"my resistance … / may very well cost you your life": Peace Studies and Violent Resistance in Poetry

"my resistance … / may very well cost you your life":Peace Studies and Violent Resistance in Poetry Spencer Clark French (bio) poetry makes nothing happen —W. H. Auden, "In Memory of W.B. Yeats" Fuck poemsAnd they are useful, would they shootCome at you, love what you are,Breathe like wrestlers, or shudderStrangely after peeing. We want liveWords of the hip world live flesh Baraka spent the majority of his life writing, speaking, and organizing for the sake of Black liberation, which extended to include Marxist ideals later in his life. The space between these two poems suggests larger questions: What does poetry have to say about peace and justice? Can a poem be violent? What does a poem do, exactly? These poetic questions mirror the orienting preoccupations of another domain of study—the field of peace studies. And when they are placed shoulder to shoulder, the broader issues and inquiries of each discipline form more complex questions: How can the aims of peace be distilled without flattening the immense human complexities of peace-making processes? In texts that contain potentially harmful content, what kinds of moral responsibilities should be placed on an author's writings, and what kinds should be placed on a reader's interpretations? How can one maintain an unwavering commitment to a less violent world—in terms of both individual and structural violence—without reducing the interpretive task to dividing texts into the reductive categories of violent or nonviolent? As with all interdisciplinary work, questions grow from the dissonances between End Page 43 differing methodologies. And this dissonance affords generative investigations, investigations that have potential to further illuminate the original fields. I'm interested in a very specific tension: Can poetry, written by those who suffer various forms of violence, fit within the broader goals of peace studies if that poetry also includes content that could be interpreted as violent? Or, how can people use poetry to, as Judith Butler concisely puts it in The Force of Nonviolence, "fight those who are committed to destruction without replicating their destructiveness"? After all, and to the point of being dull, there is a clear difference between writing about "Poems that wrestle cops into alleys / And take their weapons leaving them dead / With tongues pulled out and sent to Ireland" (Baraka) and actually tearing out a cop's tongue and sending it as Priority Mail to Dublin. For practitioners of nonviolence, this question is second only to its more subtle sibling: How does one practice nonviolence without creating the conditions for further oppression of those already being oppressed? Certain poems of resistance do include imagery that can be considered violent, and nevertheless they fit within the wider aims of peacemaking. Lucille Clifton and June Jordan are models of such engagement, but before turning to their work, some basic frameworks for understanding forms of violence and resistance are needed. Schematizing Violence Sociologist Johan Galtung, a primary founder of the field of peace studies, has expended great energy parsing the different ways that violence appears in the world. Though he has no interest in providing "the definition, or the typology," of violence, Galtung offers a functional definition: "violence is present when human beings are being influenced so that their actual somatic and mental realizations are below their potential realizations." To this he adds, "Violence is here defined as the cause of the difference between the potential and the actual, between what could have been and what is." In other words, violence is present whenever something increases the distance between people and...