treated you in a way that was unforgiveable. But for whatever reason you were unable to do anything or speak out.
Now free write, retelling that moment in the second person, capturing how you felt in your body and the details of the moment and the impact of the silence.
If you had to live the moment again, what do you wish you had said / done differently. Free write this.
Final Task: The Last Things
How do we write in a way that witnesses the moment of wounding in an intimate and powerful way?
How do we find the personal and trace it back to the political?
One way in is in the story of the things we carry with us. The key is to link personal and political and the things we carry with us everyday, the things that are precious to us that we dare not leave behind tell that story.
Here is an extract from my 2016 poem A Stranger’s Case, commissioned by the Durham Book Festival for The Book of Godless Verse. It was a poem made up of the many voices. I asked people to share with me the things they would take if they had to flee their homes:
When you pack you try to pack
only the things that belong to you
but somehow you end up taking the door.
You fold it up as small as it will go,
into a paper boat, ready for the flood.
Your mother gives you her green tiger
from under the stairs,
your granpa’s chess set,
the seed cup for the birds,
shoes your father wore only twice.
The pieces tick inside your bag
with the same tock as your mother’s clock
with all the things you never said back.
The tiger purrs, flexes her claws.
Right now we have the opposite problem. We aren’t being asked to leave our homes, we are being asked to stay locked inside them.
So my question to you is this:
If you were told that today would be your last journey outside, what five things would you take back home with you? This can be something tangible like a leaf or a sensation like the breeze on your face?
Now choose one thing.
We are going to explore the personal and the political story of the object.
How was that object made?
Who made it?
Where does it come from?
How much did it cost if that applies?
What is it made from?
What does it mean to you?
Was it a gift?
Who would you give it to if you were going to die? And why?
Example – your sister’s lipstick (hopefully you asked) – what does it mean to you to have this if it is the last time you will physically see your sister?
Add to this the story of how lipsticks are made. Who makes them. In what conditions? Blend these answers together into a poem / micro fiction / micro non-fiction piece.
By witnessing this world as it is, by telling it as we experience it, we react to history not become victims of it – we make power. The trick is that we don’t just get the luxury of becoming martyrs we get to survive and to map what that survival looks like so others can follow. There are many ways to write this kind of truth. Hopefully you’ve got a glimpse now of the different kinds of writing that can do that and still be poetic and daring. Writing that sees the wound the way a mother would – to heal it. Not to report it. Not to study it. Not to record it. But to heal it. That’s the power of writing.
What is poetry which does not save / Nations or people? / A connivance with official lies, / A song of drunkards whose throats will be cut in a moment … Czeslaw Milosz from The Witness of Poetry.
Carmen Marcus 
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